Johann Löwenthal

Origins and early life

Johann Jacob Löwenthal was born in Pest on 14 July 1810, the son of a Jewish merchant, and this fiche states plainly that he was born and raised a Jew and that, as an adult in England, he converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of the theologian William George Ward, a step that neither undoes his origin nor is hidden here.

Work and career

He learned chess as a boy and by the 1840s was one of the strongest players in Hungary, part of the Pest team that defeated Paris by correspondence in 1842–1845. He took part in the revolution of 1848 on the Hungarian side and was expelled after its defeat, emigrating first to the United States, where in 1850 he played the twelve-year-old Paul Morphy in New Orleans, and then to England, where he settled in 1851. In 1858 Morphy, now the strongest player in the world, beat him in a formal match in London, and Löwenthal, defeated, remained one of his warmest admirers and edited Morphy's games.

He won the Birmingham tournament of 1857, served as secretary of the St George's Chess Club, edited the chess columns of the Era and the Illustrated News of the World, and in 1862 organized the great international tournament of London, the first to use the modern rule that a drawn game counts half a point. His Chess Player's Magazine and his book on the tournament of 1862 helped turn British chess into an organized national discipline.

He died at St Leonards-on-Sea on 20 July 1876, and the Löwenthal Cup of the British Chess Federation still bears his name.