The Birth of Orientalism (review)

Urs App's study of orientalism, centred on the eighteenth century, extends from Xavier's mission to Japan in 1549 to the posthumous third edition of Volney's Ruines in 1826. App has written a great work. It establishes the ground on which all future studies of European orientalism will have to build, it rewrites the stories that scholars of religious history have been telling about the Western discovery (invention?) of Hinduism and Buddhism, it offers indispensable analyses of influential writers both famous (Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire) and now obscure, and it is a model of a truly global study of intellectual history.

In addition to being alert and erudite, the book is free of pedantry and moral one-upmanship. "Historians of the European discovery of Buddhism," App notes, "tend to be rather unforgiving schoolmasters," prompt to denounce the errors of the past and inclined to "the 'monkey show' approach where historical views are held up for ridicule like chimpanzees dressed in human clothes." But App knows that "parading 'false' ideas ... is far easier than understanding why those ideas arose and realizing the fragility of present-day certitudes" (134-36). Among other consequences, it follows that frauds (or "frauds") get their due in his study, and App offers painstaking reconstructions of the genesis of the Ezour-vedam and John Zephaniah Holwell's Shastah (summarized in charts on 395 and 340). App does not dismiss them as self-contained European inventions, or confine himself, for example, to Voltaire's notorious use of them; instead, App explores their genesis and dissemination in a global (multilingual, multireligious, multi-centred) context. A distinct pleasure found in reading App's work is his "biography" of these works, his account of their "mind-boggling" fates. For example, the Ezour-vedam "presents us with ... the mystical marriage of a wrongly translated, pieced-together, fifth-century Chinese Buddhist text, tuned up and put into the Buddha's mouth by an eighth-century Chinese Zen master, with the fake—yet oh so true! Yajur Veda (Ezour-vedam) authored by a French Jesuit calling himself Sumantu who criticizes the Veda and whom Sainte-Croix portrayed as a Gnanigöl heir of the Buddha's deathbed teaching of God's emptiness" (435). Holwell's "translation" has a similarly twisting fate, spurred into being by a variety of sources—missionary accounts, Voltaire and the Chevalier Ramsay, an angelology deriving via Milton and Jacob Ilive from the Book of Enoch, perhaps Ossian, and, possibly, at whatever remove, the Shaivite Agamas—and then, according to App, going on to become almost single-handedly responsible for the European invention of "Gentooism," giving it at once a scripture, god, founder, transmission, dogma, and practice.

The level of textual detail is matched by an equal attention to the theoretical frames and ideological orientations in which the texts were created and disseminated, especially as they formed part of contested discourses over origins. App documents and motivates searches for the world's oldest text (besides the Ezour-vedam and the Shastah, candidates included the Book of Enoch, the Yijing, the Forty-two Sections Sutra, the Upanishads) and oldest religious homeland (Egypt, China, or India? less often, Siberia or Tibet?). The hermeneutical practice of accom-modation, what App calls the "friendly-takeover" approach to non-Christian religions (though of course their practitioners did not experience it as friendly), is a central theme of the book, brilliantly discussed not only in the famous case of the Jesuit missions but also in Eusebius and among the deists.

Errors of the past tend to be occluded or denounced in order to serve present-day purposes. App seeks to understand them in context, however, and this means expanding the scope of research to include the labour of native informants, on whom missionaries were uneasily dependent and whose existence they sometimes concealed; the accounts, often archival, of missionaries; and the work of librarians, rarely remembered at all (on the first, see 158, 173, 191, 371; on the second, passim practically; on...