New Materials on Grote (Part 1)

1. Recently, I came across an online auction that was held almost a year ago to sell three curious photographs and a court document. The Amsterdam auction house Zwiggelaar offered the material as lot 1492 on 6 December 2022. The description states, among other things: “Depicts Grote, notorious collector of Christian Oriental manuscripts” (fig. 1). The lot was offered under the title “[Photography] Three Photographs of Friedrich Grote (1861-1922)” at an estimated price of 150 to 300 euros. Siska Zwiggelaar of Zwiggelaar Auctions informed me that the material belonged to a Spanish collector.¹

2. Grote is no stranger to those studying the dispersed manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery. He spent many years in Egypt at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and was able to build up an impressive collection of manuscripts there. Accordingly, the description says that he is “best known for obtaining Christian Arabic manuscript fragments from St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai” (fig. 1). This is not entirely correct, since he possessed manuscripts or manuscript fragments in almost all the languages represented in the Sinai collection. So he is rather “best known” for having owned so many old manuscripts from the Sinai monastery in the first place. In recent years, Paul Géhin and Grigory Kessel in particular have dealt with the Syriac manuscripts of the former Grote Collection and established its historical significance.²

3. Over the last 8 years, I have researched Grote’s biography in detail. A 70+ page article about him will come out this year in the next issue of Oriens Christianus.³ It is a bit unfortunate that I only became aware of the material after completing the article. Still, I plan to include it in an English book version of Grote’s biography, which is currently in preparation. In this post, I would first like to capture a few thoughts about the new materials.

4. As mentioned above, the lot contained three photographs and one court document. These were in an envelope on which is written: “La Grande guerre | Allemagne | Documents Boches” (“The Great War | Germany | Kraut documents”).⁴ The calligraphic script is similar to the one that appears on the back of one of the photographs (see below). At the moment I have no idea how this caption could be related to Grote.⁵ First of all, it should be mentioned with regard to the photographs that they probably originally came from Grote’s own possession. The British geologist William Fraser Hume (1867-1949) reported in a 1906 publication that “Dr. Grote […] has an intimate acquaintance with the [Sinai] peninsula, and has also formed a large photographic collection”.⁶ Two photographs by Grote are printed in the same publication (fig. 2). Photographs taken by Grote also play an important role in an Arabic article of 1894, which reports on Grote’s alleged manuscript discoveries. I have written about this here and here. Moreover, I think that there is reason to assume that Grote used the photographs he took of manuscripts to falsify their provenance in some cases.⁷

5. As for the court document, according to the description it is an eleven-page printed text. It bears the following French title: “Mémoire présentée à la cour de cassation des tribunaux Egyptiens par Friedrich Grote. Au sujet de son recours en cassation contre l’arrêt de la cour d’appel rendu à la date du 29 mai 1893” (“Memorandum presented to the Court of Cassation of the Egyptian Courts by Friedrich Grote. Concerning his appeal in cassation against the decision of the Court of Appeal of 29 May 1893”) (fig. 3). Grote’s imprisonment in Egypt is also known from other sources. It is mentioned, for instance, by Margaret Dunlop Gibson to James Rendel Harris in a letter from which Alba Fedeli has published excerpts.⁸ Already in 1894, the historian and librarian Otto Hartwig drew attention to it accompanied by an explicit warning against Grote.⁹ The document in question gives us for the first time a concrete date when Grote was in prison and what the reason for the imprisonment was. The description apparently quotes from the document that he was charged “for stealing money and documents from the home of Monsieur Diamant on 27 August 1892”. So far, my research on a “Monsieur Diamant” who resided in Cairo in 1892 has turned up nothing. It may be an otherwise unknown person. However, if any of my readers might have an idea who this person is, I would be very interested to know.

6. The photographs were probably created before 1900 or around the turn of the century. It seems certain to me that they were all made in Egypt. Grote himself can be seen in at least two of them. Before I give brief descriptions of the pictures, it must be noted that they are also partially inscribed on the front and back. One of the photographs bears the number 109 on the front, while another shows a kind of artist’s abbreviation that looks to me like a combination of the capital letters F and G (fig. 4). If this is the case, it most likely stands for the initials of the name “Friedrich Grote”. This would once again strengthen the assumption that the photographs originally came from Grote’s own collection. One of the photographs bears writing in French on the back. There it says in calligraphic handwriting: “Frederick [sic] Grote / Espion Allemande”. This is a strange sort of description of the picture. At the moment I do not know what to make of it and whether the designation as “Espion Allemande” (“German spy”) is to be interpreted literally.

7. The first photo shows a big game hunter in front of or in the midst of his trophies (fig. 5). Skulls with antlers of buffaloes and antelopes, skins, rifles. A European with a moustache and pith helmet stands in the middle, while on the right edge of the picture the arm of a person with darker skin tone can still be seen, sitting on the ground and holding a rifle. At first I thought that the hunter was Grote himself, as the description says. However, now I rather think that it is his friend Adalbert Graf zu Erbach-Fürstenau, with whom Grote travelled the Sinai for the first time already in 1882 when both were only 21 years old. Coincidentally, shortly before I became aware of this material, I had email contact with Count Adalbert’s great-great-grandson. The count, who made a name for himself as a specialist in mediaeval European book illumination, played, in my opinion, no insignificant role in awakening Grote’s interest in manuscripts. Unfortunately, no clear reference to this has yet been found in the count’s family archives. But there is a herbarium of plants from Sinai that the younger brother created. And I was kindly allowed to see an exchange of letters in which there is talk of a “hunting expedition” on the Sinai, on which the count also claims to have written an essay. I think that the photo could have been taken on precisely this hunting expedition.¹⁰

8. The second photo (fig. 6) probably also shows Adalbert Graf zu Erbach-Fürstenau (seated first from the right). It is a staged scene that captures the colonialist framework of Grote’s activity in Egypt. Three Europeans are sitting in the middle of a tent. They are taking a break, having a drink, enjoying the view of the landscape. That they are in the Orient is made clear not only by the Arabic lettering on the tent fabric, but also by the four male servants standing around them, all in caftans and fez. Grote sits in the middle and is the only one looking at the viewer. He holds a bottle in his hand while one of the servants hands out glasses. This picture was probably also taken on the hunting expedition. It also expresses a social and economic gap between seemingly rich Europeans and seemingly poor Egyptians. The photo is deceptive here, because Grote himself had financial problems in Egypt and his stay in prison is directly related to this.

9. The third photo (fig. 7) is also very interesting from a biographical point of view. We see Grote in a shady crevice about two metres deep in the ground. He is looking intently at a small notebook, holding it with his left hand, writing with his right. Above the crevice, glistening sunlight. The picture does not reveal what he was writing down there. It follows the iconography of the explorer-scholar who spares no hardship, travels to distant countries, remote regions, accepts dangers to life and limb in order to serve the sole idealistic purpose of enriching human knowledge. It was probably meant to depict Grote as the researcher he wanted to become through his activities.

10. In summary, this material documents the relationships, ambitions, and the historical framework that made Grote a manuscript collector. It is therefore of some importance for Grote’s biography. This is especially true for the court document. Unfortunately, it is at present impossible for me to contact the current owner. If they should read this post, I would be very happy if they would contact me. After several years of scouring public archives and estates for materials related to Grote, I would not have thought that such material was still in the hands of private collectors. I wonder if, like the rest of the manuscripts in the former Grote collection, it might have been sold by Grote’s widow, Käthe Grote-Hahn.

Published: 31 October 2023. Last updated: 15 October 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. I am grateful to Siska Zwiggelaar of Zwiggelaar Auctions, Amsterdam, for permission to reproduce this material. [↩]
2. I wonder whether my own publications on Grote, which emerged from my preoccupation with the Arabic manuscripts of the former collection, gave rise to the mention of Arabic manuscripts in the description. [↩]
3. Peter Tarras, “Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig Grote (1861-1922) und die christlich-orientalischen Diasporahandschriften vom Sinai: Biographie eines Sammlers“, Oriens Christianus, 106 (2023), in press. [↩]
4. The expression “boche” is a derogatory term used by the French for the Germans. [↩]
5. The “Great War” obviously refers to the First World War. The period between 1914 and 1918 is exactly the period for which we have no information at all about Grote. Whether the term “German spy”, which can be found in the same font on the back of one of the photos, also has to do with the First World War and whether this means that Grote was believed to be a German spy during this time is at present a matter of mere speculation. [↩]
6. William Fraser Hume, The Topography and Geology of Sinai (South Eastern Portion) (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1906), p. 19. [↩]
7. I note parenthetically that Grote lived with his family in Geneva until 1886, where the photographer Fred Boissonnas (1858–1946) was active at that time. The latter actually made a portrait of the Grote family in 1881. Boissonnas would later become famous primarily for his photographs of Greece. It cannot be ruled out that he subsequently had an influence on Grote’s own photographic ambitions. [↩]
8. Alba Fedeli, “Manuscript Acquisitions and Their Later Movements: A Further Note About the Case of the Lewis Quranic Manuscript“, in: Boris Liebrenz, Christoph Rauch (eds), Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies: Life and Collections of Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905) in Context, Islamic Manuscripts and Books, 19 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 228-247, at p. 234. [↩]
9. Otto Hartwig, “Der Handschriftenfund auf der Sinaihalbinsel“, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, 11 (1894), p. 428. [↩]
10. I would like to thank Louis Graf zu Erbach-Fürstenau and the archivist Anja Hering for the information and materials they provided. [↩]

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