Introduction to Arminius Vambéry

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.