Henriette de Lemos Herz (1764–1847)

Henriette Herz, née de Lemos, was born in Berlin, Germany, a daughter of Benjamin de Lemos, a Jewish physician of Portuguese descent and his wife Esther Charleville. She shared tutors with the daughters of Moses Mendelssohn and was among the first generation of emancipated Jews to assimilate into German society. Brendel Mendelssohn, later known as Dorothea Schlegel, was her lifelong friend. At age 15, Henriette married Markus Herz, a physician and philosopher 17 years her senior. She became the hostess of a popular literary salon attended by Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schiller, Madame de Genlis, and Friedrich von Schlegel, among many others. In her autobiography, she wrote, "For many years, all of Berlin’s prominent people frequented us." She gave Hebrew lessons to her friend Alexander von Humboldt. After her husband's death, she refused to remarry, but supported herself by running a private school for young women. She converted to Christianity. Near the end of her life, she burned the innumerable letters she had received during her long life, among them those written by Dorothea Schlegel, the Humboldt brothers, and Caroline von Humboldt. However, a group of her letters from 1790 to 1835 was later discovered in a private Swedish archive and published.