ABSTRACT
Examining how nineteenth-century Orientalists accessed the virtues or vices exhibited in Reinhart Dozy’s De Israëlieten te Mekka (The Israelites in Mecca, 1864), this chapter shows that nineteenth-century Orientalists quarreled about (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. As these findings challenge historians’ conventional focus on single virtues, this chapter argues that balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices deserve more attention than they have received so far.
