Bernays Jacob

Bernays Jacob a very prominent German philologist and critic of the 19th century, was born in the year 1824, and was the son of a rabbi of Hamburg. He was educated first at the Johanneum, the famous grammarschool of his native city, and afterwards at the University of Bonn, then illustrious by the presence of Brandis, Welcker, and Ritschl among its professors. On leaving Bonn, he became for a short time Bunsen's secretary and literary coadjutor. In 1853 he was appointed to a post in the Rabbinical seminary at Breslau; and in 1866 he became extraordinary professor and first librarian at Bonn, where he died on May 26, 1881, at the early age of fifty-seven. Of his writings we mention, Die Heraekleitschen Briefe (Berlin, 1869), a treatise in which he was able to show that even the epistles fathered by some sorry forger on Heraclitus may be made to cast a new light on the moral and religious condition of society in the first century: — The phrasto's Schrift iiber Fromnigkeit (Breslau, 1866): — Ueber die Chronik des Sulpicius Severus (ibid. 1861):Dialoge des Aristoteles (Berlin, 1863): — Ueber das Phokylideische Gedicht (1856): — Lucian und die Kydiker (Berlin, 1879): — Phokion u. seine neueren Beurtheiler (1881); and last, but not least, his learned and fascinating Life of Scaliger (1855), in which he showed that he felt the full meaning of the Huguenot movement. (B. P.)