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Alexandre Weill

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Who

Alexandre Weill · Arts & Literature

What

Écrivain franco-allemand, premier conteur du village juif d'Alsace dans la littérature française

When

10 mai 1811 — 18 avril 1899

Where

Schirrhoffen (Alsace, France) — mort à Paris

Biography

Alexandre Weill is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Écrivain franco-allemand, premier conteur du village juif d'Alsace dans la littérature française

How & why

Origins and early life

Alexandre Weill was born Abraham Weil on 10 May 1811 at Schirrhoffen, in the Jewish community of a village of northern Alsace, the son of a cattle dealer.

Work and career

He was sent to Metz to train as a rabbi and went on to Frankfurt in 1826, but around 1830 he left rabbinical study for philosophy and for the advanced politics of Young Germany, and thereafter wrote in both German and French. Between 1847 and 1894 he published more than forty volumes — politics, history, theology, polemic, fiction — and made his lasting mark with village tales that brought the Jewish villages of Alsace into French literature for the first time: the cattle fair, the schoolroom, the marriage broker, the mixture of Yiddish and Alsatian, written from the inside by someone who had left but had not forgotten. A Fourierist socialist, he stood without success in the elections of 1848 for the Constituent Assembly.

Later years

He married Agathina Marx in 1847, and after her death in 1878 lived alone in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, still writing, still arguing with everyone, until his death in Paris on 18 April 1899. He kept all his life a religious quarrel of his own with rabbinic Judaism, which he pressed in book after book while never leaving the people he was quarrelling with.

Sources & external links

Verify and go deeper with these external references.

Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Weill_(%C3%A9crivain)

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Contributions & Sources

Écrivain franco-allemand, premier conteur du village juif d'Alsace dans la littérature française

1847

Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Weill_(%C3%A9crivain)