Felix Jacoby

Who was Felix Jacoby?

Felix Jacoby was a German classicist and philologist. Jacoby was born into a Jewish family and was converted to Christianity at the age of 11. He is best known among classicists for his highly important work Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, a collection of text fragments of ancient Greek historians. Also significant is his long entry in the Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft on the Greek historian Herodotus; written in 1913, this article established many of the questions that would come to dominate modern Herodotean scholarship.

Jacoby was born in Magdeburg. From 1906 to 1934 he was professor of Classics at Kiel. Though he was later expelled from the University of Kiel during the Gleichschaltung of Nazi Germany, Jacoby is said by some to have been one of a very small number of German Jews who initially supported Adolf Hitler. According to some witnesses, he even went so far as to make the startling comparison in 1933:

As a Jew I find myself in a difficult position. But as a historian I have long learned not to view historical events from a private perspective. I have voted for Adolf Hitler since 1927 and I am happy that in the year of the National Rising I am allowed to lecture on Augustus, because Augustus is the only figure in world history that may be compared to Adolf Hitler.