Joseph Jacobs (29 August 1854 – 30 January 1916) was an Australian-born folklorist, literary critic and historian who became a notable collector and publisher of English folklore.

[2] He was the sixth surviving son of John Jacobs, a publican who had emigrated from London in around 1837, and his wife Sarah, née Myers.

[5] While he was in Britain Jacobs became aware of widespread anti-Semitism; to counter this he wrote an essay, "Mordecai", which was published in Macmillan's Magazine in June 1877[6] Later in 1877 he moved to Berlin to study Jewish literature and bibliography under Moritz Steinschneider, and Jewish philosophy and ethnology under Moritz Lazarus.

[7] He was concerned by the anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire and in January 1882 wrote letters on the subject to The Times of London.

This helped to raise public attention to the issue, resulting in the formation of the Mansion House Fund and Committee, of which he was secretary from 1882 to 1900.

[8] In 1891 he returned to the theme of Russian anti-Semitism in a short book, The Persecution of the Jews in Russia, which was published first in London and then in the United States by the Jewish Publication Society of America.

[13] In 1908 he was appointed a member of the board of seven editors that made a new English translation of the Bible for the Jewish Publication Society of America.

In addition to the books already mentioned, Jacobs edited The Fables of Aesop as First Printed by Caxton (1889), Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1890), Baltaser Gracian's Art of Worldly Wisdom (1892), Howell's Letters (1892), Barlaam and Josaphat (1896), The Thousand and One Nights (6 vols, 1896), and others.

[9] Writing in 1954, O. Somech Philips stated that, while Jacobs accomplished many things in his life, it was as a folklorist that "people remember him best".

"[23] After his death his stories were republished, including in the 1918 book English fairy tales by Flora Annie Steel with illustrations from Arthur Rackham.