Videos

Rabbi Jacobs presents, in this lecture, a sketch of Maimonides’ life and thought. He starts by noting the scarcity of details available from medieval sources concerning the thinker’s family – his wives, siblings, and children – as well as his physique. The dates and details of his birth (Cordoba, April 1135) and death (December 1204),…...

This video features some of the reflections which made Louis Jacobs such a unique thinker in Anglo-Jewry. He tackles some of the issues which led to the original Jacobs Affair, including contemporary historical challenges to traditional Jewish beliefs. He starts by noting that the literal interpretation of the biblical account of Creation has yielded, as…...

Rabbi Louis Jacobs responds, in this video, to his election as the ‘greatest British Jew’ in the Jewish Chronicle.  He describes the whole enterprise of casting a vote for such a figure as absurd and daft, and demonstrates that the notion of greatness is necessarily subjective. Indeed, the candidates each distinguished themselves in very different…...

In 2005, The Jewish Chronicle readers voted Louis Jacobs as the ‘greatest British Jew’. The vote proved a clear indication of Jacobs’s popularity and influence in the British-Jewish community, and provided the Friends with the opportunity to celebrate his legacy with this Q&A. Reuven Hammer hosted the event, putting forward ten questions from the audience,…...

In this video, Rabbi Jacobs reflects on his long-standing friendship with and admiration for a teacher and colleague of his, R. Koppel Kahanah. He describes R. Kahanah as a colourful and very influential rabbi, once well-known in the Anglo-Jewish community, but now remembered only be his few disciples. Kahanah came to England from Lithuania just…...

Louis Jacobs answers a number of important questions, in this video, relating to the status of women in Judaism. Can women be ordained as rabbis or cantors in synagogues? Can they be counted in a minyan? Can they read the Torah, or receive an aliyah? Can they wear tefilin or tsitsit? He discusses each of…...

The gaonim were purported to live to a very old age. The Vilna Gaon died at 70. Israel Kagan, the Chofetz Chaim, the great exponent of harmony among people died at 90. This video tells us more about their lives than we may care to know.  ...

Rabbi Jacobs discusses the significance of the Ten Commandments in Jewish thought. He questions the assumption that they sit at the heart of revelation. How do we understand the two versions of the Ten Commandments? Rabbinic tradition presents a range of views. Equally, there are different ways of understanding them today. Historically, the role of…...

This was the lecture Louis Jacobs was supposed to give to celebrate the move of his library to the Oxford Centre. Due to his illness he was unable to deliver the talk but this video covers much of his intended lecture and was taken just a few days before his death. Jewish learning today is…...

Rabbi Jacobs begins by discussing AJ Heschel. He first considers his formative influences, which included his hasidic childhood, the Baal Shem Tov, the writings of the Kotsker rebbe and German secular culture. Peppered as always with anecdotes, personal recollections and quotations from his prodigious memory, Rabbi Jacobs then offers insights into Heschel’s personality and behaviour…...

Rabbi Jacobs offer his person reflections on three leading Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He begins by recounting a public exchange he had with Emmanuel Levinas at a symposium they both attended. Their dispute was about religious tolerance in the pre-modern age and the application of the Talmud to modern philosophy. He then turns…...

On a visit to London, Rabbi Dr Elliot Cosgrove of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York took the opportunity to interview Rabbi Jacobs. They first discuss the influences on Rabbi Jacobs’s thought, particularly the differences between his yeshiva and university experiences and his teachers. Rabbi Cosgrove then asks Rabbi Jacobs how he would characterise…...

This is a talk given by Rabbi Jacobs after he had retired from his role as the rabbi of the New London Synagogue, when he felt more able to express his personal views more freely. Taking his cue from a controversy in the United Synagogue over the appointment of a Lubavitch rabbi to a communal…...

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This video is based on a book of Rabbi Jacobs’s jottings. Here he discusses the use of the Bible for semi-magical purposes, known as bibliomancy, and particularly the Lottery of the Vilna Gaon. The technique involves turning seven pages of the bible and reading the seventh line. It is similar to a seventeenth century Anglo…...

Rabbi Jacobs first discusses one book in each of his three specialist fields of theology, mysticism, and Talmud. His choice for theology is Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. However, Rabbi Jacobs owns up to the fact that he is not overly keen on Maimonides, largely because his medieval views are rooted in Greek philosophy. He…...

In this video, Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs discusses the two ceremonies associated with the birth of a baby boy; the circumcision and the redemption ceremony of a first born son. Drawing, as ever, on his extensive command of sources and stories, he explores the rationale behind the circumcision ritual and its details. He discusses Maimonides’s…...

At the New London Synagogue the latest of the books written by Rabbi Jacobs....