Meir Aron Goldschmidt

Origins and early life

Meir Aron Goldschmidt was born at Vordingborg on 26 October 1819 to Aron Goldschmidt, a merchant, and Lea Levin Rothschild, in a strictly observant Jewish family, and he was raised in the traditional Judaism of the Danish provinces before the family moved to Copenhagen.

Work and career

He never converted, and the tension between the Jewish community he came from and the Danish literary world he entered is the subject of his best work. At twenty he founded Corsaren, the Corsair, a satirical weekly which he wrote almost alone and which became the most feared publication in Denmark, attacking the absolute monarchy, the censorship and the complacency of the Copenhagen establishment; he was fined and briefly imprisoned for it, and the paper's celebrated campaign of mockery against Søren Kierkegaard in 1846, provoked by Kierkegaard himself, marked both men for life — Goldschmidt closed the paper afterwards, and later wrote of his regret.

In 1845 he published En Jøde, A Jew, the story of Jacob Bendixen, torn between the closed world of the ghetto and a Danish society that will never fully receive him; it was the first Danish novel to describe Jewish life from within, and it was translated into German, Swedish and English. He followed it with the journal Nord og Syd, with the novels Hjemløs (Homeless) and Arvingen, with the Fortællinger, and with a memoir; Georg Brandes called him the finest Danish prose stylist of his generation.

His theory of Nemesis, a moral order that repays every act, runs through his later fiction. He died in Copenhagen on 15 August 1887.