Emin was born in Oppeln (in present-day Poland), Silesia, into a middle-class German Jewish family, who moved to Neisse when he was two years old.

Travelling via Vienna and Trieste, he stopped at Antivari in Montenegro, found himself welcomed by the local community, and was soon practicing medicine.

[citation needed] He put his linguistic talent to good use, as well, adding Turkish, Albanian, and Greek to his repertoire of languages.

He became the quarantine officer of the port, leaving only in 1870 to join the staff of Ismail Hakki Pasha, governor of northern Albania;[1] in the service, he travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire, although the details are little-known.

At this point he took the name "Mehemet Emin" (Arabic Muhammad al-Amin), started a medical practice, and began collecting plants, animals, and birds, many of which he sent to museums in Europe.

Despite the grand title, there was little for Emin to do; his military force consisted of a few thousand soldiers who controlled no more than a mile's radius around each of their outposts, and the government in Khartoum was indifferent to his proposals for development.

Determined to remain in Equatoria, his communiques, carried by his friend Wilhelm Junker, aroused considerable sentiment in Europe in 1886, particularly acute after the death of Gordon the previous year.

[4] Emin then entered the service of the German East Africa Company and accompanied Dr. Stuhlmann on an expedition to the lakes in the interior, but was killed by two Arab slave traders at Kinena Station in the Congo Free State,[2] near Nyangwe,[5] on 23 or 24 October 1892.