Horschetzky married into the prominent Lackenbacher family;[2] his father-in-law Hirsch Lackenbacher was leader of the Jewish community of Nagykanizsa, Hungary,[3] where Horschetzky began practising medicine in 1811.[4] He went on to run the town's Jewish hospital and serve as director of the Jewish community school.[5] He became a member of the Royal Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1845.[1]
As a writer he devoted himself chiefly to the works of Josephus, whose Antiquities he translated and in part annotated (1826, 1843, 1851).[6] He also wrote for the journals Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, the Orient, and Ben-Chananja [he]. He possessed remarkable humor, which appears in his fictitious Reiseberichte Nathan Ghazzati's (1848), which Julius Fürst took to be a translation from Hebrew.[7]