BERNAYS, JAKOB (1824-1881), German philologist and philosophical writer, was born at Hamburg, of Jewish parents, on Sept. 11, 1824, and died at Bonn, May 26, 1881. Jakob studied from 1844 to 1848 at Bonn under Ritschl. In 1853 he accepted the chair of classical philology at the Jewish Theological college at Breslau, where he formed a friendship with Mommsen. In 1866, Bernays returned to Bonn as extraordinary professor and chief librarian.
His chief works, which deal mainly with the Greek philosophers, are:—Die Lebensbeschreibung des J. J. Scaliger (1855) ; Uber des Phokylidische Gedicht (1856) ; Die Chronik des Suipicius Severus (1861) ; Die Dialoge des Aristoteles im V erhdltniss zu seinen iibrigen Werken (1863) ; Theophrastos' Schrift iiber Frommigkeit (1866); Die Heraklitischen Briefe (1869) ; Lucian and die Cyniker (1879) ; Zwei Abhandlungen iiber die Aristotelische Theorie des Dramas (188o). The last of these was a re-publication of his Grundzuge der verlorenen Ab handlungen des Aristoteles fiber die Wirkung der Tragodie (1857), which aroused considerable controversy. See notices in Biographisches Jahrbuch fur Alterthumskunde (1881), and Allgemeine deutsche Biog raphie, xlvi. (1902) ; art. in Jewish Encyclopaedia; also Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. iii. 176 (1908) .