Shmuel Ashkenasi was born in 1941 in Tel Aviv. After completing studies in his native city, he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He aroused international notice in 1962 as an award winner in the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels and the Tschaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He is the founder of the Vermeer Quartet and has been teaching at the Music Academy in Lübeck since the turn of the century.