https://forward.com/yiddish-world/557043/rabbi-louis-jacobs-british-bible-chabad-library/
While Rabbi Jacobs had stellar Orthodox credentials, his unique understanding of Jewish theology ruffled many feathers within the British Orthodox establishment. For a time in the 1960s, Rabbi Jacobs was in line to become the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth. But once he published his seminal book We Have Reason to Believe he was sidelined and ostracized from the United Synagogue. He never became the chief rabbi.
Why? The book challenged the traditional belief in the origins of the Torah
He himself denied that he wanted to be chief rabbi.
ReplyDeleteThere are different accounts about how things developed.
The frum world loved him because he was a Gaon, and he was a Rav at golders green Beth hamedrash.
It was more the modern orthodox who were annoyed at his books, so they stopped him from his influential job at Jews college.
His backers were angry that he could not stay in prestigious orthodox positions, so they started up masorti which is similar to conservative or reform.
Unlike Shaul liberman, Jacobs was an apikores regarding the Torah authorship. But he kept halacha.
"Jacobs studied at the most orthodox of yeshivot from a relatively young age, first in Manchester and then as one of the first group of students recruited by the legendary Rabbi Eliahu Dessler when he founded the Gateshead Kollel in the early 1940’s. Indeed, Dessler was so enamoured by his student that he predicted a future for him as a leader of orthodox Jewry and made the special effort to come especially from Israel to attend his wedding at a time when international travel was far more difficult and tiresome than today. But as Harry Freedman points out in his recently published biography of Jacobs, Louis Jacobs is nowhere to be found in the list of prestigious past students of the Gateshead Kollel institution."
ReplyDeletehttps://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-tale-of-two-rabbis-on-jonathan-sacks-and-louis-jacobs/
his senior, Dessler had an equally high opinion of Jacobs:
DeleteThere is one young man, a product of Manchester (he is the only native product), and it is no exaggeration for me to say that hitherto, I have never seen an ilui [Talmudic genius] of such depth together with the other strengths in any one... he is a truly great one... able to plumb the depths of thought.[3]
Eliyahu Dessler (1892–1953),