Alfred von Kremer

Alfred von Kremer (* 13 May 1828 in Penzing (Vienna 14th district) at Vienna; † 27 December 1889 in Döbling was an Austrian orientalist and politician.
Life.
Alfred Kremer first studied Philosophy in Vienna, then Jurisprudence. He self-taught Modern Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Persian and travelled (1849-51) with a scholarship from the Academy of Sciences to Syria and Egypt.
On return he received the professorship of vernacular Arabic at the Vienna Polytechnic, a post he surrendered in May 1852 to return to Egypt as the first interpreter of the Austrian Consulate.
He received the vice-consulate (1858), consul in Cairo (1859), the consulate in Galaţi (1862), in Beirut (1870), and became ministerial advisor to the consular ministry in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed to Vienna (1872), where he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences (1876).
From May 1876 he lived in Cairo as a member of the Egyptian Government Debt Commission and returned to the Viennese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the spring of 1880. A few months later he was appointed Austrian Minister of Commerce, an appointment he held until mid-February 1881.
Works.
Kremer's writings are mostly geographic and ethnographic in nature, especially the
In wider circles he became known especially with the publication of Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen ('History of the orient under the caliphs')(Vienna 1875-77, 2 volumes).
Among the Arabic texts he published were:
He opposed the Slavic and clerical tendencies in Austria's internal politics in the treatise "Die Nationalitätsidee und der Staat" (The Nationality Idea and the State) (Vienna 1885).