[citation needed] Jolles grew up as an only child with his mother Jacoba Cornelia Singles (1847–1901) in Amsterdam.
[citation needed] He studied Egyptian and Semitic languages in Paris and Amsterdam from 1893 to 1894 and again in 1899 at the University of Leiden.
[2] Jolles, who became wealthy after his mother's death in 1901, began studying at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he received his doctorate on August 3, 1905, with a thesis on Vitruvian aesthetics with Otto Puchstein.
Jolles was naturalised and initially participated in the First World War as a soldier and finally as a lieutenant in the Landwehr.
[citation needed] In 1916, as an officer in the occupying forces, he accepted a professorship in classical archaeology and art history at the University of Ghent.
[citation needed] Simple Forms place Jolles in the company of Ernst Cassirer, Vladimir Propp, and other precursors of Structuralism.
[4] On May 1, 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, estranging several friends and his children from his first marriage: Jeltje was married to a Jewish engineer, and Jan Andries was forced to go into exile as a communist to South America under a Spanish Passport with the alias ‘Manuel Enrique Cazón Arribar’.
In 1937, Jolles joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) – the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party and the SS.