Benno Jacob

Benno Jacob (1862-1945) was a Reform Rabbi and Bible scholar.

Biography

Jacob studied in the Rabbinical Seminary and University of his native Breslau. 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 ant-semitism, 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. He was also an active author and orator in the fight against German anti-semtism in the years following WWI. 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 Reform rabbi (with a University degree in Semitics) in Germany until World War II. Before leaving Germany, he produced a monumental commentary on Genesis. Recently, a German edition of his commentary on Exodus has been published. Generally, Jacob is linked with Umberto Cassuto as one of the great twentieth-century opponents of the Documentary Hypothesis.

Jacob was not a fundamentalists and did not believe in Mosaic authorship. His rejection of the Documentary Hypothesis is based on his findings that the Pentateuch presents so much literary unity and spiritual harmony that all search for its "sources" appeared to him an exercise in futile hypothesis.

Melding a traditionalist (if not traditional) view of the Torah with a knowledge of Semitics and applying a Germanic thoroughness to his conviction that no word in the Torah is out of place, he produced two commentaries which attempt to explain nearly every nuance of every word in the Bible.

The programmatic statement in his 1916 book, "Quellenscheiden und Exegese im Pentateuch", illustrates his concerns:

[The Bible’s means of representation may be termed the semi-poetic or dichotomistic. It proceeds like poetry, but without its strict measure [i.e., meter] , employing instead paired thoughts, patterns of words and clauses and syntax, in doublets, parallels and contrasts; it is rooted, when all is said and done, in the Semitic [way of thought] , which grasps matters dichotomously. This manner of seeing, conceiving and representing dominates the Hebrew language and literature in its entirety, to its subtlest manifestations.

Bibliography

*Das erste Buch der Tora, Genesis. Übersetzt und erklärt von Benno Jacob, Schocken Verlag, Berlin 1934 (Neudruck 1999). Condensed English trans. The First Book of the Bible: Genesis (New York: Ktav, 1974).
*Das Buch Exodus, Stuttgart 1997. English trans., The Second Book of the Bible: Exodus (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992)
*Das Buch Ester bei den LXX, in ZAW 10 (1890), S. 241-298
*Im Namen Gottes, Berlin 1903
*Der Pentateuch, exegetisch-kritische Forschungen. Leipzig 1905
*Die Abzählungen in den Büchern Leviticus und Numeri, Frankfurt a. M. 1909
*Die Thora Moses, Frankfurt a. M. 1912/13
*Quellenscheidung und Exegese im Pentateuch, Leipzig 1916
*Auge um Auge, Berlin 1929

References

* [http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/JSIJ/2-2003/Elman.doc | An analysis of Jacobs work by Dr. J. Elman]
* [http://masliah.googlepages.com/nehama_leibowitz_accept_truth.pdf | a letter from Nechama Leibowitz describing her view of Jacob's work]
* Encyclopedia Judaica entry- Benno Jacib 2nd ed.)