Kultureller Vermittler, homme de lettres, Vagabund?

Abstract

ZusammenfassungSalomon Negri (1665–1727) was one among many Arab Christians who played vital roles in the fields of diplomacy, missionary work, and Oriental studies in Early Modern Europe. Born in Damascus, he moved to Paris at the age of eighteen and later travelled to Halle, Venice, Constantinople, Rome, and London, working as a language teacher, translator, informant, librarian, and copyist. By examining Negri’s short autobiography, letters, and other ego-documents written in Latin, French, Italian, and Arabic, this paper explores how he adapted his self-representation to different audiences in Protestant and Catholic Europe. I argue that Negri’s flexible self-fashioning, which allowed him to navigate between various professional and denominational contexts, can be interpreted as the survival strategy of a peripatetic Arab Christian scholar who was never recognized as an equal member of the European ‘Republic of Letters’.