Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, born Moses Saphir (8 February 1795 in Lovasberény near Székesfehérvár – 5 September 1858 in Baden bei Wien) was an Austrian satirical writer and journalist.

Saphir was the son of the merchant Gottlieb (Israel) Saphir and his wife Charlotte Brüll. During the reign of Joseph II all Jewish subjects had been required to take a family name, and Israel Saphir was the first in the family to use that surname. Moses was sent to the yeshiva in Bratislava to become a rabbi. At the age of eleven he fell out with his family and made a risky journey to Prague to attend that city's yeshiva instead.

Shortly afterwards he encountered mainstream European literature and began to study English, German, and the Romance languages. In 1814 his family removed all financial support and he was forced to return home. Nevertheless he was allowed some time later to travel to Pest, Hungary in order to study Latin and Greek. It was in Pest that he embarked on a literary career. His first book, Poetische Erstlinge (1821), was received with enthusiasm. He was invited to Vienna by the publisher Adolf Bäuerle to write for the Wiener Theaterzeitung. However, Saphir's merciless reviews and essays were so unpopular that in 1825 he was sacked, whereupon he left for Berlin, where he edited the arts pages of the Berliner Schnellpost für Literatur, Theater und Geselligkeit, also contributing to the Berliner Courier and Berliner Theateralmanachs auf das Jahr 1828.

On 3 December 1827 he founded the Tunnel über der Spree literary society, as a kind of "personal bodyguard" according to Theodor Fontane. However, as an eloquent satirist he made more enemies in Berlin, and his prominent associates in the society could not (or eventually, would not) always help him out of scrapes. The playwright Kurt Schall challenged him to a duel, and a satirical poem about Henriette Sontag in the Spenerschen Zeitung even led to a short term of imprisonment.

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