Title:

Die türkische Bibel, oder des Korans allererste teutsche Uebersetzung aus der Arabischen Urschrift selbst verfertiget: welcher Nothwendigkeit und Nutzbarkeit in einer besondern Ankündigung hier erwiesen von M. David Friedrich Megerlin, Professor.

Short title

Die türkische Bibel

Title variations

Title in English

The Turkish Bible, or the very first German translation of the Koran to be made directly from the Arabic original: the necessity and utility of which are here demonstrated in a preliminary essay by Master David Friedrich Megerlin, Professor

Section

Language

German

Creation date

1772

Genre

Translation of the Qur’an

Content

Translation

Content table

Formal Expression

Prose

Qur'an quotations

Original

Yes

Source

Use (macro-category)

Polemical

Use (micro-category)

Bibliographical references

Alastair Hamilton, ‘”To Rescue the Honour of the Germans”: Qur’an Translations by Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Protestants’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 77 (2014), pp. 173-209 esp. pp. 182-7; Alastair Hamilton, ‘David Friedrich Megerlin’, in: David Thomas and John Chesworth (eds.), Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Vol. 14. Central and Eastern Europe (1700-1800) (Leiden, 2020), pp. 187-91.

Descriptive card

Though numerous German translations of the Qur’an had appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Die türkische Bibel (1772) was the first German version to be made directly from the original. It is the work of the Lutheran theologian and pedagogue David Friedrich Megerlin (1698-1778). Despite its pioneering achievement, this is very much the work of a staunch Lutheran polemicist, eager for the conversion of Muslims and Jews. All in all it was not well received by contemporaries – most famously discarded by the young Goethe as a wretched work (elende Produktion), not least for its poor literary quality. Megerlin’s translation was also overshadowed by the German Qur'an translation published the following year by Friedrich Eberhard Boysen (1720-1800), which was received more favourably.

Entry author

Asaph Ben Tov