Helping with Inquiries

This book is crowded with fascinating pen portraits of the many people Jacobs met in his long career, especially his teachers and fellow students in the Manchester Yeshivah, the Rabbinic seminary at Gateshead and at London University. It also traces his family's origins in Eastern Europe, his boyhood in the now vanished Penrose St. of Cheetham Hill, and the progressive stages of his pastoral and intellectual career. Above all, it gives the author's first detailed account of the stormy controversy in which he was involved in the 1960s and 70s and which changed not only his career but possibly the subsequent climate of Jewish opinion in the English-speaking world. For all his restrained, relaxed manner and self-effacement the author does not shrink from criticism of others - and of himself - and emerges as a man of inner strength buttressed by the encouragement of an affectionate family and warm friendships.