In Memoriam: Dr Joannes (Jan) Schmidt (15 June 1951-11 August 2025)
Last week, the sad news reached us that Dr Jan Schmidt passed away on 11 August 2025. We wish his partner, friends and family strength and comfort as they cope with this loss. Jan Schmidt will be remembered as one of the most prolific and learned scholars in the field of Ottoman codicology and history.
Jan Schmidt, was born in 1951 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He studied History and Middle Eastern Languages and Culture at Leiden University intermittently between 1969 and 1985. In 1992, he obtained his doctorate (promotor Professor Dr Barbara Flemming 1930-2020) with the publication of his dissertation Pure Water for Thirsty Muslims (Leiden, Oosters Instituut) in which he proposed a new interpretation of the magnum opus of Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli, Künhü l-aḫbâr (1590s). His multi-faceted career encompassed, amongst other things, teaching at secondary schools in the Netherlands. He became a University Lecturer in Turkish and Ottoman Studies at Manchester University, England, and later returned to his alma mater. From 1998 until 2007, he worked as a cataloguer on several NWO (Dutch Research Council) funded projects at the University Library. In addition, from 2004 until 2016, he held a position as University Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies; in the track Turkish. After his retirement in 2016, he stayed connected as a guest researcher to the University Library (2017 – 2019) and department (2019-2020)
At the department, he taught generations of students the principles of the Ottoman language and more advanced students were introduced to the manuscript collection. Together with his colleague Dr Hans Theunissen, he gave a course on Ottoman history, and he supervised several bachelor's and master's theses. As chair of the board of examiners, he assisted the departmental administration for many years.
Jan Schmidt’s strength lay before everything else in his research in the field of Ottoman linguistics, history, and literature, covering a wide span of subjects, but mainly focusing on Ottoman history and literature as well as the contacts, political and cultural, between the Ottoman Empire and the West in the 16th to early 20th centuries. Especially his four-volume Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands 2000-2012 is a testament to his meticulous, generous scholarship of Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts. The project, initiated by Prof. Jan Just Witkam, the former curator of the Leiden University Oriental Manuscript collection, comprises a replacement of the then more than a century-old Latin catalogue. Jan Schmidt not only brought the catalogue up to date, but he also described the manuscript in a much more detailed and thorough way, with a broad interest in the text written in the margins in Persian or Arabic, as well as the other way round, marginal texts written in Turkish in Persian or Arabic manuscripts. The catalogue, first of all, covers Turkish manuscripts in the Leiden collection, but the fourth volume also covers manuscripts in other collections in the Netherlands. In addition, he published the Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester (2011). These works provide invaluable knowledge to many future generations of scholars working on these manuscripts.
Alongside cataloguing, Schmidt wrote with breadth and playfulness about Ottoman literature, historiography, and the history of Orientalism. His two-volume collection The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and Orientalism (1500–1923) (Isis Press 2002, reprint Gorgias Press 2010) gathers essays spanning poetry, biography and autobiography, travellers and merchants, and European–Ottoman political relations. His last monograph was published at Brill in 2018, entitled: The Orientalist Karl Süssheim Meets the Young Turk Officer İsma’il Hakkı Bey: Two Unexplored Sources… It entails the text editions and translations of two early twentieth-century diaries. The book provides insights into the Ottoman world, particularly during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, and the events leading up to the Young Turk Revolution through the eyes of the German orientalist Karl Süssheim and the Young Turk officer İsma'il Hakkı Bey. In collaboration with Sytske Sötemann and Sander de Groot, Jan Schmidt published a collection of Ottoman poetry, providing the original text and a Dutch translation (Jurgen Maas, 2014).
In short, we remember Jan Schmidt as an exceptionally learned and prolific scholar. May his scholarly legacy keep him alive for many generations to come.
Written by Petra de Bruijn, University Lecturer Turkish Studies at Leiden University