Jakobovits was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where his father Julius (Yoel) was a community rabbi.

The family moved to Berlin in the 1920s, where his father became rabbinical judge on the beth din of the Grossgemeinde, but fled Germany in 1938 to escape Nazi persecutions.

He was knighted on 22 July 1981[3] and was created a life peer on 5 February 1988, as Baron Jakobovits, of Regent's Park in Greater London,[4] becoming the first rabbi to receive this honour.

Jakobovits was also the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, in which capacity he worked on standardising and regulating religious conversion to Judaism.

When a Church of England report titled Faith in the City was published in December 1985 criticising Thatcher's policies, Jakobovits responded by attacking its underlying philosophy.

There, he argued, Jews had worked themselves out of poverty, educated themselves, integrated into the host culture and nurtured a "trust in and respect for the police, realising that our security as a minority depended on law and order being maintained".

[9] Jakobovits also took a conservative view on trade unions, criticised Faith in the City for not mentioning the role of trade unions, arguing that "The selfishness of workers in attempting to secure better conditions at the cost of rising unemployment and immense public misery can be just as morally indefensible as the rapaciousness of the wealthy in exploiting the working class".

He maintained that sooner or later Israel would need to negotiate the territory it conquered during the Six-Day War; which made him a controversial figure, as he mentioned these views publicly.