In 1544, less than a decade before he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the recently established College Royal in Paris, Guillaume Postel published his De orbis terrae concordia in which he declared a single world government and a universalist world religion. The king of France would initiate this new world order after leading a successful crusade against the Muslims of the Ottoman empire, preparing the world for the second coming of Christ, the new Enoch whose arrival had been prophesied millennia early in ancient Egypt and preserved in the Corpus Hermeticum. My paper situates Postel's political and religious thought at the origins of the emerging academic study of the Middle East in sixteenth century Europe. In 1936 Postel had been sent as the official interpreter of the French embassy to Suleiman the Magnificent during which time he began collecting Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts related to his esoteric interpretation of religion and world history. He subsequently traveled to Palestine and Syria from 1548 to 1551 and returned with the Arabic astronomical works of al-Tusi, and Hebrew and Aramaic Kabbalistic texts including the Sefer ha-Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir (which he translated into Latin and published in 1552). Postel's scholarship illustrates how the origins of Middle East studies were influenced by biblical studies, fascination with the "eastern" sources of esoteric knowledge, and the fusing of Renaissance intellectualism and French nationalism. His seminal Linguarum duodecum characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio (published in 1538) was one of the earliest comparative studies of Semitic languages and literature, including Syriac and Ethiopic. His stated goal was to demonstrate the common origins and fundamental harmony of all human languages, and to provide the means to decipher secret messages encoded in certain texts collected in fifteenth-century Florence. Using philology, the intellectual-social historical approach of the annals school, and a genealogical analysis of knowledge transmission, my paper examines the relationship of Postel's writings to his travels and contacts in the Middle East, his understanding of Renaissance learning, and his position vis-?-vis the royal court in Paris. Such an investigation shows how the earliest European study of the Middle East, severely limited in its range and selection of examples, was tied to ambitious nationalistic goals and a view of culture and religion that was becoming pervasive in sixteenth-century Europe.