L’histoire d’un vrai faux traité philosophique (Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob et Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat). Épisode 2 : Le temps de la démystification et la traversée du désert (de 1916 aux années 1950)

Abstract

This second article in a series devoted to the history of the philosophical treatises attributed to Zar’a Yā‘eqob and his disciple Walda Ḥeywat explores the phase of “demystification”. How did doubts arise about the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob as soon as 1916; and how did its authorship come to be attributed to Juste d’Urbin in 1920? The article, by the great philologist and historian C. Conti Rossini, that turned this “rare pearl in Ethiopian literature” into a literary hoax is a compendious collection of pieces of evidence rather than an irrefutable proof. Another philologist, E. Mittwoch, tried a few years later to prove that Juste d’Urbin was the author; but his linguistic and philological analysis was biased due to an indirect source it used. The academic community accepted, nonetheless, these two scholars’ authoritative arguments. The current article follows up on this scholarship in an effort to corroborate and enrich it, and to show its weak points. It provides a new interpretation based on genetic criticism of these texts that tries to see the author, Juste d’Urbin, at work writing the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob. Furthermore, Juste d’Urbin’s unpublished correspondence to Antoine d’Abbadie is used to better understand this freethinker’s thoughts and motivations.

Keywords

• Ethiopia
• philosophy
• deism
• Orientalism
• mystification
• autobiography