Review:
Olender's book has many virtues. Brief, intense, and often ironic, it rests on a deep foundation of learning. His ability to compress material into sinuous chapters, concise and packed with material but never overly schematic or simplified, compels admiration. "The Languages of Paradise" is a little masterpiece of exposition as well as of analysis.--Anthony Grafton"New York Review of Books" (02/26/2004) Over and above the unquestionable value of this book as history is the troubling question it poses: Are we not today, despite all the warnings of history, the willing and unenthusiastic victims of our own scientific myths? And what are they? And where are they being generated? And by whom?--Daniel Dubuisson "L'Homme " Here is the flabbergasting story of how nineteenth-century comparative philology is intimately linked to the history of religions. Maurice Olender tells it, all the while respecting the complexity and the contradictions. What makes this study so nightmarish is that Maurice Olender reveals that many of these scholars criticized any 'racist' notion of 'race, ' a term which many affected nonetheless; that they were at pains to attribute to Judaism a 'poetic sublimity' while condemning its sterilizing archaism; and that they championed religious, cultural, and national pluralism before abandoning themselves to a vertiginous Christianity which, by being Aryanized, was the only religion capable of fulfilling the original promise.--Jacques Le Goff "Le Monde " This is one of the most beautiful books that I know on this subject, an extraordinary book that I cite often.--Umberto Eco "Bouillon de culture " Maurice Olender's aim is to show that theology long retained a considerable influence over philologists who claimed to be objective scientists. He uses original and reliable sources to reveal the presence of myth at the very heart of a discourse that claimed to shed the light of rational thought on vanished forms of mythical and religious belief. Consciously or unconsciously, faith and apologetics were still at work in the writings of people who sometimes compared themselves to palaeologists and whom we look on as the founders of modern linguistics.--Jean Starobinski "Liber " What language did they speak in Eden? In the 19th century, Sanskrit and Hebrew battled for the privilege of being the original language. In "The Languages of Paradise", Maurice Olender studies the impact of Christianity on positivism and the birth of the human sciences.--Antoine de Gaudemar "Liberation "
About the Author:
Maurice Olender is Maitre de Conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Arthur Goldhammer received the French-American Translation Prize for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard).
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