Helmut Ritter

Hellmut Ritter (February 27, 1892 – 19 May 1971) was a leading German Orientalist specialising in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and an authority on Sufi ritual and mysticical beliefs.

The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War One in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy. But his academic career in Germany was effectively ended in 1925 when he was convicted for homosexuality.

Being dismissed from his post in early 1926, he went to Istanbul. There he became aware of the moldering literary treasures that lay unregarded in the city's ancient libraries. His access to this wealth of manuscripts enabled his Philologika series of scholarly articles, including the Philologika VII (on Arabic and Persian treatises on profane and mystical love). He also discovered the original text of the fantasy anthology Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange. Despite his effective exile from Germany, he was head of the German Orientalist Society in Istanbul and his scholarly work had some supporters in Germany. This support enabled the funding of his proposed Bibliotheca Islamica series of scholarly monographs from 1929 onwards. In the early 1930s he worked on early Arabic alchemical manuscripts, among others, and also pioneered the understanding of the influence of Ancient Greek literature on Arabic culture and science. The election of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 meant that Ritter's contract for work was ended, but friends in the German Orientalist Society quietly managed to find a small amount of funding that enabled his work to continue. Then a new and local opportunity arose, due to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's rapid modernisation of Istanbul and Turkey. Thus the newly improved and re-organised Istanbul University asked Ritter to work as a professor. Despite working on a temporary contract, Ritter was tasked with raising a new generation of Turkish scholars, able to work with rigour on the region's ancient literature. Ritter pursued the work with vigour, making his students learn a new language each year.

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