Julius Jolly: Kleine Schriften.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

Julius Jolly: Kleine Schriften. Edited by HEIDRUN BRUCKNER and INGO STRAUCH following preparatory work by ALBRECHT WEZLER. Vertiffentlichungen der Helmuth von Glasenapp-Stiftung. vols. 38.1 and 2. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2012. Pp. xlviii + 1378.

The first book I read from cover to cover when I began working in the field of Hindu law, sixty-five years ago, was Julius (Ernst) Jolly's Recht und Sitte, einschliesslich der einheimischen Litteratur, published in 1896 in the Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde. (An authorized translation into English, by Bhatakrishna Ghosh, appeared in 1928 and, again, in 1975.) Ever since, Jolly's works have remained constant companions in my research.

I often wondered--and the introduction to Kleine Schrjften (KS) does not say--how and why Hindu law became Jolly's longest lasting and most productive field of study. His expertise was so widely recognized that, in 1883, at the age of thirty-four, he was invited to deliver the prestigious Tagore Law Lectures at the University of Calcutta. The twelve lectures were published in 1885 at Thacker & Spink's in Calcutta, as Outlines of an History of the Hindu Law of Partition, Inheritance and Adoption, as Contained in the Original Sanskrit Texts. I wondered about this turn of events, because, like most European Sanskritists of his time--and of several later generations--Julius Jolly learned Sanskrit not for the sake of its literature, but as a language that played a major role in the study of Indo-European linguistics. He was born on 18 December 1849 in Heidelberg, where his father was a professor of mathematics, until the family moved to Munich in 1854. There Julius grew up, studying at the local university--according to Friedrich Wilhelm, he also studied in Berlin und Leipzig (Neue Deutsche Biographie 10, 1974, 591)--and earning a doctorate with a dissertation tided Die Moduslehre in den altiranischen Dialekten in ihrer Bedeutung fur die Classifikation des arischen Sprachzweigs (1871). One year later, he presented his Habilitationsschrift: Geschichte des Infinitivs im Indogermanischen (dedicated to the Classical and comparative scholar Georg Curtius), whereupon he settled as Privatdozent at the University of Wurzburg, where no Sanskrit had been taught regularly since the departure of Othmar Frank in 1826. He spent his entire academic career in Wurzburg, rising to professor extraor-dinarius (1877), to ordinarius (1886, even then as professor "fur vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Sanskrit"), until his retirement (1920, although he continued to teach Sanskrit till 1928), and his death on 25 April 1932.

One feature of Jolly's linguistic activities, which deserves to be pointed out to...