Vámbéry was born in 1832 in the Hungarian city of Szentgyörgy within the Austrian Empire (now Svätý Jur in Slovakia), into a poor Jewish family.

Vámbéry says that the constant hunger and scanty clothing of his childhood hardened his young body, which served him well in his later travels.

[3] He worked briefly as a dressmaker's assistant, but after becoming tutor to the son of the village innkeeper, he was enabled by his friends to enter the Untergymnasium of Szentgyörgy (Svätý Jur).

Herzl said of Vámbéry:[5] [He] doesn't know whether he is more Turk than Englishman, writes books in German, speaks twelve languages with equal mastery and has professed five religions, in two of which he has served as a priest...He told me 1001 tales of the Orient, of his intimacy with the sultan, etc.

By the age of twenty, Vámbéry had learned enough Ottoman Turkish to enable him to go, through the assistance of Baron József Eötvös, to Istanbul and establish himself as a private tutor of European languages.

Returning to Budapest in 1861, he received a stipend of a thousand florins from the academy, and in the autumn of the same year, disguised as a Sunni dervish, and under the name of "Reshit Efendi", he set out from the capital city of the Ottoman Empire.

His route went from Trebizond on the Black Sea to Tehran in Persia, where he joined a band of pilgrims returning from Mecca, spending several months with them traveling across Central Iran (Tabriz, Zanjan, and Kazvin).

Throughout this time, he succeeded in maintaining his disguise as "Reshit Efendi", so that upon his arrival at the Khanate of Khiva he managed to keep up appearances during interviews with Khan Sayyid Muhammad.

[4] This was the first successful journey of its kind undertaken by a European; and since it was necessary to avoid suspicion, Vámbéry could not take even fragmentary notes, except by stealth.

The Ambassador of Austria in London gave him a letter of recommendation to the Emperor, who received him in an audience and rewarded Vámbéry's international success by granting him professorship in the Royal University of Pest.

[9] In 2005 the National Archives at Kew made files accessible to the public, and it was revealed that Vámbéry had been employed by the British Foreign Office as an agent and spy whose task it was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening the British position on the Indian sub-continent.

His son, Rustem Vambery, briefly served as Hungary's ambassador to the United States after World War II.

"Meine Wanderungen und Erlebnisse in Persien" has been translated into Persian, by the Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai.