From the Memoirs of a Tartar
Rent from DeepDyveVambéry wrote these "memoirs" at the beginning of the 1880s in German. His intention was to view the western world from the perspective of an eastern man and draw parallels between the two cultures. For this, he chose the literary form of the notes written by a Tartar traveler to Europe who wants to report to his fellow [End Page 22] countrymen about the conditions in Europe. For unknown reasons, Vambéry never finished this work, but the surviving fragments contain many fine and valuable remarks and observations. Moreover, these notes are valuable because they allow for a direct look into the most personal thoughts and feelings of this great academician and diplomat. For all these reasons, we are very grateful to Rusztem Vambéry45 for his permission to publish three chapters of these documents.
I. The Jews
If you recall how the poor Jews of Central Asia move stealthily around the bazaars, full of trepidation, whispering, looking miserable in their clothes of outworn Polish caps and strings around their hips, you will scarcely believe that the coreligionists of our Jahudis play a great role there [in Europe] and occupy powerful positions with great wealth, not solely concerned with mercantile activities, and are sometimes influential in the workings of the state even though they are no less disdained, resented, and persecuted there than they are at home with us in the Muslim East.46 And since this is one of the most peculiar enigmas that have always interested me, I want to talk to you exhaustively about this peculiar people. In the west, many have debated whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnic group; although a witty person rightly remarked that it is neither but first and foremost a real disaster, I would add that it is a disaster not only to the Jews but to the Christians as well, the latter of whom not only caused the so-called Jewish Problem47 but also deserve it. As a result, we see Jews as members of a religion who have been living in the Christian west for [End Page 23] hundreds of years, having lost their Asian language and customs a long time ago, and who, having been united by a common religion from the beginning, never divorced the notion of nationhood from that of religion, and who preserved their typical Semite traits under foreign skies, faced with alien ways of life only because they were unable to mix freely with their surroundings because of external pressures, and choose to maintain that wall of separation even today though under substantially different circumstances.
While Europe was strictly religious and its political institutions resembled contemporary Asia, the fate of the Jews was close to that of today's Jews living in Persia or Turkestan where their growth and material welfare are made impossible ab ovo because of external pressures, and where they suffer tremendously because of the strong competition from the Armenians and Multanik (Hindus). The Europe of that era treated the Jews much more horribly and strictly than Islam ever did. Murder, robbery, and coerced proselytizing, although our masses did organize such, were never sanctioned by the Muslim authorities since under the laws of Islam all faiths are tolerated and protected, provided their subjects pay a special tax. In Europe, however, such tolerant thinking became acceptable only in the modern age, or more precisely, only when the Europeans realized that they themselves have lost their faith and thus should not oppress another person because of his or her religion. With this realization, or as the Frenghis48 say, with this awakening of political freedoms, Jewish emancipation began as the...
