Dreyfus-Barney, Hippolyte and Laura Clifford

by Shapour Rassekh

published in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Volume 7
New York: Columbia University, 1996

i. HIPPOLYTE DREYFUS-BARNEY

Hippolyte Dreyfus (b. Paris, 12 April 1873, d. Paris, 20 December 1928), son of a prominent French Jewish family, became a leading Bahai scholar, translator, and religious teacher. He received a degree in law from the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and practiced before the Paris court of appeals. He was converted to the Bahai faith in about 1900 by May Ellis Bolles (later Maxwell), a Canadian living in Paris. In 1903 he was able to visit the Bahai leader ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ in ʿAkkāʾ in Palestine. At about the same time he gave up his legal career to devote himself to oriental studies, enrolling in the religious-studies section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he studied Arabic and Persian with Hartwig Derenbourg and Clément Huart, intending to translate Bahai scripture into French. He was the only Western Bahai of his generation who received such formal training.

In 1904 Dreyfus went to India and Burma to visit Bahai communities there. In the following year he met Moẓaffar-al-Dīn Shah (1313-24/1896-1907) in Paris and urged him to intervene to protect the Persian Bahais. Also in 1904 he visited Bahais in many Persian cities, as well as in the Caucasus and Turkestan, where he visited the large community in Ashkhabad.

Dreyfus’ first major translation was Bahāʾ-Allāh’s Ketāb-e īqān (Book of certitude; Paris, 1904). He also published Le babisme et le béhaïsme (Paris, 1904), a lecture that he had delivered on 1 March 1904 at the École des Hautes Études Sociales. More influential was his later publication Essai sur le béhaïsme (Paris, 1909; 3rd ed. published as Bahaïsme), the first “handbook” on the faith, in which he dealt with the the history of the Babi and Bahai religions and such questions as religion and the state, universal peace, Bahaism and society, the house of justice, Bahaism and the individual, and the Bahai faith and patriotism. In 1905-06 he and Ḥabīb-Allāh Šīrāzī published a collection of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s writings entitled Les préceptes du Béhaïsme (2 vols., Paris, 1905-06), which included Haft wādī (The seven valleys), Kalemat-e maknūna (The hidden words), Lawḥ-e ḥekmat (Tablet of wisdom), Lawḥ-e aqdas (The most holy tablet), and several other works. In 1907-09 Dreyfus collaborated with the American Bahai Laura Clifford Barney (see ii, below) on the publication of Persian, French, and English editions of the answers of ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ to philosophical and theological questions that she had put to him (published as Mofāważāt-e mobāraka, Les leçons de Saint Jean d’Acre, and Some Answered Questions respectively). In later years he translated several more of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s books: al-Ketāb al-aqdas and Soʾāl o jawāb (both unpublished), Lawḥ-e Šayḵ (Paris, 1913), and a three-volume collection of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s works containing his own earlier translations and some new ones (Paris, 1923-28). He also published a number of books and scholarly articles on Bahai topics.

In 1911 he married Barney, and both took the surname Dreyfus-Barney. In the same year he served as translator when ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ visited Paris. The Dreyfus-Barneys continued their travels, visiting China and French Indochina in 1914. During World War I Hippolyte worked as a postal censor in Marseilles. In 1920 the couple once again visited Southeast Asia.

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ii. LAURA CLIFFORD DREYFUS-BARNEY

Laura Clifford Barney (b. Cincinnati, O., 30 November 1879, d. Paris, 18 August 1974) became a leading American Bahai teacher and philanthropist. The daughter of Albert and Alice Pike Barney, a socially prominent artist from Washington, D.C., she was educated by private tutors. While continuing her studies in Paris Laura met May Ellis Bolles (later Maxwell), a Canadian Bahai, and was converted to the faith in about 1900. Her mother was converted soon afterward.

Laura Barney financed the visit of the Persian Bahai scholar Mīrzā Abu’l-Fażl Golpāyagānī (q.v.) to the United States in 1901-04, in order to propagate the faith there, and helped to publish the translation of his Ḥojaj al-bahīya (Cairo, 1342/1925; tr. Ali-Kuli Khan as The Bahá’í Proofs, New York, 1902; 2nd ed., ed. J. R. I. Cole, Wilmette, Ill., 1983). In 1904 she visited ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ in ʿAkkāʾ, Palestine, where she remained about two years, acquiring a working knowledge of Persian and becoming an intimate of his household. During that time she arranged to have ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ’s answers to her questions, mainly on philosophy and Christian theology, recorded by his secretaries. She collaborated with her future husband, Hippolyte Dreyfus (see i, above), on the editing and translation of this work (al-Nūr al-abhā fīmofāważāt ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ, Leiden, 1908; tr. L. C. Barney and H. Dreyfus as Some Answered Questions, London, 1908; tr. H. Dreyfus as Les leçons de Saint Jean d’Acre, Paris, 1909). In 1905-06 she visited Persia, the Caucasus, and Russia with Dreyfus. After their marriage in April 1911, when they both adopted the surname Dreyfus-Barney, she traveled extensively with him.

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