Colloque – Jules Oppert (1825-1905) et l’assyriologie de son temps – Benjamin Foster : American Students of Near Eastern Languages in Paris, 1875-1900

Dominique CharpinCollège de FranceAnnée 2024-2025Civilisation mésopotamienneColloque - Jules Oppert (1825-1905) et l'assyriologie de son temps - Benjamin Foster : American Students of Near Eastern Languages in Paris, 1875-1900Benjamin R. FosterLaffan Professor of Assyriology, Yale University, New HavenRésuméAlthough Paris in the age of Oppert, with her Collège de France, École Pratique des Hautes Études, École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, École du Louvre, and Sorbonne, not to mention her Catholic and Jewish institutes; as well as her great museums, libraries, and societies, offered unrivaled opportunities for the student of Near Eastern languages, very few Americans took advantage of them. Instead, 10,000 or more Americans attended lectures at German universities during the period 1814-1914 and many took doctorates there in the humanities and sciences, after 1880 forming a new American academic elite. This paper offers a brief overview of the state of American "Semitic Studies" during the period 1875-1900 and summarizes reasons why American students going abroad for that subject overwhelmingly preferred attending individual German universities to navigating the more complex French system of Orientalist higher education. It then reviews the experiences and destinies of five Americans who did choose to study in Paris during the age of Oppert: Morris Jastrow, Jr. (Arabic, Semitics, Assyriology), Hally Haight (Syriac, church history), Isaac Decker (Arabic), William Conzelman (Ethiopic), and Charles Wilbour (Egyptology).