Introduction
- The Fonds includes scientific documentation of the Orientalist Georg Jacob (1862-1937), a colleague and friend of Paul Kahle’s. The documents held in the archive relate mainly to research on Egyptian Shadow Plays. About Jacob, Paul Kahle himself wrote: “[The shadow plays of Ibn Dāniyāl] are most closely associated with the name of my friend Georg Jacob (1862-1937), the Kiel orientalist and certainly one of the most original of academic colleagues. During more than thirty years of his life he returned again and again to these shadow plays” (Three Shadow Plays by Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl, ed. by the late Paul Kahle with a critical apparatus by Derek Hopwood (Cambridge, 1992)). Jacob’s documents were purchased by the University of Turin together with the Paul Kahle Fonds because they were already part of it: they came into Paul Kahle’s possession, and were in large part the object of further studies and annotations by Paul Kahle himself. Thus, these documents, that were variously re-elaborated by Kahle, were included in the Paul Kahle Fonds (Series Islamica, Sub-series Literature), while the Georg Jacob's corporate fonds includes documentation owned by Jacob which was not re-elaborated by Kahle. The fonds consists of two series ("studies" and "correspondence") and needs more in-depth studies to come to a definitive arrangement. Thanks to recent discoveries in the Library section of the Paul Kahle Fonds, awaiting study, the amount of documentation coming from Georg Jacob, annotated or not by Paul Kahle, will increase in the near future.