Dorothea Weltecke, Chair for Medieval History at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, examines the founding generation of European Syriac studies in the late nineteenth century. She traces how scholars such as William Wright, Ruben Duval, and Theodor Noldeke built the field on expanding manuscript collections in London, Paris, Berlin, and Cambridge while openly expressing contempt for the Syriac Christian cultures whose texts they studied. Weltecke draws on the protests of Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Barsaum, himself a scholar, against this treatment, and situates the pioneers' attitudes within the shifting landscape of European academia before the First World War. Delivered as an Institute for Advanced Study public lecture under the Dr. S. T. Lee Fund, the talk surveys the current state of debate on these founding orientalists and what their biases reveal about the origins of a discipline still shaped by their work.