Georg Jacob
Georg Jacob (26 May 1862 – 4 July 1937) was a scholar of Islamic studies and an Orientalist. He founded Turkology as a modern academic discipline in Germany. Life. Jacob studied Arabic geography at the Universität Greifswald, achieving his "Habilitation" in 1892. In 1896 he became an Extraordinary Professor at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, and in 1888-90 he was assistant librarian at the Royal Library in Berlin. In 1911 he was made Chair of Oriental Studies at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, succeeding . As ("ordinarius") for 'Semitic and Islamic Philology' at the university, Jacob was  the first German professor to have a chair incorporating Islamic studies, reflecting a tentative institutional willingness to allow the field of Semitic language study to expand to include the Islamic world, including the non-Semitic, Turkic-speaking world. In Kiel, Jacob 'was director of the Oriental institute at the university [...], which consisted of one room serving as his office, as classroom and as library. Luckily the room had a high ceiling, thus ample wall space was available for the book shelves'. 1922–23 saw him serving as Rector of the university, and he was the honorand of a Festschrift in 1932 . Though beginning with research on Arabic history and literature, Jacob turned his attention progressively towards Persian and Turkish studies, especially the latter. His work was characterised by its wide-ranging, internationalist outlook, and 'the customs and institutions of the common people'. In 1892, Jacob attended a shadow puppet performance in Istanbul. That experience led him to a lifetime fascination with, and scholarly research into, the subject of shadow play. Jacob was rare in the German academy of his day for specialising in Ottoman-Turkish studies, and was the first translator and editor of modern Turkish literature in the German-speaking  world, founding the Türkische Bibliothek series published by Mayer & Müller in Berlin.