Benno Jacob

Benno Jacob (7 September 1862 – 24 January 1945) was a liberal rabbi and Bible scholar.

Biography

Jacob studied in the Rabbinical Seminary and University of his native Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). He served as a rabbi between the years 1891-1929 until he retired to Hamburg to concentrate on his exegetical work.

Already in his student years he was active in the fight against antisemitism, he founded a Jewish student's society that introduced fencing duels as a method of defending the honor of Judaism when it was degraded by antisemitic students. In 1892 he had a confrontation with Liebermann von Sonnenberg, a prominent antisemitic politician and publisher. After Sonnenberg delivered a two and a half hour lecture on the Talmud, Jacob, bearing a copy of the Talmud, challenged him to read out the passages he had referred to in his lecture. When Sonnenberg admitted that he could not read even a letter of the Hebrew language, Jacob chided him for speaking about a book which he could not even read and delivered an impromptu lecture of his own refuting the arguments previously advanced. After this pattern was repeated a few more times Liebermann von Sonnenberg was forced to cancel his tour. Jacob was also an active author and orator in the fight against German antisemitism in the years following World War I. He opposed Zionism not only because of his belief in a Jewish-German synthesis, but also because he saw in Zionism a complete secularization of Judaism and a basis for Jewish atheism.

Biblical studies

Benno Jacob was a scholarly liberal rabbi (with a University degree in Semitics) in Germany until World War II. Before leaving Germany, he produced a monumental commentary on Genesis.