Page - 240 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 5240 the Carjelians are the genuine ancestors of the Magyars and Hungarians […].94 Like this one, each of the other anticipations of the contents of the Expeditio litteraria in the 1771 edition of the Demonstratio concerned issues broadly re- lated to the larger problem of the origins, including the original home, of the Hungarians. Hell’s interaction with the eminent Jesuit historian Pray, who dedicated a great deal of attention to the same issues in the same period, sheds  interesting light both on the development of his own ideas on the sub- ject, and his understanding of his role in the linguistic achievement of the Demonstratio.95 One of the relevant passages of the 1771 edition discusses the origin of Hun- garians, Sámi, Finns, and so on from “the neighborhood of China.”96 This reso- nated in complex ways with the argument put forward in Pray’s Annales veteres Hunnorum, Avarum et Hungarorum (Ancient annals of the Huns, Avars, and Hungarians [Vienna, 1761]), where the recent proposition by the French orien- talist Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800) in his Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols, et des autres peuples Tartares occidentaux (General history of the  Huns, Turks, Mongols and other western Tartar peoples [1756–58]) that the Hsiung-nu mentioned in ancient Chinese sources were identical with the Huns, was combined with the older theory of Hun–Hungarian kinship.97 The idea of a prestigious steppe kinship of the Hungarians with the mighty Huns had been the standard narrative of the subject matter ever since the early Mid- dle Ages. It was incorporated in the Gesta Hungarorum (Deeds of the Hungar- ians) of the obscure twelfth-century royal notary Anonymus, whose account of the ninth-century “reconquest” of the territory of the future Kingdom of Hun- gary by the Magyar descendants of the people of Attila became the basis of a full-fledged social and political ideology of the Hungarian nobility in a work written in 1282–85 by Simon Kézai (Simon of Kéza), bearing the same title. Kézai proposed that the nobility’s social pre-eminence, privileges, and political 94 Sajnovics, Demonstratio (1771), 119. Cf. “Jn eo autem opere […],” Manuscripte Hell, wus. 95 For an analysis of these connections from the perspective of linguistics, see Zsuzsa C. Vladár, “Valójában ki a szerzője a Demonstrációnak?,” Magyar Nyelv 112, no. 3 (2016): 316– 24; Vladár, “Hell mint nyelvész: A Kar-jelia etimológia és a kínai hasonlítás példája,” in A nyelvtörténeti kutatások újabb eredményei , ed. Tamás Forgács, Miklós Németh, and Balázs Sinkovics (Szeged: szte, 2017), 9:337–50. 96 Sajnovics, Demonstratio (1771), 50–51. 97 On the “discovery of Eurasia” by de Guignes, see J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages, and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 99–155.