Page - 233 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

233The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum Ungarorum (The origin of Hungarians, written in 1756, and published as part of a more comprehensive work in 1770), and the two-volume Sibirische Geschichte von der Entdeckung Sibiriens bis auf die Eroberung dieses Landes durch die Rus­ sische Waffen (Siberian history from the discovery of Siberia to the conquest of this land by Russian arms [St. Petersburg, 1768]). Fischer’s books reiterated the claim that the Hungarians are a Finno-Ugrian people, and soon became refer- ence works in German academic circles, particularly in Göttingen, where the theory became enshrined in August Ludwig von Schlözer’s (1735–1809) widely influential Allgemeine nordische Geschichte (General Nordic history [1771]).73 In Hungary itself, the first to embrace the Finno-Ugrian theory was the remark- able Lutheran antiquarian scholar Dávid Czvittinger (1675/79–1743) in his Specimen Hungariae litteratae (Sample of Hungarian learning [1711]). There were several others to prepare the ground for Sajnovics, including individuals who did so despite their uneasiness with the theory, such as Bél, who pre- sumed to identify the remnants of the “Hungarian-Scythian” language in Finn- ish.74 One also finds brief mentions of hypotheses of linguistic kinship of the same kind in several ethnographic and geographic works, such as Johannes Scheffer us’s (1621–79) classic monograph Lapponia (1673)75 or the influential Erd beschreibung (Description of the world [1764–92]) by Anton Friedrich Büsching (1724–93).76 73 Fischer’s role is usually understood as subsidiary to the better-known German scholars recruited for the expedition, naturalist Johann Georg Gmelin (1709–55) and especially historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller. He is also recognized as having written at the request of von Schlözer the Vocabularium Sibiricum (1747), deposited in manuscript as a gift in the Historical Institute in Göttingen, to be used extensively by later scholars there. The litera- ture on Fischer is meager, but see passing references in Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations: 18th-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations, spe- cial issue, “National Cultures before Nationalism,” 47 (Summer 1994): 170–95, here 186–87; in more detail, Vermeulen, “Anthropology in Colonial Contexts,” 22–25; and Vermeulen, Before Boas, 167–71, 186–94, 281, 294. For the Kamchatka expeditions in the context of eighteenth-century Russian voyages of discovery, see Erich Donnert, Russia in the Age of Enlightenment (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1986, German original 1983), 95–114. 74 Péter Domokos, Szkítiától Lappóniáig: A nyelvrokonság és az őstörténet kérdéskörének visszhangja (Budapest: Universitas, 1998). 75 Johannes Schefferus, Lapponia, id est regionis Lapponum et gentis nova et verissima de­ scriptio (Frankfurt: Ex officina Christiani Wolffii, 1673), esp. 177–83 (a chapter consisting primarily of a comparison between Sámi and Finnish, which are indeed related languag- es). The book was also made available in German, English, French, and Dutch editions between 1674 and 1682. 76 Anton Friedrich Büsching, Neue Erdbeschreibung (Hamburg: Bohn, 1764), e.g., 1:428: “Their [the Finnish] language is slightly different from the Estonian, in dialect only; furthermore, it is related to Lapponian and in some respects to Hungarian as well.”