Talk:Max von Oppenheim

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What are the references to the marvel universe Zola person doing on this page? Looks vandalized or mis-pasted.

max

Hi, I have added more information, some from Spiegel.de and some from his de.wikipedia page on Max Von Oppenheim. It should be noted that this material was translated.Valleyspring (talk) 18:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Overhaul

I’ve given this article a much-needed overhaul in line with the following principles:

• this guy is notable mainly for discovering, excavating and exhibiting the archaeological findings of Tell Halaf. In the diplomatic/spy business he was quite small fry…the page should reflect that
• an encyclopedic article should use different language and have a different focus than an article in, say, the Daily Mirror, Paris Match or the script notes of an Indiana Jones movie
• in particular, POV words like “chauvinistic” should be used – if at all – only as a direct quotation
• it reflects on the neutrality of some of the previous editing that the claim that he “approved” massacres in the source became “encouraging massacre” in the article
• given that it can be tough to know what people were doing 100 years ago, we should be very wary of going into details what they thought or felt…unless based on a direct quote
• I have found no evidence that Oppenheim was involved with any Hindu conspiracies, this seems completely out of his area of expertise and radius of action. The call for holy war against the Colonial powers would have extended to Muslims in India, though.
• recently two major exhibitions have been made on Oppenheim by state-run museums in Germany. It is career suicide here to be seen to sweep under the rug any indication of Nazi co-operation or sympathizing. Since there was no mention of this anywhere, I put the statement by McMeekin (who I presume this came from, the footnote was somewhat confusing) in a direct quote.

In the previous version, it was not always clear which of the individual statements were sourced and which were not, since it did not follow the “one cit. per sentence” nor “one cit. per paragraph” approach. I have used one footnote at the end of the paragraph when all the material is from that source. Otherwise, there is more than one cit. per paragraph.

For those who think this was too radical, here are those materials that looked at least partially sourced - in case someone thinks these are appropriate encyclopedic content and wants to restore them (hopefully in a tasteful way):

In 1886 he travelled to the Maghreb and picked up his first concubine at a slave market, an Arab-Berber woman.

Oppenheim emphasised the need for Germany to defend the Ottoman Empire against the British and reflected the chauvinistic, anti-British, pan-Germanic thinking that was fed by the Kaisers Weltpolitik. Examples of this were his belief that most Armenians in Cairo were in the pay of Lord Cromer, the Consul-General, and that Syria's Christians were being incited to secede from the Ottoman Empire and so were hostile to Germans because they knew that the Germans were 'friends of the Sultan and opponents of the separation of any part of the Ottoman Empire'. In general he regarded Sunni Muslims as reliable but was suspicious of the Sherif of Mecca and Ibn Sauds tribe of Wahhabi Muslims believing that both were in the pay of British agents - correctly in this case.

Every autumn his head servant would supply Oppenheim with a new slave girl who would become mistress of the harem until the following year. An affair with a married woman named Zenab ended when her husband discovered the liaison and drowned the woman in the Nile.

Because Germany was not an Islamic power the war on the Entente powers needed to be 'endorsed with the seal of the Sultan-Caliph' and on 14 November 1914 in a ceremony at Fatih Mosque the first ever global jihad had been inaugurated. The impetus for this move came from the German government, which subsidized distribution of the Ottoman holy war fetvas, and most of the accompanying commentaries from Muslim jurists, and Oppenheim's jihad bureau played a significant role. By the end of November 1914 the jihad fetvas had been translated into French, Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Thousands of pamphlets emerged under Oppenheim's direction in Berlin at this period and his Exposé declared that, "the blood of infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity", the "killing of the infidels who rule over the Islamic lands", meaning British, French, Russian, and possibly Dutch and Italian nationals, had become " a sacred duty". And Oppenheim's instructions, distinct from traditional 'jihad by campaign' led by the Caliph, urged the use of 'individual Jihad', assassinations of Entente officials with 'cutting, killing instruments' and 'Jihad by bands',- secret formations in Egypt, India and Central Asia.

I’ll leave the Category:German Jews in place for now. He was born the son of two Catholics, was baptized and was raised as a Catholic. But I will not venture into the issue of whether WP defines Jewishness as a religious or a racial trait.

Finally, I could have used 10-15 separate RS for this just from the newspaper articles on the 2011 and 2103 exhibitions alone. However, since the journalists ultimately only made use of information given to them by the curators and authors of the catalogues, I stuck to using the ultimate source (i.e. the catalogue).Drow69 (talk) 15:41, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

References

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