Wolf Pascheles

Wolf Pascheles, the son of impoverished parents, lived his entire life in Prague. At first a tutor, he soon became a publisher and bookseller. In 1828, he edited and published a small German-language prayer book for women. During the cholera epidemic in his city in 1832, he printed a book of penitential prayers by Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi. In 1836, he opened Prague’s first Hebrew bookshop; he opened another one in Brünn (present-day Brno) in 1844. Beginning in 1846, he edited a popular anthology under the title Sippurim; the collection included biographies of medieval and later Jewish figures as well as imaginative Jewish literature (such as “The Kamzan”).