Jonathan Sacks, Baron Sacks

Jonathan Henry Sacks, Baron Sacks was an English Orthodox rabbi, philosopher, theologian, and author. Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013. As the spiritual head of the United Synagogue, the largest synagogue body in the United Kingdom, he was the Chief Rabbi of those Orthodox synagogues but was not recognized as the religious authority for the Haredi Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations or for the progressive movements such as Conservative, Reform, and Liberal Judaism. As Chief Rabbi, he formally carried the title of Av Beit Din of the London Beth Din. At the time of his death, he was the Chief Rabbi Emeritus.
After stepping down as Chief Rabbi, in addition to his international travelling and speaking engagements and prolific writing, Sacks served as the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University and as the Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University. He was also appointed Professor of Law, Ethics, and the Bible at King's College London. He won the Templeton Prize in 2016. He was also a Senior Fellow to the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Early life

Jonathan Henry Sacks was born in the Lambeth district of London on 8 March 1948, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish textile seller Louis David Sacks and his wife Louisa, who came from a family of leading Jewish wine merchants. He had three brothers named Brian, Alan, and Eliot, all of whom eventually made aliyah. He said that his father did not have "much Jewish education".
Sacks commenced his formal education at St Mary's Primary School and at Christ's College, Finchley, his local schools. He completed his higher education at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he gained a first-class honours degree in Philosophy.
While a student at Cambridge, he travelled to New York City, where he met with rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Menachem Mendel Schneerson to discuss a variety of issues relating to religion, faith, and philosophy. He later wrote, "Rabbi Soloveitchik had challenged me to think, Rabbi Schneerson had challenged me to lead." Schneerson urged Sacks to seek rabbinic ordination and enter the rabbinate.
Sacks subsequently continued his postgraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and King's College London, completing a PhD which the University of London awarded him in 1982.
He received his rabbinic ordination from the London School of Jewish Studies and London's Etz Chaim Yeshiva,
with semikhah respectively from Rabbis Nahum Rabinovitch and Noson Ordman.

Career

Sacks's first rabbinic appointment was as the Rabbi for the Golders Green synagogue in London. In 1983, he became Rabbi of the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in Central London, a position he held until 1990. Between 1984 and 1990, Sacks also served as Principal of Jews' College, the United Synagogue's rabbinical seminary. Dr. Sacks was inducted to serve as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth on 1 September 1991, a position he held until 1 September 2013.
Sacks became a Knight Bachelor in the 2005 Birthday Honours "for services to the Community and to Inter-faith Relations". He was made an Honorary Freeman of the London Borough of Barnet in September 2006. On 13 July 2009 the House of Lords Appointments Commission announced that Sacks was recommended for a life peerage with a seat in the House of Lords. He took the title "Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London" and sat as a crossbencher.
A visiting professor at several universities in Britain, the United States, and Israel, Sacks held 16 honorary degrees, including a doctorate of divinity conferred on him in September 2001 by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, to mark his first ten years in office as Chief Rabbi. In recognition of his work, Sacks won several international awards, including the Jerusalem Prize in 1995 for his contribution to diaspora Jewish life and The Ladislaus Laszt Ecumenical and Social Concern Award from Ben Gurion University in Israel in 2011.
The author of 25 books, Sacks published commentaries on the siddur and completed commentaries to the machzorim for the Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Pesach. His other books include, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, and The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning. His books won literary awards, including the Grawemeyer Prize for Religion in 2004 for The Dignity of Difference, and a National Jewish Book Award in 2000 for A Letter in the Scroll. Koren Publishers Jerusalem published The Koren Sacks Siddur in 2006, and is described by Koren as the "first new Orthodox Hebrew/English siddur in a generation". Covenant & Conversation: Genesis was awarded a National Jewish Book Award in 2009, and his commentary to the Passivor mahzor book won the 2013 Modern Jewish Thought and Experience Dorot Foundation Award from the Jewish Book Council in the United States. His Covenant & Conversation commentaries on the weekly Torah portion are read by thousands of people in Jewish communities around the world. In September of 2025, Koren posthumously published a one-volume Torah with Masoretic Text and translation alongside his commentary as well as those commentators he had selected, including Rashi.
Sacks' contributions to wider British society have also been recognized. A regular contributor to national media, frequently appearing on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day or writing the Credo column or opinion pieces in The Times, Sacks was awarded The Sanford St Martin's Trust Personal Award for 2013 for "his advocacy of Judaism and religion in general". He was invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton as a representative of the Jewish community.
At a Gala Dinner held in Central London in May 2013 to mark the completion of the Chief Rabbi's time in office, Charles III, at the time Prince of Wales, called Sacks a "light unto this nation", "a steadfast friend" and "a valued adviser" whose "guidance on any given issue has never failed to be of practical value and deeply grounded in the kind of wisdom that is increasingly hard to come by".

Chief Rabbi

In his installation address upon succeeding Immanuel Jakobovits as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in September 1991, Sacks called for a Decade of Renewal which would "revitalize British Jewry's great powers of creativity". He said this renewal should be based on five central values: "love of every Jew, love of learning, love of God, a profound contribution to British society and an unequivocal attachment to Israel." Sacks said he wanted to be "a catalyst for creativity, to encourage leadership in others, and to let in the fresh air of initiative and imagination". This led to a series of innovative communal projects including Jewish Continuity, a national foundation for Jewish educational programmes and outreach; the Association of Jewish Business Ethics; the Chief Rabbinate Awards for Excellence; the Chief Rabbinate Bursaries, and Community Development, a national scheme to enhance Jewish community life. The Chief Rabbi began his second decade of office with a call to 'Jewish Responsibility' and a renewed commitment to the ethical dimension of Judaism. He was succeeded as Chief Rabbi by Ephraim Mirvis on 1 September 2013.

Appointments held

In addition to serving as Chief Rabbi, Sacks held numerous appointments during his career including:

Professor of Judaic Thought, New York University, New York.
Professor of Jewish Thought, Yeshiva University, New York.
Professor of Law, Ethics and the Bible at King's College, London
Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth
Lecturer in moral philosophy, Middlesex Polytechnic, 1971–1973
Lecturer, Jews' College London, 1973–82; director of its rabbinic facility, 1983–1990; Principal, 1984–1990
Visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Essex, 1989–1990
Sherman lecturer at the University of Manchester, 1989.
Riddell lecturer at Newcastle University, 1993.
Cook lecturer at the University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews, 1996.
Visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998–2004.

Sacks was also a frequent guest on both television and radio, and regularly contributed to the national press. He delivered the 1990 BBC Reith Lectures on The Persistence of Faith.

Awards and honours

Sacks was awarded numerous prizes, including:

1995: Jerusalem Prize
2000: American National Jewish Book for A Letter in the Scroll
2004: The Grawemeyer Prize for Religion
2009: American National Jewish Book Award for Covenant & Conversation Genesis: The Book of Beginnings
2010: The Norman Lamm Prize, Yeshiva University
2010: The Abraham Kuyper Prize, Princeton Theological Seminary
2011: The Ladislaus Laszt Ecumenical and Social Concern Award, Ben Gurion University
2011: Keter Torah Award, Open University
2013: The Sanford St Martin's Trust Personal Award for Excellence in Religious Broadcasting
2013: American National Jewish Book Award for The Koren Sacks Pesah Mahzor
2015: American National Jewish Book Award for Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence
2016: Templeton Prize, "has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books"
2021: Genesis Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, awarded posthumously by Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Philosophy and views

Much has been written about Sacks' philosophical contribution to Judaism and beyond. These include: a volume on his work entitled Universalizing Particularity that forms part of The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers series, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes; a book entitled Radical Responsibility edited by Michael J. Harris, Daniel Rynhold and Tamra Wright; and a book entitled Morasha Kehillat Yaakov edited by Rabbi Michael Pollak and Dayan Shmuel Simons.