Biography, Degrees, and Languages

Dr. Joydeep Bagchee was born in a distinguished Indian academic family. He completed a BA in Philosophy from prestigious St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and then moved to the US for further studies. Because of his interest in the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he chose to study at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. The Graduate Faculty was founded as the University in Exile by the first president of the New School, Alvin Johnson. It served as a home for European intellectuals who had fled fascism in Europe. Leading Jewish intellectuals such as Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt had called the Graduate Faculty home. Dr. Bagchee wished to follow in their footsteps to understand the causes and consequences of the intellectual movements that had led to the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Inspired by his training at The New School, Dr. Bagchee moved to Germany in 2005 to deepen his understanding of Continental thought. While studying at the University of Berlin, Dr. Bagchee visited the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, an experience that decisively shaped his intellectual development. He credits a local historian and guide with opening his eyes to the organized, systematic destruction of the Jewish people, a campaign that robbed them of the ability to organize or to resist and forced them participate in their own destruction. After two years of intensive research into Heidegger’s early writings at the University of Freiburg, Dr. Bagchee completed a critical dissertation on Heidegger in which he analyzed Heidegger’s account of human finitude in his magnum opus Being and Time. Dr. Bagchee demonstrated the shortcomings of Heidegger’s understanding of temporality, and argued that a specifically Protestant view of human beings underlay this understanding.

Dr. Bagchee’s growing disenchantment with Heidegger’s covert Lutheranism led him to seek new fields of intellectual engagement. At this time, the question of Indology, the so-called science of India, and of race became paramount for him. While working with Prof. Vishwa Adluri on the subject, Dr. Bagchee realized that German anti-Semitism engendered and guided both phenomena, that is, Indology and the development of race theory (Rassentheorie). His research established the connection between the German university, Protestantism, Luther’s anti-Judaism, and the emergence of Oriental studies in Germany.

The discipline of Oriental studies emerged from Hebrew studies, which in turn emerged from Protestant theology’s interest in the Hebrew Bible. Hampered by their lack of specialization in the language and eager to further buttress the Christian appropriation and reinterpretation of the Tanakh, in the seventeenth century Protestant theologians began hiring rabbis (often converts to Christianity) to aid them in reading and publishing a variety of Hebrew textual sources. As Hebrew studies developed, Protestant scholars became equally well versed in these sources and hence could now debate with rabbis from a position of equal if not greater authority. Eventually, the interest in Hebrew textual sources led to a wider interest in social and historical conditions in ancient Israel, particularly the existence of other “Semitic” cultures and communities, thus giving rise to a more generic Oriental studies. A final and late consequence of this preoccupation with Israel was the development of the subdiscipline of Indology, the study of India. The thesis of linguistic affinity between ancient Sanskrit (supposedly spoken by the “Aryan” race) and German allowed German scholars to complete the project of driving a wedge between Judaism and German Christianity: Christianity was no longer a “Semitic” religion, which developed from Judaism, but the expression of a superior Aryan worldview in its final and most perfect form. Given the ancient antecedents of this worldview (in the Rgveda, among the oldest texts of humanity), it could claim greater antiquity than the Hebrew religion. Indology thus crucially participated in the project of a “de-Judification” and “purification” of German Protestantism by providing ancient origins, a racial basis, a set of texts, and a noble ancestry for it.

By providing extensive evidence to support this connection, Dr. Bagchee’s research overturned the existing paradigm in Oriental studies, prevalent since Said, of linking Orientalism to Empire. Instead, it showed that Orientalism was linked to German anti-Judaism, and the interest in India had only arisen as a consequence of the desire to void Christianity of its Jewish origin.

This work culminated in the publication of The Nay Science from Oxford University Press, New York, a work that despite its share of controversy was hailed as a masterpiece in the field. This book permanently changed the received wisdom on Indology, making it difficult to sustain the pretense that this humanities “discipline” had ever been objective or scientific. In the words of a reviewer in the premier journal History of Religions, the book displayed a “brilliant use of Occidental historical-critical, empirical, and Gadamerian phenomenology” to “hoist” “earlier Western scholars by their own petards.”

Dr. Bagchee also traced the prevalence of anti-Judaic tropes in the writings of leading nineteenth-century Indologists, focusing particularly on their equation of Brahmin “priests” with “rabbis,” the narrative of the alleged corruption of an original revelation (given to an Aryan people), a corruption that allegedly paralleled what had happened with the Old Testament (and then again with the New Testament, once the Catholic Church “backslid” into “Jewish” legalism), and finally, their expectation that the Protestant “science” of Indology would do for Indian texts what Martin Luther had done for scripture. Working long hours in German state and national archives, Dr. Bagchee provided exhaustive and irrefutable evidence for anti-Semitism as both official state ideology and official state policy—all the way from the Kaiserreich to Nazi Germany. Nearly every aspect of university politics, from hiring policies to pressuring Jews to convert in return for admission to ranks of the professoriate, had some anti-Jewish component.

As his way of bringing light to the Jewish predicament, he spent four years translating Monika Richarz’s classic study of the entry of Jews into the university into English. This work, which details how Jews faced various forms of discrimination and pressure to convert, as they started pursuing university education in the seventeenth century, has previously been unavailable to scholars without a knowledge of German. Yet, it is the definitive study of the subject. The Leo Baeck Institute New York is hosting a book launch event in November 2022 for the German Jews and the University.

As a professor at the Hindu University of America, Dr. Bagchee continues to teach this important material to a generation of young Indians, highlighting the connection between German “race science” (Rassenwissenschaft), the theory of Aryan migration, and German anti-Semitism. His forthcoming book, The Aryans: A Long History (to be published by Routledge India next year), explores the Christian theological antecedents of the theory of an Aryan race, and how it was used to exclude black Africans as well as Jews from the Creator’s “plan” for humanity. Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of German Indological scholarship, Dr. Bagchee identified the key texts for this story, including some by notable anti-Semites (and Nazis) such as Johannes Hertel and Erich Frauwallner (both NSDAP members). He then translated all of these texts himself in order to present to the non-German speaking world how Indologists had used the podium of academe (Hertel and Frauwallners held chairs in Leipzig and Vienna, respectively; Frauwallner was rehabilitated and permitted to rejoin his institute and continue publishing after the war, even though his anti-Semitism was well known) to spread their hateful views in the name of “science.” The content of these texts was previously known only among Indologists, English speakers having no access to them.