Laudator Temporis Acti

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 1):

The first and most rudimentary test of the historian’s competence is that he should be able to read his sources. This is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script.

[....]

I was told that I should study the original documents, which meant British documents, French documents, German documents, Austrian documents and Russian documents. And in my youth and innocence I asked, What about the Turkish documents? I was told that they were not important, and anyway there weren’t any. I found this an unsatisfactory answer. There had to be some Turkish documents. In the books that I read on the Eastern Question, Turkey was a stage and a backdrop and all the actors were Europeans. I felt this needed further investigation. So I learned Turkish, or at least enough to read some documents.