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An Ottoman Historian in Troubled Times. Five Letters from Paul Wittek to Sydney N. Fisher, 1938–1949: The Testimony of a Friendship

Abstract The present short study publishes five hitherto unknown letters written by the Ottoman historian Paul Wittek (1894–1978) to the American Middle Eastern historian Sydney Nettleton Fisher (1906–87). Fisher was a graduate student of Wittek for a few months in 1938; the letters were written during two short periods (1938–9 and 1946–9), when Wittek was attached firstly to the Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves at the Université Libre, Brussels, and secondly, from 1948 onwards, to the University of London. In the intervening years (1940–6), Wittek was a political refugee twice over in England. The letters manifest the development of a close friendship between Wittek and Fisher who, as two supplementary letters written to him by the British Arabist and Islamic scholar H. A. R. Gibb show, was also active during the war years in attempting—unsuccesfully—to facilitate Wittek's acceptance in the U.S.A. as a political refugee.