Thread by @shahanSean

The German Orientalist Julius Wellhausen (17 May 1844–7 Jan 1918) entered the field of Islamic history having already achieved academic stardom for his studies on the Torah. He can be regarded as the most influential historian of early Islam from the late-18th/early-19th cent.

On his decision to switch topics he wrote, “I made the transition from the Old Testament to the Arabs with the intention of getting to know the wild seedling [der Wildling] onto which the shoots of Yahweh’s Torah were grafted...

For I did not doubt that it was from the comparisons with the Arab antiquity that one could most easily tease an idea from the original condition in which the Hebrews entered history.”

Wellhausen was one of the first scholars to rely upon the new, full edition of al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 923 CE) monumental, universal history, Tārīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk, published by M.J. de Goeje and his team of Dutch scholars.
iranicaonline.org/articles/de-go…

Wellhausen published a series of groundbreaking monographs on the new data from Ṭabarī:
Reste arabischen Heidentums (1887)
archive.org/details/restea…
Prolegomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams (1899)
menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/ssg/content/ti…

Die religiös-politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam (1901)
archive.org/details/in.ern…
and his masterpiece, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902)
archive.org/details/dasara…

Wellhausen published Das arabische Riech in 1902, which is notably the same year of the infamous ‘Babel-Bible Streit’ hit the German academy, a controversy which might have overshadowed his groundbreaking work on early Islamic history.

[The controversy was set in motion by the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch ( 1850 – 1922) when he argued at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin in the presence of emperor Wilhelm II that the Hebrew Bible and Jewish religion had Babylonian roots. ]

Wellhausen lamented that no one cared about his work on early Islamic (he'd say, ‘Arab’) history, writing: “I knew that interest in and understanding of Arab history was weak, but I would not have believed that it is so minimal that no review of my book has appeared[a year later]

… the harvest here is rich, but the workers are too few. Everybody is fascinated by the Old Testament and cuneiform. No one wants to read through the multiple layers of Arabic literature; even most professors do not." In other words, the field was a dead end.

After 1902, he left the study of Arab history behind to pursue the study of the New Testament.
My source for this material is Suzanne L. Marchand’s wonderful book: German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009)