Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) was an Australian-born folklorist, historian and literary critic. Born in Sydney, he studied at Cambridge and in Berlin, and lived in London before moving to New York in 1900. He is best known for his collections of fairy tales, English Fairy Tales, Celtic Fairy Tales, Indian Fairy Tales and Europa's Fairy Book, illustrated by John D. Batten, which brought tales such as "Jack and the Beanstalk" to generations of readers. A scholar of Jewish history, he wrote on the Jews of Angevin England and on Spain, and was a revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia.