ABSTRACT
Arminius Vambery operated on the fringes of diplomacy, but rarely in its shadows. The lame offspring of an impoverished Talmud scholar and his illiterate, but industrious, wife, Arminius Vambery, or Hermann Wamberger as he was first known, was very much a self-made man and scholar. Ethnicity was important to Vambery and, although as a young man he suffered the anti-semitic taunts of at least one of the teachers at the Catholic seminary he attended, he grew in adolescence into a passionate Hungarian patriot, choosing eventually to Magyarise his name to Vambery Armin. Lionised by London society, Vambery was enthralled by Britain's liberal values and progressive institutions, and he came to regard its empire and influence in Asia as the obvious counterweight to a despotic and expansive Russia. This was all the more pertinent as in 1863 Russia's generals had resumed their advance into the transcaspian region.
