Jacob Bernays

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Jacob Bernays (born September 11, 1824 in Hamburg ; died May 26, 1881 in Bonn ) was a German classical philologist .

Life

Jacob Bernays' father Isaak Bernays (1792–1849) was the first Orthodox German rabbi to preach in German. Jacob's brother was Michael Bernays . He studied from 1844 to 1848 at the University of Bonn , whose philological faculty under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Ritschl (whose favorite pupil became Bernays) was the center of classical philology in Germany at that time.

Bernays received his doctorate in 1848 with a thesis on Heraklit and completed his habilitation immediately afterwards. Because he was not given a professorship at a German state university because of his Jewish faith, in 1853 he took over the chair for classical philology at the newly established Jewish-Theological Seminary Fraenckel'scher Stiftung in Breslau , where he became close friends with Theodor Mommsen .

He was only able to embark on a “normal” academic career after the founding of the North German Confederation in 1866, which brought about the final legal emancipation of the Jews. When Ritschl left Bonn for Leipzig in 1866 after the famous " Bonn philologist dispute " with Otto Jahn , Bernays was appointed to his old university as associate professor and main librarian. He stayed in Bonn until his death. He had a great influence on numerous philologists, among them Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Theodor Heyse .

Bernays confessed to traditional Judaism all his life and refused to convert to Christianity in order to be able to start a career as a university lecturer. Therefore, he had to wait a long time before he was appointed professor at a Prussian university. His case caused a sensation and was even discussed in the Prussian parliament. Since January 12, 1865, Bernays was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

genealogy

Jacob Bernays was the uncle of Martha Bernays , Freud's wife, and great-uncle of Edward Bernays .

plant

Bernays' scientific interests lay primarily in the area of Greek philosophy. Despite his extensive knowledge of ancient texts and the entire philological literature since the Renaissance, Bernays always adhered to narrowly defined topics and often to seemingly remote authors, whom he treated with the utmost meticulousness and exact imagination and presented in polished language. According to his own admission, he lacked the necessary superficiality for the form of the large monographic treatise. With this, Bernays became a sharply profiled figure who stands out from the development of a research enterprise that developed during his lifetime and was decisively promoted by his friend Mommsen. This was characterized by the establishment of organizations and major projects that took decades. It has attracted a great deal of attention in the historiography of science, such as Arnaldo Momigliano and Jean Bollack .

His treatment of the Heraclite Fragments was the first and benchmark example of how original texts by pre-Socratic philosophers can be retrieved from their traditional context. For example, in a methodologically epoch-making treatise by Theophrastus , he reconstructed the lost work On Piety from quotations in the writings of Porphyry . Since this text is at the same time the first testimony to the knowledge of the Greeks of Judaism , for Bernays it was not just a demonstration of the philological method, as which this work was admired from the beginning.

Bernays' fascination with Joseph Scaliger , to whom he dedicated a biography in 1855, was based on the interrelationship between Greek and Hebrew philology . The unification of the Hebrew Bible with Greco-Roman education was the declared aim of Bernays' efforts (Ges. Abh., Vol. 2, p. 195), with which he as a scientist opposed the assimilation of the Jews to the Christianity-influenced society of the nineteenth century took a position. When his brother, who later as Goethe researcher became known Michael Bernays , was baptized, Jacob Bernays broke off relations with him, never to resume it.

The greatest sensation, however, aroused the main features of Aristotle's lost treatises on the effects of tragedy (1857), in which he reconstructed Aristotle 's poetics , which were only preserved in fragments . Bernays' contribution to understanding the catharsis doctrine of poetics is still known and recognized today . The elucidation of the Aristotelian theory of tragic effects had a great influence on Friedrich Nietzsche's treatise "The Birth of Tragedy" as well as on Sigmund Freud's psychological theories .

Fonts

literature

  • Hermann Usener :  Bernays, Jacob . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 46, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1902, pp. 393-404. In the history of relations between Jews and Germans, an almost unparalleled appreciation of an Orthodox German Jew by a German
  • Theodor Gomperz : Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) , in: ders., Essays und Quellen , Stuttgart 1905, pp. 106–125.
  • Rolf Mehrlein:  Bernays, Jacob. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 104 ( digitized version ).
  • Arnaldo Momigliano : Jacob Bernays . North-Holland publishing company, Amsterdam, London 1969 (= Mededelingen of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeeling Letterkunde, nieuwe reeks, deel 32, n. 5, pp. 151-178). (reprinted several times; influential)
  • Hans I. Bach: Jacob Bernays. A contribution to the history of emancipation of the Jews and to the history of the German spirit in the 19th century . Tübingen 1974. (Standard biography; elegantly written and historically informative, but less productive in terms of the history of science)
  • John Glucker, André Laks (Ed.): Jacob Bernays. Un philologue juif . Presses Univ. du Septentrion, Villeneuve d'Ascq 1996 (= Cahiers de philologie, 16th Série Apparat critique.) (including the contribution by Jean Bollack)
  • Anthony Grafton : Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and Others . In: The Jewish Past Revisited. Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians. Ed. by David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 16-38.
  • Klaus-Gunther Wesseling:  Jacob Bernays. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 16, Bautz, Herzberg 1999, ISBN 3-88309-079-4 , Sp. 101-122.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Jean Bollack : Jacob Bernays: un homme entre deux mondes. Avec une préface de Renate Schlesier , Paris 1998.
    • German translation by Tim Trzaskalik: A man between two worlds: The philologist Jacob Bernays , with a foreword by Renate Schlesier; Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8353-0489-5 .
  • Andreas Brämer : Bernays, Jacob . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 47-47 .
  • Gherardo Ugolini: Jacob Bernays e l'interpretazione medico-omeopatica della catarsi tragica. Con traduzione del saggio di Bernays, Principles of the lost treatise of Aristotle on the effects of tragedy (1857) , Cierre Grafica, Verona 2012. ISBN 978-88-95351-76-6

Web links

Wikisource: Jacob Bernays  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Bernays, Jacob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philologist and philosophical writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1824
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH May 26, 1881
Place of death Bonn