Ármin Vámbéry

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

Arminius Vámbéry (painted by Mihály Kovács, 1861)

Ármin Vámbéry, Arminius Vámbéry born Hermann Bamberger, or Bamberger Ármin (19 March 1832, Dunaszerdahely, Kingdom of Hungary – 15 September 1913, Budapest, Austria-Hungary) 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 life and schooling

Vámbéry came from a poor Jewish family. He attended the village school in his native town until the age of twelve and showed a remarkable aptitude for learning languages. He was forced to walk with crutches because of a congenital disorder and eventually had to leave school due to difficult financial circumstances. He worked briefly as an apprentice to a ladies' tailor, but after becoming tutor to the son of the village innkeeper, he was enabled by his friends to enter the "Untergymnasium" of Svätý Jur (Hungarian: Szentgyörgy).

By the age of sixteen, he had a good knowledge of Hungarian, Latin, French, and German. He was also rapidly acquiring English, the Scandinavian languages, Russian, Serbian, and other Slavic languages.

In 1846, he went to Pressburg (today Bratislava, Hungarian: Pozsony), where he remained three years. Later he studied at Vienna, Kecskemét, and Budapest.

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.

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. The grammatical similarities between Turkish, Hungarian and the Finno-Ugric languages are striking and not fully explained by comparative linguistics even today . 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.

Vámbéry's memorial in Dunajská Streda - Dunaszerdahely

Trivia

• 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".

• There is a vampire hunter character in the webcomic Sluggy Freelance named Arminius Vambrey possibly based on this Armin Vambery and his candidacy as inspiration for Abraham Van Helsing.

Publications

• "Deutsch-Türkisches Taschenwörterbuch" (Constantinople, 1858) [German-Turkish Pocket Dictionary]
• "Abuska," a Turkish-Chagatai dictionary (Budapest, 1861)
• "Reise in Mittelasien" (Leipzig, 1865, 2d ed. 1873) [Travel in Middle Asia]
• "Cagataische Sprachstudien" (ib. 1867) [Chagatai Language Studies]
• "Meine Wanderungen und Erlebnisse in Persien" (ib. 1867) - Wanderings and Adventures in Persia [My Wanderings and Experiences in Persia]
• "Skizzen aus Mittelasien" (ib. 1868) - Sketches of Central Asia
• "Uigurische Sprachmonumente und das Kudatku-Bilik" (Innsbruck, 1870)
• "Uigurisch-Türkische Wortvergleichungen" (Budapest, 1870)
• "Geschichte Bocharas" (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1872) - History of Bokhara (1873)
• "Der Islam im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert" (Leipzig, 1875) [Islam in the Nineteenth Century]
• "Sittenbilder aus dem Morgenlande" (Berlin, 1876) - Manners in Oriental Countries
• "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Turkotatarischen Sprachen" (Leipzig, 1878) [Etymological Dictionary of the Turko-Tatar Languages]
• "Die Primitive Cultur des Turkotatarischen Volkes" (ib. 1879) - Primitive Civilization of the Turko-Tatar People
• "Der Ursprung der Magyaren" (ib. 1882) - Origin of the Magyars
• "Das Türkenvolk" (ib. 1885)- The Turkish People
• "Die Scheïbaniade, ein Oezbegisches Heldengedicht", text and translation (Budapest, 1885)
• "Story of Hungary" (London, 1887)
• "A Magyarság Keletkezése és Gyarapodása" (Budapest, 1895)
• "Travels and Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reis in India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Persia During the Years 1553-1556", a translation from the Turkish (ib. 1899)
• "Alt-Osmanische Sprachstudien" (Leyden, 1901) [Old-Ottoman (Turkish) Language Studies]
• "?" - Western Culture in Eastern Lands (1906)

On political subjects, Vámbéry wrote:

• "Russlands Machtstellung in Asien" (Leipzig, 1871) [Russia's Power Position in Asia]
• "Zentralasien und die Englisch-Russische Grenzfrage" (ib. 1873) [Central Asia and the English-Russian Border Question]
• "The Coming Struggle for India" (London, 1885)

He wrote his autobiography under the titles "Arminius Vámbéry, His Life and Adventures" (ib. 1883) and "Struggles of My Life" (ib. 1904).

Many of his works have been translated into other languages, especially French. He also published numerous articles and books, mostly in German and Hungarian. His travels have been translated into many languages, and his Autobiography was written in English.

"Meine Wanderungen und Erlebnisse in Persien" has been translated into Persian, by the famous Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai.

References

• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Herzl, King of the Jews: A Psychoanalytic Biography of Theodor Herzl, by Avner Falk (1993), pp. 395ff. has a detailed discussion of Vámbéry's biography and of his relations with Herzl.

External links

• Jewish Discovery of Islam by Martin Kramer, includes discussion of Vámbéry.