Most of Benfey's childhood and youth was lived during the post-war period, which was marked by economic impoverishment and political oppression of nationalists and liberals.

In 1830, he successfully presented his dissertation, Observationes ad Anacreontis Fragmenta Genuina,[2] and was granted a venia legendi, or license to teach university courses.

[1] The subject matter he lectured on began to broaden, and in 1836, he collaborated on Über die Monatsnamen einiger alten Völker (Month Names of Ancient Peoples)[2] with his friend Moritz A. Stern, a Jewish mathematician who also taught at the University of Gottingen.

In 1839, he also wrote an article on India for Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste ("Universal Encyclopaedia of Sciences and Arts").

In 1842, The Institut de France awarded Benfey the prix Volney for his Lexicon,[3] which brought him international recognition in the world of philology and comparative languages.

Younger, less accomplished lecturers were promoted and hired ahead of him, leading many to believe that this was a purposeful snub, and a display of prejudice against Benfey's Jewish religion and heritage.

Instrumental in securing Benfey a position was Alexander von Humboldt, a famous 19th century naturalist and explorer, who was particularly close to the Prussian monarch Frederick William IV.

All these works had been produced under the pressure of poverty, the government, whether from parsimony or from prejudice against a Jew, refusing to make any substantial addition to his small salary as an assistant professor at the university.

[3] At length, in 1862, the growing appreciation of foreign scholars shamed it into making him a full professor, and in 1866 Benfey published the laborious work by which he is on the whole best known, his great Sanskrit-English Dictionary.

He had designed to close his literary labours by a grammar of Vedic Sanskrit, and was actively preparing it when he was interrupted by illness, which terminated in his death at Göttingen.