Introduction to early Zionist Arminius Vambéry

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN THE 19th-20th CENTURIES AND THEIR JEWISH REPRESENTATIVES,
International Conference, Cluj-Napoca, October 17-19, 2006

http://www.euro.ubbcluj.ro/studiaj/sj20 ... ATIVES.PDF

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Introduction to Arminius Vambéry
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies - Volume 25, Number 3, Spring 2007, pp. 1-15

Purdue University Press

Written in the mid 1880s by the Hungarian Jewish Orientalist Arminius Vambéry, "The Memoirs of a Tartar" is a report on European social conditions from the viewpoint of a Central Asian living in Europe. In it, Vambéry gives his most honest assessment of the so-called Jewish Question in Europe. This piece is a rare expression of Vambéry's views on Jewish integration into the European mainstream and the resistance it engendered; the choices of remaining Orthodox, becoming Reform, or totally leaving Judaism behind; the faults of the West in creating the "Jewish Problem"; and the general internal weaknesses of European social structures with their anachronistic systems of social advantages for the aristocracy. Vambéry's Tartar provides a uniquely fascinating analysis of major Jewish issues such as assimilation, religious reforms and secular Zionism as responses to the changing nature of European anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century.

http://www.muse.uq.edu.au/login?uri=/jo ... andler.pdf

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Ármin Vámbéry

    The native form of this personal name is Vámbéry Ármin. This article uses the Western name order.

Arminius Vámbéry (painted by Mihály Kovács, 1861)

Ármin Vámbéry, Arminius Vámbéry born Hermann Bamberger, or Bamberger Ármin (19 March 1832 – 15 September 1913), was a Hungarian orientalist and traveler. According to Ernst Pawel, a biographer of Theodor Herzl, as well as Tom Reiss, a biographer of Kurban Said, Vámbéry's original last name was Wamberger rather than Bamberger.

Early travels

Vámbéry was especially attracted by the literature and culture of the Ottoman Empire including Turkey. By the age of twenty, Vámbéry had learned enough Ottoman Turkish to enable him to go, through the assistance of Baron Joseph Eötvös, to Constantinople and establish himself as a private tutor of European languages. He became a tutor in the house of Pasha Huseyin Daim, and, under the influence of his friend and instructor, Ahmet Efendi, became a full Osmanli, serving as secretary to Fuat Pasha. About this time he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in recognition of his translations of Ottoman historians.

After spending about a year in Constantinople, he published a Turkish-German dictionary in 1858. Later, he also published various other linguistic works. He also learned some twenty other Ottoman languages and dialects. Returning to Budapest in 1861, he received a stipend of a thousand florins from the academy, and in the autumn of the same year, disguised as a Sunnite dervish, and under the name of Reshit Efendi, he set out from Constantinople. His route lay from Trebizond on the Black Sea to Tehran in Persia, where he joined a band of pilgrims returning from Mecca, spending several months with them traveling across Central Iran (Tabriz, Zanjan, and Kazvin). He then went to Shiraz, through Ispahan, and in June, 1863, he reached Khiva (Central Asia). Throughout this time, he succeeded in maintaining his disguise as "Reshit Efendi," so that upon his arrival at Khiva he managed to keep up appearances during interviews with the local khan. Together with his band of travelers, he then crossed Bokhara and arrived at Samarkand. Initially, he aroused the suspicions of the local ruler, who kept him in an audience for a full half-hour. Vámbéry managed to maintain his pretences, and left the audience laden with gifts. Upon leaving Samarkand, Vámbéry began making his way back to Constantinople, traveling by way of Herat. There he took leave of the band of dervishes and joined a caravan to Tehran, and from there, via Trebizond and Erzerum, to Constantinople, arriving there in March 1864.

This was the first journey of its kind undertaken by a Western European; and since it was necessary to avoid suspicion, Vámbéry could not take even fragmentary notes, except by stealth. He returned to Europe in 1864. That following June, he paid a visit to London, where he was treated as a celebrity because of his daring adventures and knowledge of languages. That same year, he published his Travels in Central Asia, based on the few, furtive notes he was able to make while traveling with the dervishes. Returning to Hungary, Vámbéry was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Budapest in 1865, retiring in 1905. He died in Budapest, then in Austria-Hungary.

Vámbéry was one of the Jewish Orientalists, like Kurban Said (Lev Nussimbaum), who assumed Muslim identities and wrote about Muslim life. He converted four times. He was a double agent and a double dealer. He was close to the Ottoman sultans. In 1900-1901 he promised Theodor Herzl to arrange an audience for him with Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II, but his real goal was to obtain money from Herzl, and he did not arrange the meeting. The Ottomans were merely using Herzl as a playing card in their negotiations with Maurice Rouvier of France on the consolidation of their debt.

Vámbéry became known also as a publicist, zealously defending English policy in the East as against that of the Russians. In 2005 the National Archives at Kew, Surrey, made files accessible to the public, and it was revealed that Vámbéry had been employed by the British Foreign Office as an agent and spy whose task it was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening the British position on the Indian sub-continent.

Furthermore, he enthusiastically advocated the theory of a close Turkish-Hungarian linguistic relationship, provoking a harsh scientific and political debate in Hungary. Vámbéry argued that the similarities between Turkish and Hungarian pointed to a common origin for the two languages in Northern Asia. This theory was opposed by followers of the Finno-Ugric theory of the origins of Hungarian, who gradually triumphed in Hungary but not in Turkey. In Turkey, Hungarian and Turkish are still considered as two branches of the same language family, the Ural-Altaic.

It has been alleged that Vámbéry's ideas were ignored for much of the 20th century for reasons that were, at least partly, political and cultural[citation needed]. The grammatical similarities between Turkish, Hungarian and the Finno-Ugric languages are striking[citation needed] and not fully explained by comparative linguistics even today[citation needed]. The unresolved question is whether the similarities are due to a genetic relationship or to some other cause. Vámbéry's observations and ideas are still an inspiration for future work in this area of comparative linguistics[citation needed].
Vámbéry's memorial in Dunajská Streda - Dunaszerdahely

    * Vámbéry knew Bram Stoker and is believed by some biographers to have acted as his consultant on Transylvanian culture. The character of Professor Van Helsing in Stoker's novel, Dracula, is sometimes said to be based on Vámbéry, though there is no real evidence of this supposition. In the novel (chapter 23) the professor refers to his "friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rmin ... mb%C3%A9ry