In the course of the eighteenth century, as wigs grew shorter and the fortunes of the Dutch Republic declined, three successive generations of Schultenses held the Chair of Oriental languages at Leiden University.Footnote ² The first, Albert Schultens (1686–1750), is mainly known for his theory that Arabic is the twin sister of Hebrew but more perfectly preserved in the isolation of the desert, and that the exegesis of many obscure passages in the Bible may be helped by the study of Arabic. His son, Jan Jacob Schultens (1716–1778), was generally acknowledged to be the most learned Arabist of his time with the possible exception of J.J. Reiske, but his entanglement in theological disputations prevented him from publishing on any scale. Hendrik Albert Schultens (1749–1793), the last scion of the ‘dynasty’, was a typical product of the Enlightenment. A moderate in religious matters, he took a lively interest in Arabic as a literary language and keenly appreciated the beauty of classical Arabic poetry. Like his father and grandfather before him, he served as rector magnificus of Leiden University and chaired the Leiden-based Society of Netherlands Literature (Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde). In 1772–1773 he travelled to England and visited Cambridge, where he updated the local manuscripts catalogue, and Oxford, where he copied an Arabic manuscript and met scholars such as William Jones and Benjamin Kennicott. Oxford University honoured him with a Master's degree, a rare distinction for a foreigner.Footnote ³ Unusually for a man of his day, he read English literature and his private library contained works by Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. A man of the world, affable, well-dressed and well-spoken, he served as a role model for his students. His favourite student, Johan Hendrik van der Palm (1763–1840), eventually succeeded him as Professor of Oriental languages. Although Van der Palm's contribution to Oriental studies is negligible, he is still remembered as ‘agent’ or minister of national education in the days of the Batavian Republic, as the author of a Bible translation and countless moral tracts, as a gifted orator whose resounding sermons were universally admired, and finally, as a model of deportment. Hendrik Albert Schultens made an indelible impression on Van der Palm, who entertained a lifelong veneration for his former professor.Footnote ⁴ No less a man of the world than Schultens, Van der Palm managed to weather the successive regimes of stadtholder William V, the Batavian Republic, the Kingdom of Holland under Napoleon's brother Louis, the French Empire and the independent Dutch monarchy under King William I.

The three Schultenses, like Van der Palm after them, combined their professorship with the post of Curator of Oriental collections at the Leiden University Library. In 1729 Albert Schultens was the first to be appointed as Interpres Legati Warneriani or ‘Interpreter of the Warner Bequest’, a reference to Levinus Warner (1619–1665), the seventeenth-century Orientalist and Dutch representative to the Sublime Porte who left a collection of 1,000 Oriental manuscripts to the Library.Footnote ⁵ They also acted as translators for the official correspondence between the Dutch Republic and foreign powers like the Barbary States and the Ottoman Empire.

The Schultenses were by no means as active in acquiring manuscripts for the University Library as Warner had been before them. In fact, hardly more than a dozen were registered during the first eight decades of the eighteenth century, all of them donations. However, all three Schultenses possessed rich Oriental collections in their private libraries, consisting of Oriental manuscripts, the printed works of European Orientalists, their personal research notes and the copies and drafts of their translation work for the Government. Indeed, the private collection of a man like Jan Jacob Schultens all but outnumbered the holdings of the University Library itself.Footnote ⁶

It is therefore a relief to read Berkvens-Stevelinck's Magna Commoditas, the most recent history of the Leiden University Library, where she states that in the year 1806 the University Library, notwithstanding its perennial lack of funds, managed to acquire Oriental manuscripts and books from the estate of the three Schultenses for a considerable sum of money. According to her, it was the largest addition in the field of Oriental studies since Warner's legacy.Footnote ⁷ Berkvens based herself on two previous histories of the University Library by Matthijs Siegenbeek and P.C. Molhuysen, published in 1829–1832 and 1905 respectively, in which one finds similar statements about a wholesale acquisition of Oriental materials in that year and the unusually large expenditure made on their account.Footnote ⁸ However, neither the handwritten inventory of the Leiden Oriental manuscripts, nor the accessions list of printed books, reveal anything about such a purchase in 1806. This information raises a number of questions. Did the University Library buy any Schultens materials in 1806 at all? If so, why were they not registered as such? And what is the source of the reports in the successive histories of the Leiden University Library?

The J.J. Schultens's Auction (1780)

To begin with, Berkvens omits mention of an earlier purchase made in 1780. In September-October of that year, an auction took place at the Leiden bookseller Henricus Mostert's of the private library of Jan Jacob Schultens, who had died two years previously. A 605-page catalogue was prepared and almost four weeks were needed to sell the 1,130 folios, 3,859 quartos and 7,022 octavos on subjects like philosophy and theology, classics and Oriental languages.Footnote ⁹ His son and successor Hendrik Albert Schultens represented the University Library at this auction, although he also bought books and manuscripts on his own account. Apparently there are no records of the printed books acquired by the University Library on this occasion, but 81 Oriental manuscripts are mentioned in the inventory, the Codices Or. 1222–1302. Ironically, by this single purchase from the private library of his father, Hendrik Albert showed himself more active as curator of Oriental collections than his father and grandfather together had been.

The University Library, however, was not the only buyer at the auction. Joannes Willmet (1750–1835), Professor of Oriental languages at Harderwijk from 1794 and at Amsterdam from 1804,Footnote ¹⁰ also attended and acquired 26 Oriental manuscripts for his own private collection. Before he died in October 1835 he expressed the wish that his collection of manuscripts be purchased by the library of the Royal Netherlands Institute, later the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. His wish was fulfilled by King William I of the Netherlands, an active sponsor of scholarship and industry, who bought Willmet's Oriental manuscripts in 1837 and donated them to the Royal Institute. In 1856 they were given on permanent loan to the Leiden University Library, and in this way Willmet's 26 Schultens manuscripts returned to Leiden after an absence of 76 years.Footnote ¹¹

The failed auction of H.A. Schultens's books (1794) and its aftermath

When Hendrik Albert Schultens died on 12 August 1793 at the age of 44, his widow Catharina Elisabeth de Sitter (c. 1743–1809) arranged for his books and manuscripts to be sold by the Leiden publisher and bookseller A. & J. Honkoop. The auction catalogue was prepared by Schultens's successor Everard Scheidius (1742–1794).Footnote ¹² On 30 September 1794 an advertisement appeared in the French-language Leiden newspaper Nouvelles extraordinaires de divers endroits, commonly known as the Gazette de Leyde, announcing the auction at Rapenburg 49, the home of the deceased, on 27 October and the following seven days. However, when leafing through the pages of the Gazette de Leyde, it becomes clear that the times were inauspicious for an auction that was supposed to attract potential customers from abroad. The Dutch Republic, in a state of war with Revolutionary France since 1793, was on the verge of collapse. In late October-early November 1794 the French started their invasion by crossing the river Meuse. King George III's son Frederick, Duke of York (1763–1827), marched a British and Allied army into the Netherlands, but it was only temporarily able to check the French advance. The Netherlands were overrun, stadtholder William V fled to England in January 1795, and just before the capitulation the Batavian Republic was proclaimed, based on the principles of Liberté, Egalité & Fraternité. Under such circumstances an auction was out of the question and on 28 October 1794 it was reported in the Gazette de Leyde that

In spite of the reassuring tone of the advertisement, the auction never took place and more than a year later the books were still unsold. At that moment Van der Palm, H.A. Schultens's favourite student, intervened. On 1 December 1795 he had accepted a nomination as Professor of Oriental languages at Leiden and he resolved to add more lustre to his new appointment by taking the entire collection off the hands of the widow.Footnote ¹³ It was an excellent opportunity for him to acquire the private collection of a scholar whom he had always tried to emulate, and his contemporaries confirm that he took great pride in it.Footnote ¹⁴ He may also have been moved by a genuine desire to help Schultens's widow, who, with the death of her husband, found herself left behind with three sons and two daughters.Footnote ¹⁵ The archives of the Society of Netherlands Literature, of which Van der Palm was a member, hold a letter from Schultens's widow to Van der Palm dated 3 April 1796, in which she expresses her satisfaction that her late husband's collection had passed into the hands of someone for whom he had always felt the greatest esteem and friendship and, finding herself reluctant to do business with a bookseller like Honkoop, a man “commonly known for his greedy disposition”, she asked him to act as her intermediary.Footnote ¹⁶

After Van der Palm's death in 1840, his book collection was sold at auction by the Leiden firms of S. & J. Luchtmans and D. du Mortier in April 1841. The title of the catalogue, referring to ‘the Schultens library, which was used by J.H. van der Palm during his lifetime’, leaves no doubt about how the collection was still known at the time.Footnote ¹⁷ The auction, occurring almost 50 years after Hendrik Albert's death, gave Leiden University Library yet another opportunity to acquire Schultens books and manuscripts. It is well documented in the records of the Library. There is a 22-page list, containing detailed references to the page and item number in the printed catalogue, the title of the book, its format, subject and shelfmark.Footnote ¹⁸ The account books of the Library contain a second, detailed, list with the price of each item, adding up to a total of 1,705 guilders and 1½ cents.Footnote ¹⁹ In this way, 479 printed books and 27 Oriental manuscripts from the Schultens collections found their way into the Library, together with 89 printed books and 7 Oriental manuscripts from Van der Palm's own collection. The manuscripts are registered in the inventory of Oriental manuscripts as Codd. Or. 1571–1599.

The Van Eerde auction (1836) and other acquisitions

Apart from these above-mentioned acquisitions or loans, none of which is mentioned in Berkvens's history of the Leiden University Library, there are other examples of large-scale accessions of Schultens manuscripts long after the death of the last Schultens. For instance, when the Groningen professor and university librarian Jan Rudolf van EerdeFootnote ²⁰ died in 1835, he turned out to be in the possession of dozens of manuscripts, almost exclusively consisting of unpublished papers and scholarly notes in the hand of all three generations of Schultens. When this mass of papers was offered for auction in Groningen in 1836, they were purchased by, again, King William I for the less than princely sum of 47 guilders and 25 cents. He, in turn, donated them to the Leiden University Library, where they were registered in the course of 1837 as Codd. Or. 1455–1502. Although no documentary evidence exists, it is likely that the papers in question had been sold to Van Eerde by Catharina Elisabeth de Sitter, Hendrik Albert Schultens's widow, who had returned to her relatives in Groningen toward the end of her life, or by her heirs. In any case, the auction catalogue mentions the manuscripts as “originating from the library of Hendrik Albert Schultens”.Footnote ²¹

In addition to this, the University Library holds a large number of copies and drafts of diplomatic translations by the three Schultenses and their predecessor Johannes Heyman (1667–1737).Footnote ²² The registration numbers seem to indicate that they were added to the Library collections during the curatorship of Hendrik Arent Hamaker, who held office from 1817 to 1835, but the inventory remains silent on the date or method of acquisition. In the absence of any reliable information one may assume that they were also acquired from Hendrik Albert Schultens's heirs. In his Catalogue of Turkish manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University, Jan Schmidt suggests that these manuscripts may very well have belonged to Hamaker's private library. However, neither the auction catalogue of 1836, nor the financial records of the university library refer to these items.Footnote ²³

The Elusive Purchase of 1806

Thus far, it has become clear that Schultens books and manuscripts entered the library at various instances, either directly or indirectly, through auctions, donations and loans. However, this knowledge does not bring us any closer to the presumed acquisition of 1806. Yet, it is unlikely that three historians of the Leiden University Library should be completely mistaken about this. As it turns out they are not, or not quite. The earliest documentary evidence that such a sale did indeed take place in 1806 can be found in the above-mentioned letter of 3 April 1796, which is extant in the collections of the Society of Netherlands Literature. Just after Van der Palm's takeover of Hendrik Albert Schultens's private library, the widow informed Van der Palm that a number of items had been deliberately excluded from the purchase:

As a matter of fact, her youngest son Albert Willem (b. Leiden 17 April 1783) felt no such inclination. He became a clerk at a naval base in Amsterdam and died on 5 December 1804, only 21 years old. At that moment, Hendrik Albert Schultens's widow Catharina Elisabeth de Sitter, who had already suffered the loss of two other sons and a daughter after the death of her husband, was left with only one surviving child, her daughter Johanna Elisabeth (1779–1820). She then proceeded to dispose of the materials that had been kept apart for the benefit of her sons. One must assume that she first went to Van der Palm, to whom she had given the right of first refusal. Van der Palm however, who was in the service of the Government between 1799 and 1806, was not in a position to buy. The widow subsequently approached the trustees (‘curatoren’) of Leiden University, who convened on 29 March 1805 to discuss her offer. The trustees, perceiving that any document left behind by the Schultenses might be important for the study of Oriental languages, felt favourably disposed towards the offer, but before making a final decision they appointed a committee consisting of the Leiden Orientalist Sebald F.J. Rau (1765–1807)Footnote ²⁵ and, unsurprisingly, Van der Palm, in order to ascertain the value of the offer.Footnote ²⁶

Almost one and a half years later, on 19 September 1806, Rau and Van der Palm reported back with a succinct and also slightly incorrect survey of the books and manuscripts. As already indicated in the widow's letter to Van der Palm, the collection consisted mainly of annotated copies of Jacobus Golius’ Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Leiden, 1653), filled with the handwritten notes of all three generations of Schultens. In addition there were copies of Basilius Faber's Thesaurus eruditionis scolasticae (Leipzig, 1696), Johannes Scapula's Lexicon Graeco-Latinum and some contemporary copies of Arabic manuscripts, most notably a copy of Edward Pococke's translation of the Majmaʿal-amthāl, a collection of Arabic proverbs by the twelfth-century Iranian scholar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Maydānī, transcribed by Hendrik Albert Schultens during his stay in Oxford (see the Appendix below for a more detailed bibliographical description of all items).Footnote ²⁷ The estimated value of this small collection was, according to Rau and Van der Palm, one thousand gold ducats or 5,250 guilders. On the same day, 19 September 1806, the trustees agreed to the suggested price and asked Van der Palm to offer this sum to Schultens's widow, who accepted by letter to Van der Palm on 27 September 1806.Footnote ²⁸ The acquisition was important enough to catch the eye of the general public, for instance in the pages of the popular literary magazine Algemeene Konst- en Letterbode (‘General messenger of Arts and Letters’), where it was announced in glowing terms as “a sublime treasure of pretious Manuscripts”.Footnote ²⁹

In those days, 5,250 guilders was an extravagant sum according to any standard. The regular Library budget for 1806 was only 300 guilders and the annual income of the average Leiden professor ranged between 2,000 and 3,000 guilders.Footnote ³⁰ Since the regular budget was evidently inadequate, the trustees of the university turned to the trust fund of Lodewijk Chastelain (17??-1785). Chastelain, a lawyer from The Hague, had appointed the university as his universal heir in 1779 on the condition that the revenues from his estate be used for books for the faculties of Law, Medicine and Philosophy alternately, with the conspicuous exception of the faculty of Divinity.Footnote ³¹ However, even the affluent Chastelain fund proved incapable of covering the whole sum, and the trustees could do nothing but pay half the amount and promise to settle the remaining debt “as soon as the state of finances allow”. Even this proved difficult, and when the university paid a second instalment of 1,625 guilders in 1809 Schultens's widow had already died.Footnote ³² The fate of the last instalment of 1,000 guilders is unknown.

It is evident that all those concerned felt perfectly justified in spending more than 5,000 guilders on a few annotated dictionaries and contemporary manuscripts. As we have seen, the price had originally been fixed by Hendrik Albert Schultens himself. It is possible that Van der Palm followed his professor's opinion as he had always done, and he may also have acted to serve the interests of the widow, but on the other hand the trustees of the university were perfectly free to reject the offer. The fact that they did accept it, even when they could not really afford to do so, implies that they, too, were eager to secure possession of this little collection.

In this respect, it is interesting to take a closer look at the arguments brought forward by Rau and Van der Palm in their report to the trustees. According to them, the scholarly notes in the dictionaries were valuable because of the “stupendous learning” of the Schultens, which had to be preserved for the Leiden academic community. Hendrik Albert Schultens's copy of al-Maydānī's proverbs was regarded as valuable because he himself had declared that this manuscript alone had been worth his entire journey to England. Lastly, Rau and Van der Palm stressed the value that “foreign scholars and universities” would attach to these unique specimens of scholarship and the high prices they would be willing to offer. Many times, they warned, similar “invaluable products of the national mind” had been allowed to disappear abroad, invariably leading to regrets afterwards.

Strictly speaking, these ‘arguments’ constitute an assertion rather than an explanation of the facts: the annotated dictionaries were valuable because Rau and Van der Palm considered the authors of the notes as fine scholars; obviously, H.A. Schultens had thought so too during his lifetime, and everybody's opinion was confirmed by unspecified foreigners who were apparently introduced into the argument for extra leverage. Who were the trustees of the university to challenge all this?

In fact, the value attributed to this collection cannot fairly be understood without reference to the state of Arabic lexicography in the early nineteenth century. In those days Jacobus Golius's Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, published in 1653, was not yet superseded by a more recent work, and western scholars of Arabic used to update their Golius with marginal annotations based on their own study of Arabic texts. It may, therefore, be assumed with good reason that the scholarly notes of the three generations of Schultens were regarded as an important contribution to Arabic lexicography, and the annotated dictionaries themselves as priceless items. It was only from 1830 that Golius's work came to be replaced by Georg Wilhelm Freytag's Arabic-Latin dictionary, published under the same title as its predecessor, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (4 vols., Halis Saxonum [Halle a/d Saale], 1830–1837). For those who wonder if Leiden University spent its money wisely on the annotated dictionaries, it is to some degree reassuring to read Freytag's preface, wherein he stated that he had derived much profit from Jan Jacob Schultens's notes to his own Golius, a copy that had been put at his disposal by the Leiden University Library.Footnote ³³

After the publication of Freytag's Lexicon, annotated Goliuses lost much of their added value. For instance, when H.A. Hamaker's private library was auctioned in 1836, Leiden University Library paid 600 guilders for his annotated copy of J. Willmet's Lexicon linguae Arabicae in Coranum, Haririum et vitam Timuri (Lugd. Bat. 1784, current shelfmark UBL 854 B 2–3), against a mere 100 guilders for his annotated Golius (shelfmark UBL 843 A 11–12).Footnote ³⁴

Even the use of Latin as a scholarly medium rapidly lost currency in the course of the nineteenth century. The new generation of Arabic lexicographers, such as Edward William Lane (1801–1876) or Albin de Biberstein Kazimirski (1808–1887), used their own vernacular rather than Latin. A Dutch Arabist like R.P.A. Dozy (1820–1883) made the effort of looking up Jan Jacob Schultens's notes to his Golius when preparing his Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1881), but he found them “in a veritable chaos”. “No doubt”, he declared dismissively, “they were clear to him who wrote them, but not to us”. Nevertheless, even Dozy had to admit that he had used Jan Jacob Schultens's notes for his citations from authors like Barhebraeus, Ibn Ṭufayl and al-Tanūkhī.Footnote ³⁵

The Arabic dictionaries were registered in the acquisitions journal of the university library only in 1816, after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars.Footnote ³⁶ The same seems to apply to the contemporary manuscripts. The dictionaries in classical languages were registered as late as 1845, where they go unnoticed among the other acquisitions of that year.Footnote ³⁷

With hindsight it is not difficult to see that the difference between notions such as quality and quantity and value and price became blurred with the passing of time. The actual content of this extraordinary purchase was forgotten, but the memory of the extravagant expenditure has lingered on in the successive histories of the Leiden University Library to this day, culminating in the idea that a very large amount of money must necessarily have involved a large number of books and manuscripts. Quod non.