Jacob was also an active author and orator in the fight against German antisemitism in the years following World War I.
Benno Jacob was a scholarly liberal rabbi (with a University degree in Semitics) in Germany until World War II.
Generally, Jacob is linked with Umberto Cassuto as one of the great twentieth-century opponents of the Documentary Hypothesis.
The programmatic statement in his 1916 book, Quellenscheiden und Exegese im Pentateuch, illustrates his concerns: [The Torah's] means of representation may be termed the semi-poetic or dichotomistic.
This manner of seeing, conceiving and representing dominates the Hebrew language and literature in its entirety, to its subtlest manifestations.