Some Orientalists pursued their scholarship to the point of ruin

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

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to reader’s themes of obsessive scholarship and self-sacrifice for obscure knowledge.

Related

• Early orientalists made extreme personal sacrifices incompatible with venal motives (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalism turned scattered testimony into a domesticated, categorical simulacrum of the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval European scholars studied at Arab Muslim universities in Spain and Sicily. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalists recycled predecessors’ texts instead of observing the real Orient (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.79)
• Early Orientalists codified and domesticated the Orient into a European province of learning. (similarity 0.78)
• Non-Western scholars initially welcomed Orientalist scholarship and used it readily (similarity 0.78)
• Even sympathetic scholars exercised a will to reshape the Orient to their own image (similarity 0.78)
• Postwar hostility to Orientalism grew from political conflict, not scholarship defects (similarity 0.78)