Jacobs, Joseph

Joseph Jacobs, (born Aug. 29, 1854, Sydney, N.S.W. [Australia]—died Jan. 30, 1916, Yonkers, N.Y., U.S.), Australian-born English folklore scholar, one of the most popular 19th-century adapters of children’s fairy tales. He was also a historian of pre-expulsion English Jewry (The Jews of Angevin England, 1893), a historian of Jewish culture (Studies in Jewish Statistics, 1891), and a literary scholar.

After attending primary school Sydney, Jacobs immigrated to England in 1872. A graduate (1876) of the University of Cambridge, Jacobs was secretary (1882–1900) of the Russo-Jewish Committee (London), formed to improve the wretched social and political conditions of Jews in Russia. He edited the journal Folk-Lore from 1889 to 1900. A prolific author, Jacobs is generally best known for such scholarly and popular works on folklore as The Fables of Aesop (1894), English Fairy Tales (1890), Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), Indian Fairy Tales (1892), The Book of Wonder Voyages (1896), and Europa’s Fairy Book (1916). In 1900 he immigrated with his family to the United States, where he worked as revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia. He later taught literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and edited the magazine American Hebrew (1906–16).