Henriette Herz

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Henriette Herz, née Henriette de Lemos,by Anna Dorothea Lisiewska, 1778

Henriette Herz née De Lemos (September 5, 1764 – October 22, 1847) is best known for the "salonnieres" or literary salons that she started with a group of emancipated Jews in Prussia.

She was the daughter of a physician, descended from a Portuguese Jewish family of Hamburg, Benjamin de Lemos (1711–1789) and Esther (1742–1817), née Charleville.

Henriette Herz had grown up in the Berlin of the Jewish emancipation and had shared tutors apparently with the Mendelssohn's daughters. At age fifteen, she married a physician, seventeen years her senior. Markus Herz had studied medicine at the University of Königsberg, one of only three universities that accepted Jews—but only in its medical faculty. She was said to be an extremely beautiful woman.[citation needed]

After a few years the salon split in two, a science-seminar led by her husband and a literary salon by Henriette herself. Most notable men and women in Berlin were said to have attended her salon. Among her friends and acquaintances were Dorothea von Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean Paul Richter, Friedrich Schiller, Mirabeau, Friedrich Rückert, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, Johann Jakob Engel, Georg Ludwig Spalding, the Danish Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Johannes von Müller, the sculptor Schadow, Salomon Maimon, Friedrich von Gentz, Fanny von Arnstein, Madame de Genlis, Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten, Gustav von Brinkmann, and Friedrich Schlegel.

Grave of Henriette Herz
Alexander von Humboldt often visited and even received Hebrew lessons from Henriette. The theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher was another frequent visitor. After the death of her husband she came under the powerful influence of Schleiermacher and converted to Protestantism. Her grave is preserved in the Protestant Friedhof II der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No. II of the congregations of Jerusalem's Church and New Church) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, south of Hallesches Tor.

References

    Further reading

    • Hertz, Deborah (2005). Jewish high society in Old Regime Berlin. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 0-8156-2955-9. 
    • Herz, Henriette de Lemos (2012). Henriette Herz: Ihr Leben und ihre Erinnerungen. Nabu Press. ISBN 978-1277188660. 

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