Franz Baermann Steiner

Over recent decades, research has brought to light the extensive influence his person, teaching and writings had on colleagues. David Mills has recently written of him as one of the great "what ifs" of anthropology, asking, "What if Franz Steiner, Czech refugee and author of an influential work on taboo, had not died at the tender age of 44?" [sic]. His preliminary work on the ethnography of Somalia, for example, inspired his student, Ioan M. Lewis, who inherited his papers on this subject, to specialise in that society, on which he was to become a world-ranking authority. His Taboo had a decisive impact on Mary Douglas, and her recent biographer calls it "the crucial point of departure" for her early study Purity and Danger (1966). Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre also credits Steiner's views on morality for influencing his own.

He taught at the University of Oxford from 1950 until his death two years later. His most widely known work, Taboo, is composed of his lectures on the subject and was posthumously published in 1956. The extensive influence his thinking exercised on British anthropologists of his generation is only now becoming apparent, with the publication of his collected writings. The Holocaust claimed his parents, in Treblinka in 1942, together with most of his kin.

He was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1949, a position he held until his premature death three years later. The following year he acquired British citizenship. He is mainly known for his posthumous collection Taboo, composed of lectures he delivered on that subject, after being persuaded by Evans-Pritchard to teach this, rather than, as planned, a series of lectures on Marx.

Steiner's struggle to define his Jewish identity, especially as that was inflected by the shock of the Holocaust, and his relation to the Zionist project, were given extensive expression in a letter he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in 1946.

The occasion was provided by the publication, in the London Jewish Chronicle, of an abridgement of Gandhi's final remarks on the question of Jewish relations with the Arabs of Palestine, which had been printed in his English-language journal Harijan on 21 July 1946. What complicated Steiner's reply was the fact that, in the meantime, the Irgun had blown up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and in carrying Gandhi's remarks on 26 July, the Jewish Chronicle took note of the incident to contextualise Gandhi's position on non-violence.

His family was exterminated during the Holocaust. His health in the last decade, due to stress and poverty, was always delicate. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1946, and a coronary thrombosis in 1949. He died of a heart attack, while speaking to an acquaintance over the phone, in 1952, just after Iris Murdoch had accepted his proposal of marriage. She attributed his death to the effects of the Holocaust, remarking that "Franz was certainly one of Hitler's victims". Peter J. Conradi wrote that Steiner never recovered from the sadness he felt when his parents were murdered in a concentration camp. According to Conradi, Murdoch's portraits of such positive figures in her fiction as Peter Saward (The Flight from the Enchanter, 1956), Willy Jost (The Nice and the Good, 1968) and Tallis Browne (A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 1970) were inspired by her memories of Franz Steiner.

His thought is characterised by an intense commitment to the right of self-determination of non-Western peoples. His analytical technique constantly exposed the descriptive biases of the anthropological tradition which, down to his day, had endeavoured to describe these peoples. He included his own ethnic group, the Jews, in this category. His influence was informal and vast within the tradition of post-war British anthropology, but is rarely attested in the literature because he published little. His one projected and massive book on the sociology of slavery, entitled Servile Institutions, remained uncompleted at his death. The huge original manuscript, with his research materials, was lost in the spring of 1942, when a heavy suitcase he left outside a toilet, while switching trains at Reading, vanished, or, according to one other variation of what became a local tale, someone stole it from a guarded baggage carriage. Steiner had to recompose it from scratch in the succeeding decade. His fanatical dedication to meticulous comprehensiveness meant that much of his work remained in manuscript. As Evans-Pritchard wrote in his introduction to Steiner's posthumous masterpiece Taboo, published in 1956, Steiner was reluctant to "publish anything that was not based upon a critical analysis of every source, in whatever language." Others spoke more negatively of his "ultimately misconceived aspirations to encyclopaedic monumentality".

He obtained his doctorate in linguistics 1935 with a thesis on Arabic word formation (Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte, "Studies on the History of Arabic Roots"). He then moved to study at the University of Vienna to specialise in Arctic ethnology. With the rise of Nazi antisemitism, he became a refugee and moved to London in 1936 to study with Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He returned to Prague in July 1937 and undertook field research on Roma communities for several weeks during a trip in Carpathian Ruthenia, in eastern Czechoslovakia. In 1938, he shifted back to Oxford where he pursued his studies in anthropology, registering for a research degree in the Michaelmas term for 1939–40 on the subject of "A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery" at Magdalen College, where Alfred Radcliffe-Brown held the chair of Social Anthropology. During his exile in England he became an intimate of Elias Canetti, to whom he had previously been introduced, in Vienna, by Hans Adler. During the war he studied under Evans-Pritchard, while in turn deeply influencing him and many lecturers and students of that circle, including Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, Adam Curle, M. N. Srinivas, Paul Bohannan, I.M. Lewis and Godfrey Lienhardt. Iris Murdoch, though she had met him briefly in 1941, fell in love with him in the summer of 1951.

From the early 1930s, Steiner embraced the idea, a commonplace of the 18th century and theorised in the work of the sociologist Werner Sombart, that Jewish character was oriental, and held the view that he himself was "an oriental born in the West". Though this perception reflected aspects of his own search for his Jewish identity, it had wider implications. The critique he developed of the imperial cast of Western anthropological writing, and his sympathy for hermeneutic techniques that would recover native terms for the way non-Westerners experienced their world, are grounded in this premise. The approach he propounded allows him to be claimed now as an early theoretical precursor of that mode of critical analysis of ethnographic reports which identified in Orientalism a structure of cognitive prejudice framing Western interpretations of the Other. Indeed, he considered Western civilisation as "fundamentally predatory, in terms both territorial and epistemic, upon civilisations that differ from it."

His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia and his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods. His mother's family was from Prague. Neither side practised Judaism, and his father was an atheist, but Franz received elements of a religious education at school, and from occasional attendance at synagogues. He belonged to the last generation of the German, and Jewish, minority in Prague of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who were to make distinctive contributions to German literature. From his early childhood he was a close friend of Hans Günther Adler and Wolf Salus, the son of Hugo Salus. In 1920 he entered the German State Gymnasium in Štepánská Street, where Max Brod and Franz Werfel had studied. He joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union) in 1926. He was attracted to Marxism early, a fascination that lasted until 1930, and also to political Zionism. He enrolled at the German University of Prague in late 1928 for coursework on Semitic languages, with a minor in ethnology, while pursuing as an external student courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies at the Czech language Charles University of Prague. He studied Arabic abroad for a year, in 1930–31, at the Hebrew University in Palestine. In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergmann, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Scholem. It was from this circle during his stay that he developed views akin to those of Brit Shalom on Jewish-Arab co-operation, though he remained suspicious of fundamentalist Islam.

Franz Baermann Steiner (12 October 1909 – 27 November 1952) was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist, and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, with both classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch.