1845 JOSEPH WOLFF. Double Signed & Inscribed Blank Title from His "Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara"

Neatly excised and mounted to an album leaf, a wonderful Jewish missionary double autograph including a section in Arabic. 

Wolff, "that most curious of missionaries" (Blackmer), was the son of a rabbi from Bavaria, he converted firstly to Catholicism, and subsequently to Anglicanism. In 1821 he began "his extraordinary nomadic career as a missionary to the Jews of the Near East and central Asia. Between 1821 and 1826 he travelled as a missionary in Egypt, the Sinai, the Holy Land, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Crimea" (ODNB). In 1827 he undertook another expedition that took him through "Corfu, Alexandria, Beirut, Cyprus, Cairo, Jerusalem, Anatolia, Constantinople, Armenia, Persia, and Khorasan, where in November 1831 brigands robbed and enslaved him He then traversed Bukhara and Balkh, and reached Kabul, emerging from central Asia in a state of nudity after having been plundered and compelled to march 600 miles without clothing." He crossed India from Ludhiana to Bombay and returned to England via Egypt and Malta. In 1843 he was commissioned to return to Bokhara to seek out information concerning Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, two players of the Great Game held there as spies. Unbeknownst to Wolff or his sponsors both officers had been executed in 1842 soon after their capture, which fact Wolff "eventually discovered after an amazing series of adventures in which he barely escaped with his life." (Blackmer).