James Loeb

James Loeb (August 6, 1867 – May 27, 1933) was an American banker, Hellenist and philanthropist.
Biography
James Loeb, of German-Jewish descent, was the second son of Solomon Loeb and Betty Loeb. James Loeb joined his father at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1888 and was made partner in 1894, but he retired from the bank in 1901 due to severe illness.
In memory of his former lecturer and friend Charles Eliot Norton, Loeb created The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship in 1907. In 1911, he founded and endowed the Loeb Classical Library. He assembled a team of Anglo-American classicists to oversee the series, and arranged for publication through Heinemann (publisher) in London When James Loeb died, he bequeathed the Loeb Classical Library and funds to Harvard University to establish The Loeb Classical Library Foundation and to support research in the classics.
He founded the Institute of Musical Art, which later became part of the Juilliard School of Music. That year he also turned over his collection of Arretine pottery to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.
He donated a large amount of funds to what is now called the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, which helped his former psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin to establish and maintain the Institute in its early days. Nevertheless, presumably unknown to Loeb, Kraepelin held racist views about Jews, and his student who took over the Institute, Ernst Rudin, was a leading advocate of racial hygiene and forced sterilization or killing of psychiatric inpatients for which he was personally honoured by Adolf Hitler.
Loeb left a large portion of his significant art collection to the Museum Antiker Kleinkunst in Munich (today the Staatliche Antikensammlungen) ("Sammlung James Loeb"). He was a member of the English Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.
Loeb's correspondence with Aby Warburg has been characterized as creating a Renaissance of relationships of the European to classical antiquity.
Translations
Paul Delcharme, Euripides and the Spirit of His Dreams
Maurice Croiset, Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens
Auguste Couat, Alexandrian Poetry under the First Three Ptolemies, 324-222 B.C.
References
Further reading
"Aby Warburg's Collaboration with James Loeb and Fritz Saxl" in McEwan, D. (2023). Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing (1st ed.). Routledge.
James Loeb, 1887–1933: Kunstsammler und Mäzen, by Brigitte Salmen (ed.) for the Schloßmuseum des Marktes Murnau, Murnau, 2000. [This is a German-language exhibition-catalogue for a presentation of the life of James Loeb, collector and philanthropist at the Schloßmuseum Murnau, April 7 – July 9, 2000. The book contains essays from various authors (Brigitte Salmen, Dorothea McEwan, Erika Simon and others). It also contains a German translation of James Loeb's biographical essay Our Father: A Memorial [privately printed, 1929]; James Loeb: Unser Vater: Eine Denkschrift für Salomon Loeb, pp. 9–16.]
Olmstead, Andrea. “The Toll of Idealism: James Loeb—Musician, Classicist, Philanthropist.” The Journal of Musicology (St. Joseph, Mich.) 14.2 (1996): 233–262.
External links
Loeb Family Tree
James Loeb
1867 births
1933 deaths
American bankers
American people of German-Jewish descent
American philanthropists
German bankers
Jews and Judaism in Cincinnati
Loeb family
American translators
Staatliche Antikensammlungen
Harvard College alumni