Meïr Aron Goldschmidt

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Meïr Aron Goldschmidt (October 26, 1819 - August 15, 1887) was a Danish publisher, journalist and novelist with a Jewish background. Goldschmidt was born in Vordingborg but raised in Copenhagen. He belonged to a strictly orthodox family but his meeting with classical Greek culture changed much of this attitude and made him hereafter trying to balance between Jewish and non-Jewish thoughts. Especially the Greek idea of Nemesis impressed him and imbued much of his later works.

He graduated in 1836. In 1837 he founded Præstø Amts Tidende which in 1839 merged with Callundborg Ugeblad to become Sjællandsposten. He sold that in 1840 and in the same year founded the weekly political and satirical Corsaren ("The Corsair") where he under the cover of different editors criticised the king. He was sentenced to prison (6 times 4 days), a fine and future censorship on June 7, 1843 in the Supreme Court as the real editor. Corsaren remains an innovation of Danish journalism.

Goldschmidt had previously praised Søren Kierkegaard for his Either/Or, but the friendship was destroyed after the Corsar's continued attack on Kierkegaard - an attack that was in part provoked by Kierkegaard himself.

1846 Goldschmidt sold Corsaren. In the years 1847-1859 he ran a political magazine called Nord og Syd ("North and South").

Politically Goldschmidt was at the beginning a rebel with republican sympathies and flirting with Utopian socialist views (a novelty of Danish literature) but from the 1850s he came closer to a more traditional liberal ideology, and his attempts of playing a political role as an editor aroused accusations of opportunism. About 1860 he stopped his career as an opinion former and concentrated on literature.

His literature shows an interest in the metaphysical and philosophical. His novel En Jøde (Eng. transl. A Jew, 1990) is the first description of the Copenhagen Jewish milieu wieved from within, concentrated on a partly assimilated Jew who is at last marginalised thanks to the prejudices of his surroundings and to his own feeling of unsafeness. The large novel Hjemløs ("Homeless") deals with the idea of Nemesis and so does the important Arvingen ("The Heir"), the first Danish fine literary treatment of divorce. Very valuable are his tales and novellas dealing with Jewish individuals described in a special mixture of irony and sympathy. Not seldom realism is broken by a special mysticism.

From a short-lived marriage he had a son in 1846 and a daughter in 1848.

Posterity has regarded Goldschmidt an uneven author. His novels are often weakened by long passages of pure action and outward events but in a concentrated form (especially in the novellas of his old age) he shows himself as the last great Danish prose writer of the romantic period. Being a romanticist himself his interest of problems and psychology however in some ways anticipates the Modern Break-Through, not least the writings of Henrik Pontoppidan. As the first Danish-Jewish writer who described his original milieu he has also contributed to more open-mindedness between two cultures. Finally he must be regarded one of the pioneers of a modern and independent Danish journalism.