Felix Liebermann

Who was Felix Liebermann?

Felix Liebermann was a Jewish German historian, who is celebrated for his scholarly contributions to the study of medieval English history, particularly that of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman law. Born in 1851, Berlin, he came from a Jewish-German family and was the younger brother of the painter Max Liebermann. Having first pursued a business career in banking and textile industry and having lived for some time in Manchester, he moved to Göttingen, Germany, in 1873 to study early English history, with Georg Waitz and Reinhold Pauli as his mentors. After his promotion on the Dialogus de scaccario in 1875, he rapidly earned a name for himself as a medieval historian. In 1896, he received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and later, the title of professor of history from the Prussian minister of justice Robert Bosse. He died in a car accident in Berlin, 1925.