Friedrich Grote<br/>
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| Friedrich Grote | |
|---|---|
| Born | 4 July 1861 Päse, Kingdom of Hanover |
| 💀Died | 15 August 1922 (aged 61) Regensburg, Weimar Republic15 August 1922 (aged 61) |
| 💼 Occupation | minister, missionary, teacher, scholar, traveler, collector |
Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig Grote (4 July 1861 – 15 August 1922) was a German Protestant minister, teacher and private missionary who travelled in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt on the Sinai Peninsula. He is nowadays remembred for his extensive collection of valuable ancient manuscripts and manuscript fragments in a variety of Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic, Armenian, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Georgian, Greek, and Syriac. The importance of the former Grote collection is due to the great number of palimpsests it contained as well as the fact that most of its holdings hail from Saint Catherine's Monastery. Today the collection is dispersed throughout Europe and the United States.
Grote was the maternal uncle of the Swiss-British economic historian Wilhelm Bickel.[1] He had occasional contacts with important European orientalists such as Georg Graf, the Scottish twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, and Alphonse Mingana.[2] The British geologist William Fraser Hume printed photographs taken by Grote on the Sinai Peninsula in his Topography and Geology of the Peninsula of Sinai.[3] Hume also refers to Grote's "large photographic collection",[4] which, like Grote's manuscript collection, does not exist anymore. Despite various attempts in different fields and apart from marginal publications Grote never managed to establish himself as a scholar. Rather, most of his efforts in this direction met with disapproval.[5]
Life[edit]
Friedrich Grote was born on 4 July 1861 in Päse, Lower Saxony, near Hanover which at the time formed the Kingdom of Hanover. He was the first of ten children of the Lutheran minister and publicist Ludwig Heinrich Grote (1825 – 1887).[6] After the Prussian annexion of Hanover in 1866 Ludwig Grote suffered from political persecution and was imprissoned a number of times, resulting in the family's flight into Swiss exile in 1877 where they settled in Geneva.[7] Friedrich Grote went to school in Melsungen in northern Hesse until age 16. In 1875 his school witnessed an outbreak of typhus feaver with ten alumni dying and the 14-year-old Grote only just escaping death.[8] Since he was only half a year from receiving his "Abitur" certificate (German higher education entrance qualification) when he followed his family to Geneva, Grote had to take final exams in Geneva after which he then entered university there.[9] Friedrich Grote studied Theology at Geneva's reformed Faculty of Theology, somewhat to the displeasing of his Lutehran father,[10] and graduated in 1885.[11] Around Easter 1882 he was supposed to make a boat tour with six of his fellow students on Lake Geneva that resulted in a fatal accident, killing all passangers. Grote's tardiness saved him his life.[12] During his time at the university he made friends with the German mineralogist Ernst Anton Wülfing.[13]
From 1886 to 1889 Grote served as pastor in the Milanese German Protestant Church.[14] During that time he published an article joining the debate about the histotrical location of Mount Calvary.[15] In it he advocates the views of Claude R. Conder and George Gordon, probably under the direct influence of Selah Merrill whom he met personally in Jerusalem,[16] that Gologotha is to be identified with the hill near the Garden Tomb known as Skull Hill or Gordon's Calvary.[17] Grote's contribution alternates between scholarly discussion and travelogue reporting his visit of various histotic sites in Jerusalem in the company of his friend Count Adalbert zu Erbach-Fürstenau who sponsored the trip that took place in July 1887.[18] In May of the same year Grote had married his first wife Mathilde Dumonal in Geneva.[19] The journey to Palestine was probably their honeymoon. Erbach-Fürstenau was an art historian specializing in medieval manuscript illuminations.[20] He may have instilled in Grote his later curiosity regarding manuscripts.[21] The two also travelled the Sinai for two months already in 1882.[22]
Grote justified his resignation in Milan by his plans to do research at the library of Saint Catherine's Monastery.[23] He must have arrived in Egypt around 1889. There he followed different occupations, apparently several at a time. People who met Grote in Egypt portray him primarily as a scholar or misisonary. But he also worked as a tour guide or possibly dragoman. He obtained funding by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences for collating Greek manuscripts. The Free Church of Scotland sponsored his missionary activities. Around 1895 he got arrested for three months allegedly for theft.[24] Nevertheless, Grote stayed in Egypt until after World War I.
In 1918 he married his second wife Käte Grote-Hahn (née Hahn) who would later sell the remainder of the Grote collection. Grote-Hahn obtained a degree in agriculture in 1930.[25] The couple had one son.[26]. They lived in Berlin for some time, before moving to Leutkirch im Allgäu, where Grote took up a teaching position. During this time he started selling parts of his manuscript collection and contacted specialists in order to estimate the value of his pieces. His brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Bickel served as a middle man for sells to the British Library as well as the National Library of France.[27] Many manuscript fragments were sold at comparably low prices.[28] Two Greek palimpsest fragments were given as a gift to the Abbey of Beuron.[29] For a short time, the family moved to Regensburg where Grote died at the age of 61 on 15 August 1922.[30].
Travels in Egypt[edit]
The Grote Collection[edit]
Publications[edit]
- Friedrich Grote, "Wo liegt Golgotha?", Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft und kirchliches Leben 8 (1887): 25-34.
- Friedrich Grote (published anonymously), "Kunūz Sīnāʾ aw al-kutub al-ʿarabīya fī Ṭūr Sīnāʾ [Sinai's Treasures or the Arabic Books on Mount Sinai]", al-Muqtaṭaf 6 (1 March 1894/23 Šaʿbān 1311): 365-368.
- Käte Grote-Hahn, Die Preisentwicklung in der dänischen Landwirtschaft und ihre Wirkungen auf Bodenkultur und Viehhaltung, PhD Dissertation (Greifswald: Abel, 1930).
Bibliography[edit]
- Albrecht, Felix (2013) "A Hitherto Unknown Witness to the Apostolic Constitutions in Uncial Script". In: M. Vinzent (ed.), Studia Patristica: Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2011, Vol. 12, Studia Patristica, LXIV (Löwen etc.), p. 267-276.
- Crivello, F. (2011) "Im Schatten von Arthur Haseloff. Adalbert Graf zu Erbach-Fürstenau und die Anfänge des Studiums der staufischen Buchmalerei". In: K.G. Beukers et al. (eds.), Buchschätze des Mittelalters: Forschungsüberblicke, Forschungsperspektiven: Beiträge zum Kolloquium des Kunsthistorischen Instituts der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel vom 24. bis 26. April 2009 (Regensburg), 155–164.
- Kochav, S. (1995) "The Search for a Protestant Holy Sepulchre: The Garden Tomb in Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem." In: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46.2: 278–301. doi:10.1017/S0022046900011374
- Tarras, P. (2020) "From Sinai to Munich: Tracing the History of a Fragment from the Grote Collection". In: Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 6.1 (2020): 73–90. doi:10.25592/uhhfdm.1107.
References[edit]
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 77
- ↑ For Grote's exchange with Georg Graf, see Graf 1925; Graf 1954; Géhin 2017, p. 8; Tarras 2018. Grote accidentally met Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson outside Saint Catherine's Monastery in 1892, as documented by Gibson 1893, p. 35; see also Kessel 2014b, p. 50, n. 42; Tarras 2020, p. 79. His link to Mingana was established by Fedeli 2019.
- ↑ Hume 1906, Plate I and III; cf. also ibid. p. 26
- ↑ Hume 1906, p. 26
- ↑ Cf. e.g. the harsh judgement in Hartwig 1894, quoted also in Kessel 2016, p. 487, n. 55
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 80.
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 80.
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 435
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 473
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 481
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 80.
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 487
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 485
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 80
- ↑ Grote 1887
- ↑ Grote 1887, p. 31
- ↑ For the context of this debate, see Kochav 1995
- ↑ Grote 1887, p. 25
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 600
- ↑ Crivello 2011
- ↑ Cf. Tarras 2020, p. 81
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 81
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p.80 cites Grote's letter of resignation.
- ↑ Hartwig 1894; Fedeli 2019, 234; ibid. n. 32; Tarras 2019, 80.
- ↑ Grote-Hahn 1930. Cited also by Albrecht 2013, p. 270, n. 12.
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 600.
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 77; 78, n. 21; Géhin 2006, p. 24; Géhin 2010, p. 14, n. 2; Géhin 2017, p. 8, n. 27.
- ↑ Tarras 2020, p. 75, n. 3.
- ↑ Dold 1929.
- ↑ Stumpff 2018, p. 600
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