Reason to Believe
The Controversial Life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Louis Jacobs was Britain's most gifted Jewish scholar. A Talmudic genius, outstanding teacher and accomplished author, cultured and easy-going, he was widely expected to become Britain's next Chief Rabbi.
Then controversy struck. The Chief Rabbi refused to appoint him as Principal of Jews' College, the country's premier rabbinic college. He further forbade him from returning as rabbi to his former synagogue. All because of a book Jacobs had written some years earlier, challenging from a rational perspective the traditional belief in the origins of the Torah.
The British Jewish community was torn apart. It was a scandal unlike anything they had ever previously endured. The national media loved it. Jacobs became a cause celebre, a beacon of reason, a humble man who wouldn't be compromised. His congregation resigned en masse and created a new synagogue for him in Abbey Road, the heart of fashionable 1960s London. It became the go-to venue for Jews seeking reasonable answers to questions of faith.
A prolific author of over 50 books and hundreds of articles on every aspect of Judaism, from the basics of religious belief to the complexities of mysticism and law, Louis Jacobs won the heart and affection of the mainstream British Jewish community. When the Jewish Chronicle ran a poll to discover the Greatest British Jew, Jacobs won hands down. He said it made him feel daft.
Reason To Believe tells the dramatic and touching story of Louis Jacobs's life, and of the human drama lived out by his family, deeply wounded by his rejection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British historian Freedman (Kabbalah) gives his late teacher Rabbi Louis Jacobs (1920 2006) his due in this definitive biography. Despite Jacobs's upbringing as a traditional ritually observant British Jew and ordination as an Orthodox rabbi, he lived his life committed to finding a confluence between his faith and the critical questions he had about sacred texts; that approach led him to credit the documentary hypothesis, which attributed the Hebrew Bible to multiple human sources, rather than being the literal word of God. Jacobs had pulpits at Manchester Central Synagogue and London's New West End Synagogue before becoming moral tutor at Jews' College, London, where he taught Talmud and homiletics. But, despite his growing renown, it was his defense of the documentary hypothesis that led to controversy in 1961 when Jacobs was invited to assume the helm of Jews College the Orthodox United Synagogue's rabbinical seminary. He never did so, thanks to Israel Brodie, then the U.K.'s chief rabbi, who strenuously objected to Jacobs's views. The Jacobs Affair became news outside the Jewish world, and revealed deep schisms in Anglo-Jewry about the power of the chief rabbinate, as well as what Orthodox Jews could believe. This engrossing, richly detailed look at a major British religious leader will appeal to any academic reader interested in modern Judaism.
