Ignaz Kuranda was born in Prague, where his family had a business of second hand books. He studied for a while at Aaron Kornfeld’s yeshivah in Gulcov Jenikov. He moved to Vienna (1834) where he started writing plays, of them was performed. He moved to Brussels, Belgium, after having lived in different German cities. He became a philo-German, and admired everything German. He founded the liberal German periodical Die Grenzboten (1841), in which he published his opinion about Austrian internal policy issues. He moved with the paper to Leipzig (1842), but still wrote on the same issues. He smuggled his periodical into Austria, to keep people there informed about the strength of Liberal forces in Germany and the rest of the world. Kuranda had good connections with Jewish Austrian writers who helped him, and were helped by him. After returning to Vienna in 1848, Kuranda was elected to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt, where he suffered from Czech nationalists anti-Semite activities. He failed in his efforts together with others to persuade the Czechs to participate in the assembly, and had to flee from the town. He returned to Vienna and founded the Ostdeutsche Post (which appeared until 1866.
After the failure of the 1848 revolution, Kuranda was kept under police supervision, and was acquited by a jury on anti-Semite issues (1860). This caused Kuranda to be very popular among East European Jews. He was elected to the Diet of Lower Austria in 1861, and remained in that position for twenty years. At the same time he devoted much time to internal Jewish affairs and was elected to the Board of the Jewish Community of Vienna, in 1860, and to its president in 1872. Kuranda tried to introduce liturgical reforms but nearly caused a crisis. He was vice-president of Israelitische Alianz, and a supporter of Jewish studies.