Jakob Bernays - Biography

Jakob Bernays (September 11, 1824 – May 26, 1881) was a German philologist and philosophical writer.

Life

Bernays was born in Hamburg to Jewish parents. His father, Isaac Bernays (1792-1849) was a man of wide culture and the first orthodox German rabbi to preach in the vernacular; his brother, Michael Bernays, was also a distinguished scholar.

Jakob studied from 1844 to 1848 at the University of Bonn, whose philological school, under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (whose favourite pupil Bernays became), was the best in Germany.

In 1853 he accepted the chair of classical philology at the newly founded Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, where he formed a close friendship with Theodor Mommsen. In 1866, when Ritschl left Bonn for Leipzig, Bernays returned to his old university as extraordinary professor and chief librarian. He remained at Bonn until his death on 26 May 1881.

Works

His chief works, which deal mainly with the Greek philosophers, are:

• Die Lebensbeschreibung des J.J. Scaliger (1855)
• Über das Phokylidische Gesicht (1856)
• Die Chronik des Sulpicius Severus (1861)
• Die Dialoge des Aristoteles im Verhältniss zu seinen übrigen Werken (1863)
• Theophrastos' Schrift über Frömmigkeit (1866)
• Die Heraklitischen Briefe (1869)
• Lucian und die Cyniker (1879)
• Zwei Abhandlungen über die Aristotelische Theorie des Dramas (1880).

The last of these was a republication of his Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlungen des Aristoteles über die Wirkung der Tragodie (1857), which aroused considerable controversy.

• Notices in Biographisches Jahrbuch für Alterthumskunde (1881), and Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, xlvi. (1902)
• article in the Jewish Encyclopedia
• John Edwin Sandys, History of Class. Schol. iii. I 76 (1908).
• Du, von dem ich lebe! Letters to Paul Heyse. Ed. W. M.Calder III & Timo, Günther. Wallstein, Göttingen 2010.ISBN 3835307436