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). ==Notes==