Early orientalists made extreme personal sacrifices incompatible with venal motives

Evidence

The same difficulty of understanding the purposes, the motivations, persists. One thinks of such figures as the Englishman Simon Ockley (1678–1720), a poor scholar with a large family, who went into a debtors’ prison rather than earn a proper livelihood, and left his family to starve because of his obsession with the history of the early medieval Caliphate. One thinks of the German Johann Jakob Reiske (1716–1774), pinching pennies to publish the Arabic texts that he was editing at his own expense because no one else would print them. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2062

Categorization

• SHARE: The Ockley detail — debtors’ prison over abandoning Caliphate scholarship — is perfect for a classicist or Middle East historian.
• SEED: A portrait-of-intellectual-obsession angle: the scholars who destroyed their lives, not for empire or gold, but for dead Arabic texts.
• XREF: connects to: Early orientalists pursued Arabic scholarship at ruinous personal cost