But the ‘first true Orientalist’ according to Irwin was Guillaume Postel, who travelled to Constantinople in 1535 on a French royal commission to collect Eastern manuscripts, and promptly learned Arabic, Turkish and Coptic (among other languages) to add to the Hebrew he had mastered as a schoolboy. Postel wasn’t a Christian evangelist: his beliefs were weirder. They included the opinion that world peace could be achieved if everybody spoke Hebrew; and a conviction that he had met the Shekinah (a manifestation of divinity) in the form of a Venetian woman whose X-ray vision allowed her to look into the Earth’s core and see Satan. For this he was officially declared insane (but not a heretic) by the Inquisition in Venice. He spent much of his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably incarcerated in a Paris asylum.
Two hundred years later, it was not much easier to learn Arabic in France.
