News

Tribute to André Caquot

by Jean-Marie Durand

André Caquot* (1923-2004)

André Caquot was born on April 24, 1923 in Épinal. His high school teachers, with whom he had shown himself to be a gifted pupil, had no doubts about his success, and in fact he came first in the competitive examination for the ENS at rue d'Ulm in 1944, where he stayed from 1946 to 1949. It was languages that immediately caught his fancy, of course, given the times, the ancient classical languages. After graduating from Normale, he took the agrégation in grammar, where he was bound to come out on top again.

Alongside these "school obligations", he had already begun learning ancient Semitic studies. At that time, the best teachers were to be found at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVe and Ve sections: with Isidore Lévy, Édouard Dhorme, Charles Virolleaud, Marcel Cohen, James G. Février, or André Dupont-Seine. Février, or André Dupont-Sommer. Dhorme and Dupont-Sommer were later to join the Collège de France.

Unlike Indo-European idioms, Semitic languages are characterized by exceptional morphological clarity, due to great phonetic stability. Verbal structures clearly correspond from language to language, so that many Akkadian forms and terms from the 3^rd millennium BC are still understood by today's Bedouins. For anyone with a taste for languages, learning one in the Semitic domain brings with it the natural temptation to at least take a tour of other languages. For André Caquot, the tour turned into a journey. He had very quickly mastered Hebrew and its sister languages, Aramaic of the 1st millennium BC and other Aramaic languages; he also read the Arabic classics and various types of Ethiopic.

It was a time when French research, thanks to Charles Virolleaud, had just made a spectacular breakthrough by deciphering the tablets found in Syria at the site of ancient Ugarit, near Latakia. These tablets used the world's oldest alphabet to record not only a new West Semitic language of the 14^th and 13^th centuries BC, but above all to record West Semitic myths, whose stories and even expressions were precursors of the Bible.

At the same time, another unexpected discovery was to provide André Caquot with an inexhaustible source of research material: that made at Khirbet Qumran, near the shores of the Dead Sea, of the remains of a library of several hundred Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls - or fragments of scrolls - from the end of the Second Temple.

Ugarit and Qumran: these two new West-Semitic corpuses were to remain the focus of André Caquot's research throughout his long scientific career, right up to his very last moments.

André Caquot was not only a great reader of books, he also had direct contact with Semitic-speaking countries in the East, as well as with their present-day states. Paradoxically, however, this great reader of the Bible never, to my knowledge, visited the countries it describes. His experience of the Orient began when he was appointed boarder at the Institut Français d'Archéologie in Beirut from 1949 to 1952, then member of the French Archaeological Mission to Ethiopia in 1953-1954. These two stays gave him the opportunity to practise languages and to read literature fluently. But he always had a particular interest in ancient texts and the classical aspects of these Semitic languages: he confessed that he was only interested in archaeology as a provider of inscriptions, especially if they were literary texts, in the hope that they would deal with religious subjects, his real field of research.

It was only natural that, in 1951, he should obtain the title of graduate student in the fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, known as Sciences religieuses.

In the same section, at the age of 32, he was awarded the chair of "Comparative Semitic Religions" in 1955, a position he held from 1957 to 1960 as lecturer in the history of religions at the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the University of Strasbourg, then, from 1964 to 1968, as lecturer in Hebrew and the history of the religion of Israel at the Sorbonne.

In 1972, when his teacher André Dupont-Sommer stopped teaching at the Collège de France, he succeeded him in the chair of Hebrew and Aramaic, one of the oldest in the Collège, particularly illustrated in the 19^th century by Ernest Renan. At the same time, the library of the Institut d'Études Sémitiques moved from the Sorbonne to the Collège de France, enabling him to set up a major scientific center there.

André Caquot held this chair until 1994, where he pursued his research in his favorite fields: the Hebrew Bible, the Qumran manuscripts, intertestamental literature attested in particular by Ethiopian manuscripts, Ugaritic mythological texts and the main documents of West Semitic epigraphy. He was also active in the field of Orientalism, serving as president of the Société Asiatique, the Société des Études Juives, the Société des Études Renaniennes and the Société des Études Samaritaines, while for many years he was secretary of the Société d'Histoire des Religions. At the CNRS, he was also head of the joint Semitic Studies research team. In 1992, he chaired the 14^th Congress of theInternational Organization for the Study of the Old Testament.

In 1977, he was elected an ordinary member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Henri-Irénée Marrou's chair, and the illustrious society found in him an assiduous collaborator, who liked to intervene after the papers, dispensing remarks and erudite interventions. He was elected president in 1986.

He naturally received all the honors and distinctions bestowed on one of the leading representatives of French academia, even if by temperament he tended to avoid crowds and gatherings, however glittering. His rejection of the cult of personality led him to reject the very idea of a volume of tributes from his students.

In fact, he preferred the pleasure of teaching to his beloved lectures, sharing his acquired knowledge and advancing his understanding. So, even after his retirement from the Collège de France, he continued for several years to teach in Angers at the Université Catholique de l'Ouest, gathering around him a small group of young disciples who wished to study Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and it was to this private institution that he bequeathed the bulk of his personal library.

It's impossible to list all his works and publications here, although books were scarce, and so the famous thesis to which his generation submitted at length is still missing. We're left with the idea that, for him, the pleasure of learning and passing on knowledge - which, it must be said, was extraordinarily diverse - far outweighed the desire to produce extensive syntheses. As a result, he left us mostly fundamental but relatively short articles.

This was, moreover, the state of mind of the masters of ancient orientalism in the first part of the twentieth century, where great philological acribiosity was exercised with a view to producing extremely elaborate translations, rather than vast ensembles where common sense could feel a sense of vertigo. This was due to the acute awareness of entering new territory, where prior reconnaissance and inventories were of prime importance. The situation has changed a lot, perhaps not always for the good of research.

In any case, he was very wary of general ideas à la Renan, whether in philosophy or theology, and, more than his master André Dupont-Sommer, he hesitated when faced with the restitution of texts without parallels. His biblical approach was based on a lexical comparison extended to the various ancient Semitic languages - which he personally mastered in all their diversity - and to Greek translations when rare words were involved.

Contrary to current exegesis, his familiarity with Ugaritic literature had given him a sense of antiquity; he thus had a sense of the ancient character of part of the Bible, even if these redactions had subsequently been revised and rewritten in more recent reissues. His commentary on the Books of Samuel (1994), the Abstract from a collaboration on the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible (TOB) and the fruit of several years' teaching at the Collège de France, shows that he took account of a redaction of the work in several stages.

Nonetheless, I lack the competence to go beyond mere admiration for André Caquot's work, and go beyond echoing the testimonies he has already received from more authoritative scholars. From my own field of specialization, I am deeply grateful to him for his fruitful collaboration with Maurice Sznycer, his colleague and very close friend from the fourth Section of the EPHE, in producing a translation of Ugaritic myths that is far more coherent and usable than most modern vernacular versions, which are often marked by the stamp of unreason. At his lectures, which I was able to attend as a public member, he himself often smiled at the unbridled comparatism that led to the interpretation of Ugaritic texts with the help of Arabic dictionaries, whereas the very reading of the Ugaritic text, after collation, had to be changed: he was amused by so much science on a non-existent text!

I also know, from personal acquaintance, the extent to which his curiosity was always on the alert, ready to open up to other fields, as shown by his latest research on Saadiah Gaon's Arabic translation of the Bible, but I also caught him cursively reading for his own pleasure books written in languages far removed from his specialist fields.

The saga of André Caquot recounts how he devoted each summer to learning a new language. One summer, he took up the study of Japanese.

André Caquot is one of those scholars who are not replaced, because with them disappears a part of human knowledge: no doubt through reserve, but also through lack of time, he did not pass on to us all that he had observed in the course of his immense peregrinations in literature.

Of the man himself, those who had the advantage of having him as a colleague certainly remember his old-fashioned politeness and easy rapport.

Of the private person I know little. In those days, it was not fashionable to have access to the private world of our masters.

Jean-Marie Durand, March 20, 2005.

Note

*Thanks to my colleague and friend André Lemaire, director of the fourth Section of the EPHE, correspondent of the Institut, and one of the late master's main pupils, who helped me to write this note.