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This article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

This article examines literary and cultural translations in the domain of thoughts on education by following the trajectories of intellectual networks among South Asian and German scholars. The main protagonists of this entangled intellectual history are Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978) and his teacher Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) and other actors who thought beyond British imperial educational ideology and practices. Husain engaged with the original writings of German educationists and translated Spranger's canonical text Psychologie des Jugendalters into Urdu as Nafsiyat-i unfuvan-i shabab. This text showcases a deep concern with the subject of youth that simultaneously exhibits immense potential but also shows glimpses of qualities inimical to national development. By drawing attention to how concepts, which are considered to be culturally and historically specific to German history, were translated into Urdu and Muslim cultural contexts in South Asia, this study seeks to arrive at a finer understanding of the entangled nature of Indo-German intellectual history that extends beyond nationalist frames.

The current turn in the histories of modern India and Germany is a movement away from their respective national and linguistic boundaries toward exploration of global connections and resultant entanglements. It has been facilitated by new interventions made by transnational and transregional histories, which have become more prominent, both intellectually and institutionally, in Germany with the rise of the Global History approach in recent years. Modern South Asian history, too, has successfully moved beyond the colonial and nationalist framework to explore the larger terrain of Indian Ocean history as well as the wider connections both within and beyond the British Empire. These developments have given rise to an exciting meeting point that brings modern Indian and German histories together. The essays in this special section are focused on connections forged in Germany and, specifically, in Berlin, while also tracing the prehistory and afterlives in the colony and newly independent nations in South Asia. At the same time, our articles locate Indo-German histories within a wider global context as well.

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