Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

Origins and early life

Moritz Gottlieb Saphir was born Moses Saphir at Lovasberény in Hungary on 8 February 1795, into an orthodox Yiddish-speaking Jewish family, and was sent to the yeshivot of Pressburg and then of Prague, where he studied under Rabbi Samuel Landau; he was intended for the rabbinate and knew the Talmud thoroughly before he ever read a German book.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that in 1832 he embraced the Protestant faith, a conversion of career rather than of conviction in the judgment of his contemporaries, and that it did not stop the antisemitic press of Vienna and Berlin from attacking him as a Jew for the rest of his life. He turned to German letters in his twenties, wrote in Pest, Vienna, Berlin and Munich, and was expelled from more than one of them for the sharpness of his pen.

He invented a manner: the feuilleton built on puns, antithesis and comic exaggeration, in which the reviewer is as much the subject as the play, and Viennese readers bought newspapers for it. His Berlin Schnellpost and above all Der Humorist, which he founded in Vienna in 1837 and edited for twenty years, made him one of the most widely read German writers of his time, and he is named with Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne — both of whom have their own fiches here — as one of the three Jewish-born authors who first won international fame in German.

His enemies, and there were many, called his wit mechanical; the historians of the Viennese press credit him with creating the modern theatre column. He died at Baden near Vienna on 5 September 1858.