We are saddened by the recent passing of Jan Schmidt. For many years, he was part of the wider NIT-community, regularly spending research stays at NIT. He presented public lectures at NIT on the writings of Stephan Schulz (2008), Fritz Rudolf Kraus (2009), and Vasfi Efendi (2012) and co-organized the 2012 NIT symposium Ha’ilat-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Tragedies); Ottomans Upheavals Through Ottoman and Foreign Eyes. The following obituary was written by Hanneke van der Heijden.
With the sad passing of Jan Schmidt, we lose one of the most prolific and learned scholars in the fields of Ottoman codicology, history, language and literature.
Jan Schmidt started his academic career with his Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands (2000-2012) – four thick volumes that will provide future generations of scholars with invaluable knowledge. The catalogue represented much more than just an update of the previous one (written in Latin). Schmidt added a lot of detail and precision to the descriptions, and broadened the catalogue’s scope by including Persian and Arabic texts written in margins, as well as Turkish texts scribbled in the margins of Persian or Arabic manuscripts. In the same period he published the Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester (2011).
But his interest was certainly not limited to codicology. Schmidt, who paired a passion for reading with a love for writing, published an impressive number of articles on a range of topics related to Ottoman history, linguistics and literature. A selection of his articles was republished in Joys of Philology, two volumes which testify of Schmidt’s meticulous work, and reflect the infectious playfulness with which he approached his topics. This same playfulness is also felt in his translations of Ottoman poetry.
Human detail was another indispensable element in his work. It’s no coincidence that he often approached his topics through a historical protagonist: Schmidt published the accounts of a 18th century Dutch traveller to Ottoman lands, the diaries of the Young Turk officer İsmail Hakkı Bey and the orientalist Karl Süssheim as well as the large body of letters written by the German assyriologist Fritz Rudolf Kraus during his exile in Istanbul in the 1930s-1940s.
Throughout his career Schmidt generously shared his knowledge and erudition with his students at Leiden University, his colleagues in the Netherlands and abroad, and with the readers of the magazine Edebiyāt, a Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, which he co-edited for many years. His family and friends lose a warm, truly interested and involved companion, someone who loved to entertain his company with anecdotes about his travels and his humorous remarks about ‘the human condition’.
Jan Schmidt (photo: Sytske Sötemann)