Isaac Taylor (canon)

Isaac Taylor (2 May 1829 – 18 October 1901), son of Isaac Taylor, was a philologist, toponymist, and Anglican canon of York (from 1885).

Though he wrote several inflammatory theological pamphlets, such as The Liturgy and the Dissenters (1860) and Leaves from an Egyptian Notebook (1888), he is chiefly remembered today for his archaeological and philological studies, which include Words and Places (1864), Etruscan Researches (1874), The Alphabet (1883), and Greeks and Goths (1879), in which he argued that the runes were derived from a variety of the Hellenic alphabet used in the Greek colonies on the Black Sea about the 6th century B.C. "It would seem that the Goths, who then occupied the region between the southern coast of the Baltic and the upper waters of the Dnieper," Taylor argued in a subsequent paper, "must have obtained a knowledge of the art of writing from the merchants of Olbia and other Greek colonies on the Euxine, who, according to Herodotus, voyaged forty days' journey to the North by the great trade route of the Dnieper."

Taylor's ideas concerning religion raised many eyebrows amongst his contemporaries. In 1887, he argued that Islam had been more successful than Christianity in "civilizing" Africa and ridding the "Dark Continent" of cannibalism, devil worship, human sacrifice, witchcraft, infanticide, and bad hygiene. Cheers followed not Taylor's lecture—made to a British audience primarily of Anglican missionary supporters—but the remarks made by the speakers who followed him and denounced his theories. In the same address, delivered to the Wolverhampton Church Congress in 1887, Taylor argued that "Islam, above all, is the most powerful total abstinence society in the world; whereas the extension of European trade means the extension of drunkenness and vice, and the degradation of the people." Ultimately, Taylor's comments were made based upon the racist assumptions of Islamicist controversialists, including the famous traveller and writer Richard Burton that the lower races were better adapted to respond to the message of Islam than that of Christianity.

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