Diaspora DYNAMISM OF THE DIASPORA EUROPE In his book “History of the Jews” published in 1715, he pushed the argument to such an extent that he considered Zarathushtra had been born a Jew ! So he was a monotheist. He even situated Zarathustra’s birth in the 5th century BCE. and designated Zarathushtra’s Jewish teachers namely Elias, Ezra and Daniel. With the rediscovery and translation of Avesta, in the late 18th
More and more, as Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin in his book “Western Response to Zoroastre” points out, “Zarathushtra became part of an attempt in Western Europe to emancipate modern men and women from Christianity”. Zoroastrianism was praised with all the virtues which Christianity was supposed to be lacking: such as rationality, simplicity, contact with nature, constructive and positive instincts, and above all, Zarathushtra was acclaimed for his dualistic solution to the problem of evil. The old and disturbing question about the nature of Jewish and Christian God that had been left unanswered for at least two thousand years, once again, was brought forward: You say: your God is All Knowledgeable and All Powerful. Tell us why He has created a creature named Satan, to deceit the weak human beings, that He Himself has created. Either this God is not All Knowledgeable or He is not All Powerful or the Evil is a part of Him. In reaction to this embarrassing question, the Christian intellectuals counter-attacked and changed the front. They accused Duperron of being a forger and the translation of Avesta a forgery. Facing such a poisoning situation, Duperon, himself a faithful Roman Catholic, set back and refused to see anything in the Avesta that could be used against Christianity. His attitude, of course, disappointed the anti-church intellectuals, though Voltaire insisted on Duperron’s courage.
century by the French scholar Anquetil Duperron, it was the turn of the Humanists, made of philosophers, scholars, writers, poets, musicians, artists to enter this ideological battle. The translation of Avesta provoked passionate discussions in Europe. Voltaire (6), Grimm (7), Didérot (8), Goethe (9), Von Kleist (9), Byron (10), Wordsworth (11), Shelley (12) and later Nietzsche (photo above) and many others joined this ideological fight (6). The great musicians participated as well. Rameau included Zarathushtra in his opera “Zoroastre”, Mozart in his “The Magic Flute” and Richard Strauss in his symphony “Thus Spake Zarathushtra”. The main interest, for the European intellectuals in Zarathushtra, was that they thought they had found a weapon against the power of the Church. To them the Church did not have anymore the monopoly of the truth. The truth could also be found in a non-Christian tradition, much older than Christianity. FEZANA JOURNAL — Summer 2010
At this point philologists and linguists also joined the battle. Three years later another translation of Avesta made by the German linguist Kleukers proved that Duperron was right and Avesta entered for good the field of scientific research (15). It took however another thirty years until the last panchristian resistants give in and recognize its authenticity. From then on the scholars became interested to search the hidden sources of Christianity within the Zoroastrian doctrine. The discovery of Sanskrit and the relationship between this language and the Avestan language, made easier the comprehension of the Avesta. The idea of the common origin of the civilization of Iran and India was thus established. For the Humanists however, there was another victory on the way. That was the recognition and translation of the Gathas, in the middle of the 19th century, by the brilliant German philologist Martin Haug (16). Through a very hard study, he isolated and translated 17 out of the 72 chapters of the Yasnas in Avesta, written in a much older language. These 17 chapters, the 77