1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Reiske, Johann Jacob

REISKE, JOHANN JACOB (1716–1774), German scholar and physician, was born on the 25th of December 1716 at Zörbig in Electoral Saxony. From the Waisenhaus at Halle he passed in 1733 to the university of Leipzig, and there spent five years. He tried to find his own way in Greek literature, to which German schools then gave little attention; but, as he had not mastered the grammar, he soon found this a sore task and took up Arabic. He was very poor, having almost nothing beyond his allowance, which for the five years was only two hundred thalers. But everything of which he could cheat his appetite was spent on Arabic books, and when he had read all that was then printed he thirsted for manuscripts, and in March 1738 started on foot for Hamburg, joyous though totally unprovided, on his way to Leiden and the treasures of the Warnerianum. At Hamburg he got some money and letters of recommendation from the Hebraist Wolf, and took ship to Amsterdam. Here d’Orville, to whom he had an introduction, proposed to retain him as his amanuensis at a salary of six hundred guilders. Reiske refused, though he thought the offer very generous; he did not want money, he wanted manuscripts. When he reached Leiden (June 6, 1738) he found that the lectures were over for the term and that the MSS.

were not open to him. But d’Orville and A. Schultens helped him to private teaching and reading for the press, by which he was able to live. He heard the lectures of A. Schultens, and practised himself in Arabic with his son J. J. Schultens. Through Schultens too he got at Arabic MSS., and was even allowed sub rosa to take them home with him. Ultimately he seems to have got free access to the collection, which he re-catalogued—the work of almost a whole summer, for which the curators rewarded him with nine guilders.

Reiske’s first years in Leiden were not unhappy, till he got into serious trouble by introducing emendations of his own into the second edition of Burmann’s Petronius, which he had to see through the press. His patrons withdrew from him, and his chance of perhaps becoming professor was gone; d’Orville indeed soon came round, for he could not do without Reiske, who did work of which his patron, after dressing it up in his own style, took the credit. But A. Schultens was never the same as before to him; Reiske indeed was too independent, and hurt him by his open criticisms of his master’s way of making Arabic mainly a handmaid of Hebrew. Reiske, however, himself admits that Schultens always behaved honourably to him. In 1742 by Schultens’s advice Reiske took up medicine as a study by which he might hope to live if he could not do so by philology. In 1746 he graduated as M.D., the fees being remitted at Schultens’s intercession. It was Schultens too who conquered the difficulties opposed to his graduation at the last moment by the faculty of theology on the ground that some of his theses had a materialistic ring. On the 10th of June 1746 he left Holland and settled in Leipzig, where he hoped to get medical practice.

But his shy, proud nature was not fitted to gain patients, and the Leipzig doctors would not recommend one who was not a Leipzig graduate. In 1747 an Arabic dedication to the electoral prince of Saxony got him the title of professor, but neither the faculty of arts nor that of medicine was willing to admit him among them, and he never delivered a course of lectures. He had still to go on doing literary task-work, but his labour was much worse paid in Leipzig than in Leiden. Still he could have lived and sent his old mother, as his custom was, a yearly present of a piece of leather to be sold in retail if he had been a better manager. But, careless for the morrow, he was always printing at his own cost great books which found no buyers. His academical colleagues were hostile; and Ernesti, under a show of friendship, secretly hindered his promotion. His unsparing reviews made bad blood with the pillars of the university.

At length in 1758 the magistrates of Leipzig rescued him from his misery by giving him the rectorate of St Nicolai, and, though he still made no way with the leading men of the university and suffered from the hostility of men like Ruhnken and J. D. Michaelis, he was compensated for this by the esteem of Frederick the Great, of Lessing, Karsten Niebuhr, and many foreign scholars. The last decade of his life was made cheerful by his marriage with Ernestine Müller, who shared all his interests and learned Greek to help him with collations. In proof of his gratitude her portrait stands beside his in the first volume of the Oratores Graeci. Reiske died on the 14th of August 1774, and his MS. remains passed, through Lessing’s mediation, to the Danish minister Suhm, and are now in the Copenhagen library.