Middle Eastern Christians led the first wave of Easterners studying in Europe

Evidence

By the seventeenth century the flow of newcomers from Europe, whether renegades or refugees, was drying up. But if Europeans were no longer coming to the Middle East, a new element was appearing to take their place: Middle Easterners going to Europe. These were from the Middle Eastern Christian com­ munities who began to establish contacts with western Europe in various ways, notably by sending their sons to Italian and later other European colleges and universities for education. The Greeks were the leaders in this movement; other Christian communities followed. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1072

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of Levantine Christian communities as cultural intermediaries between East and West, a pattern also seen in Indian Ocean and Ottoman trading diasporas.

Related

• Early Muslim student missions to Europe transformed their home countries (similarity 0.80)
• Foreign-educated Muslim students became vectors of Western ideas in their home countries (similarity 0.79)