"Dissertation on the Druze"- 19th Century Essay by Swedish Orientalist Matthias Norberg

The Swedish orientalist Matthias Norberg, who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, was a prolific writer of extended essays on a variety of topics pertaining to the Middle East and North Africa, though these writings are understudied and not so accessible to a wider audience as they were composed in Latin. In this post I present a translation of an extended essay by Norberg on the Druze sect, in which he covers in condensed form the history of the sect, its supposed sanctuaries of worship, the division of the sect’s members into ‘ignorant’ and ‘knowledgeable,’ dissimulation by members of the community, and reports of Druze beliefs about the transmigration of souls and the afterlife. As such, this translated essay will be of great importance to those interested in the depiction of Middle Eastern minority sects in early Western Orientalist writings.