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How One Rabbi Exposed a 19th Century Hate Machine: Benno Jacob's War in Göttingen

Berndt Schaller, Benno Jacob

In 1892, a young rabbi named Benno Jacob walked into a packed hall in Göttingen, Germany, where a thousand people had gathered to hear a popular anti-Semitic politician rant about the Talmud. The speaker, Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, had spent two and a half hours painting Jews as morally corrupt. But Jacob didn't shout back—he brought a secret weapon: a copy of the Talmud borrowed from the royal library. He challenged the politician to point out a single line that violated German law. The man admitted he couldn't read Hebrew. The crowd was stunned. This is the story of Benno Jacob, a PhD, a German army veteran, and a liberal rabbi who spent 15 years fighting a losing war against a rising tide of hate in one of Europe's most educated cities. Based on Berndt Schaller's meticulous biography, this video unpacks how anti-Semitism was weaponized by academics like Julius Wellhausen, how Jacob's own community split over a pipe organ and a ritual bath, and how his intellectual legacy—his monumental commentary on Genesis—was later embraced by the very Christian theologians who once ignored him. It's a haunting look at the limits of reason in an irrational age, and a warning for our own polarized times.