Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 4, 2026

Louis Jacobs: 20th-Century Britain’s Most Controversial and Celebrated Rabbi

The Jacobs Affair and the limits of Orthodoxy.

In 2005, the Jewish Chronicle, the UK’s oldest and most prominent Jewish publication, held a poll in which readers were asked who was “the greatest British Jew of all time.” The winner was Louis Jacobs (1920–2006), a rabbi trained in England’s most Orthodox institutions, whose positions on the divine origins of the Torah would create a major controversy within Anglo-Jewry in the 1960s. In conversation with J.J. Kimche, Miri Freud-Kandel delves into Jacobs’s life, his contribution to academic Jewish studies, the “Jacobs Affair,” and the core ideas of his thought. (Audio, 74 minutes.)

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