Reinach, Salomon

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REINACH, SALOMON

REINACH, SALOMON (1858–1932) was a French archaeologist and author of more than seventy books. Reinach is most widely known for his controversial writings in the area of the anthropological-ethnological comparative study of religions. He became conservator of the Musées Nationales in 1893, director of the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain in 1901, and also served from the following year onward as professor at the École du Louvre in Paris. He was coeditor of the Revue archéologique, and from 1896 a member of the Académie des Inscriptions.

Although he branded eighteenth-century rationalism as a "paltry doctrine" seeking "to suppress religion without knowing its essence and without any clear idea of its origin and development" (Cultes, vol. 2, p. xviii, my translation), Reinach expressed his admiration for Voltaire, whose ideas about religion he did not share, but whose "incomparable gifts as a narrator" greatly inspired him (Orpheus, Eng. ed. of 1930, pp. vi-vii) and in whose spirit he wished to wage a more effective campaign against the church. "The history of humanity is that of a progressive secularisation [laïcisation ] which is by no means complete as yet" (Orpheus, p. 23).

Reinach saw his own role as that of a popularizer of what others—among them Robertson Smith, Frazer, Tylor, Lang, and Jevons—had discovered: "Mine has been a lowlier part—to grasp the ideas of my betters, and to diffuse them as widely as I might" (Cults, p. xi). His summary definitions of magic and religion and of totem and taboo are in many ways illustrative of his approach. Reinach described magic as "the strategy of animism," and he based his definition of religion on the Latin word religio, calling it "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties" (Orpheus, p. 23). On totem and taboo Reinach remarked: "The totem is inconceivable without a taboo, and the logical outcome of a generalised taboo can hardly be anything else than a totem" (Cults, p. ix). His admission, made during the Third International Congress for the History of Religions held at Oxford in 1908, that totemism was "an overridden hobby" of which he himself had been "one of the roughriders" was followed by the statement that he "did not yet feel disposed to apologize nor to recant," and this unwillingness seems to hold true for subsequent writings as well. Discussing, for example, the ceremonial killing and eating of a totem, he leaves the possibility open that this idea of "fortifying and sanctifying oneself by assimilation of a divine being" survived in the medieval Christian rite of the Eucharist: "If primitive Christianity, with its theophagistic practices, conquered Europe so rapidly, it was because this idea of the manducation of the god was not new, but simply the presentation of one of the most profound religious instincts of humanity in a more spiritual form" (Orpheus, p. 19).

Bibliography

Reinach wrote extensively in the areas of classical philology, archaeology, and art history. Among his publications in these fields are Manuel de philologie classique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1883–1884); Minerva, 4th ed. (Paris, 1900); and Apollo: Histoire générale des arts plastiques (Paris, 1904), which has been translated by Florence Simmonds as Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art throughout the Ages, 2d ed. (London, 1907).

Almost one hundred of Reinach's articles, most dealing with the comparative study of religion, were republished in Cultes, mythes et religions, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1908–1913). Elizabeth Frost selected fourteen of these essays for her translation, Cults, Myths and Religions (London, 1912).

Bibliographical sources include E. Pottier's "Salomon Reinach," Revue archéologique, 5th series, 36 (1932): 137–154; Bibliographie de Salomon Reinach, 1874–1922, with supplement (Saint-Germain, 1922–1927); and Bibliographie de Salomon Reinach, with notes by Seymour de Ricci (Paris, 1936). This last volume also includes a biographical sketch of Reinach.

New Sources

Reinach's ideas on the origins and development of religions are summarized in Orpheus: Histoire générale des religions (Paris, 1909). This book became extremely popular. It went through thirty editions (30^th, Paris, 1921) and was translated into five languages, including Russian during the Soviet era. The English edition, translated by Florence Simmonds as Orpheus: A General History of Religions (New York, 1909), went through thirty-eight editions before Reinach's death (the edition quoted in the text is that of 1930).

Every existing publication of Cults, Myths and Religions is superseded by a new edition of a broad selection of these articles in French as Cultes, mythes et religions (Paris, 1996). This volume is provided with a foreword by Pierre Brunel, a preface, five sectional introductions and complementary notes by Hervé Duchêne. The detailed and well-organized bibliography makes this book an indespensable tool for every research.

Metzger, H. "La Bibliothèque Salomon Reinach." Bulletin de Liaison de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Salomon Reinach 2 (1984): 25–27.