Joseph Jacobs

Home > Literature and the Arts > Scholars and Historians > Historians, Miscellaneous: Biographies

Joseph Jacobs 1854–1916, Jewish writer, historian, and folklorist, b. Australia. He lived in England until 1900, when he went to the United States to edit a revision of The Jewish Encyclopedia. He was later a teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and editor of the American Hebrew. His major contributions to Jewish history include Jews of Angevin England (1893), An Inquiry into the Sources of the History of the Jews in Spain (1894), and Jewish Contributions to Civilization (1919), an incomplete fragment. His Story of Geographical Discovery (1899) went through a number of editions. From 1889 to 1900 he edited Folk-Lore, the journal of the Folk-Lore Society. He compiled several collections of fairy tales and edited scholarly editions of Aesop's fables (1889) and the Thousand and One Nights (6 vol., 1896).

Jacobs, Joseph (1854–1916). Born in Australia of Jewish parents, Jacobs wrote chiefly on Jewish history and culture, but between 1889 and 1900 he was actively involved on the Council of the Folklore Society. At his suggestion, the Society renamed its journal Folk-Lore in 1890; he was its first Editor under the new title (1890–3), and remained on the editorial board till 1900. He studied narrative genres, especially those involving both oral and written transmission, such as fables. As regards folklore theory, he held that when similar items are found in separate cultures they have spread from a single place and time of origin, by contact between social groups (diffusionism), rather than developing independently (polygenesis); also, that folklore items such as tales or proverbs are created by a single ‘author’, not by a whole community.

Jacobs produced several collections of fairytales for young readers; they include English Fairy Tales (1890, revised 1898) and More English Fairy Tales (1894), which did much to spread awareness of our own oral tradition. Two, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Henny-Penny’, are personal memories of tales told him in childhood; the rest are texts previously collected and published by others, some being modified for easier reading. But the lengthy notes accompanying these popularized tales are thoroughly scholarly.

Other important works are his editions of The Fables of Aesop as First Printed by William Caxton (1889), of The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox (1895), and of Barlam and Josaphat (1896), and his substantial introduction to E. W. Lane's translation of The One Thousand and One Nights (1895).

Bibliography

Obituary: Folk-Lore 65 (1954), 126–7. Gary Alan Fine , Folk-lore 98 (1987), 183–93.