Gustav Zerffi

George Gustav (or Gustavus) Zerffi, born with the surname Cerf or perhaps Hirsch (21 May 1820 – January 28, 1892) was a journalist, revolutionist and spy.

Biography Born in Hungary, Zerffi was educated in Budapest. He became a journalist at the age of eighteen. He was the author of Wiener Lichtbilder und Schattenspiele, with twelve caricatures (Vienna, 1848); and as editor of the liberal Der Ungar (Reform) in 1848, he became conspicuous by his attacks upon the Germans and the imperial family.

With Csernatoni, Stancsits, Zanetti, Steinitz, and others he set the tone for the revolutionists, and in 1848 he was József Schweidel's captain and adjutant in the Honvéd army. He also acted for a time as Kossuth's private secretary. On the failure of the revolution he fled to Belgrade (1849) where he entered the service of the French consul. By this time, however, he had become a member of the Austrian secret service, reporting on Hungarian émigré activities (and even other groups of revolutionary exiles) for the Habsburg Ministry of the Interior until 1865.

In 1850 he translated Kossuth's complete works into German for the Europäische Bibliothek der Neuen Belletristischen Litteratur (cccxxii., cccxlvii., cccxlix.), and two years later he visited Paris, going in 1853 to London, where he became a member of the Medical royal college, and afterward secretary of the German National Association. He resigned this post under suspicion, however, although he remained in London. He published an English version of Goethe's Faust with critical and explanatory notes (1859). He became a citizen of Great Britain.

According to Joseph McCabe, he gave "agnostic and strongly worded" Rationalist lectures to the London Sunday Lecture Society: his published efforts in this direction included Natural Phenomena and their Influence on Different Religious Systems (1873); Dogma and Science (1876); and The Spontaneous Dissolution of Ancient Creeds (1876).