Jacobs, Joseph

Jacobs, Joseph, 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).