Martin Jacobs

Martin Jacobs

At Washington University in St. Louis, Martin Jacobs is Professor of Rabbinic Studies in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES). In addition, Jacobs is affiliated with Washington University’s History Department and the Program in Religious Studies.

Born and raised in Germany, he earned both his Ph.D. and Habilitation in Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Early in his career, he taught as a visiting lecturer at the University of Jordan, Amman (1998-1999). Later Jacobs held visiting fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1999-2001); the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2001-2002, and 2011-2012); the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2003); and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan (2018-2019).

Jacobs is the author of four monographs and numerous articles whose topics range from rabbinic history and culture to Jewish-Muslim encounters, medieval travel literature, and early modern historiography.

He has recently finished his fourth book project, Empire from the Margins: Early Modern Jewish Historians on the Spanish and Ottoman Expansion, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in fall 2025. Based on a close reading of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jewish historians, this study reveals hitherto unexplored perspectives on two globalizing polities of their time: the Spanish and Ottoman empires. As Jews, these historians expressed marginalized views of imperial power; however, differing from colonial subjects in the New World, they belonged to a marginalized community within the Mediterranean basin where the Spanish and Ottoman empires were centered, and their territorial and economic ambitions overlapped. In writing about imperial expansion, these historians also grappled with the trans-imperial character of the Jewish community and their own multilayered identities. Their shifting positionalities illuminate the contending allegiances of a Jewish diaspora living in and between rivaling empires. (For a related post, go here.)

His third book, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2014, to be reissued in paperback in September 2025), is titled Reorienting the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World. It explores the Middle East as it was experienced, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers and writers ranging from the late Middle Ages to early modern times (ca. 1150-1520). As Jacobs shows, many of the travelers, hailing from Christendom, argued against a Christian vision of the Levant, which they reclaimed as a landscape of Jewish memory, and thereby reoriented a “Western” conception of the “East” for a Jewish readership. At the same time, the book identifies Jewish examples of nascent Orientalism and appraises travel writing’s role in corroborating and challenging specifically Jewish notions of home and exile, identity and difference.

His second book similarly engages with Jewish encounters with the Islamicate world—in both a real and purely literary sense—but focuses on a different kind of primary sources. Islamische Geschichte in jüdischen Chroniken, published by Mohr Siebeck (2004), investigates various Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their accounts of Muslim history since the days of the Prophet Muhammad. While Christian authors of the Renaissance period writing on Muslim history have already been extensively discussed by others this is the first study of comparable Jewish literature.

Jacobs’s first book, Die Institution des jüdischen Patriarchen, also published by Mohr Siebeck (1995), is devoted to a central chapter of Jewish history during the late Roman era, the institution of the Jewish Patriarch (Hebrew: nasi), and uses this case study to evaluate the reliability of rabbinic literature as a historical source.