Other livesReligion This article is more than 3 years oldObituaryAlan Jacobs obituary
This article is more than 3 years oldMy friend Alan Jacobs, who has died aged 90, was an authority on the works of mystical thinkers.
His speciality was the compilation and editing of anthologies based on extracts from spiritual poetry and sacred texts, including The Element Book of Mystical Verse (1997) and Peace of Mind: Words of Wisdom to Comfort and Inspire (2010).
But he also wrote about the lives and thoughts of spiritual thinkers, including The Wisdom of Marcus Aurelius (2003) and Thoreau: Transcendent Nature for a Modern World (2012).
Alan’s interest in the subjects he wrote about was not just academic, as he had experienced his own spiritual awakening during his early 20s. When he encountered the works of the Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi, it was a revelation. Alan came to consider him “the guru of gurus”, and later was president of Britain’s Sri Ramana Maharshi Foundation.
The son of a Jewish businessman, Lawrence Jacobs, and his wife, Rose (nee Phillips), Alan was born in London and raised in the family’s flat behind Selfridges on Oxford Street. He was sent to school at Malvern College in Worcestershire, where his father hoped he would be groomed to take on the running of the family’s retail outlets, the Times Furnishing homeware stores and the menswear chain Willerby’s.
Trade held scant appeal for a youngster with more rarefied interests in religion and art, but nonetheless, after national service in the early 1950s Alan joined the board of directors of Willerby’s, spending most of the next two decades working for the firm.
In 1953 he married Claire Mendoza, a journalist. With the birth of their three children, Laura, Keith and Graham, he found both spiritual and personal happiness at the family’s home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London.
In 1970, after Willerby’s had been sold, Alan and Claire set up an art gallery in central London, specialising in the works of Dutch Old Masters. It was a successful venture at first, and Alan became enough of an expert to have a book on the subject, 17th Century Dutch and Flemish Painters: A Collectors’ Guide, published in 1976.
In 1981 tragedy struck when Claire died of a brain haemorrhage. Thereafter the gallery’s fortunes began to wane, and in 1990 it ceased trading. Alan decided to take early retirement, content to live a simple and frugal life devoted to spiritual matters and his writing.
He gave his spirits an annual fillip by visiting his favourite retreat, an ashram based at Sri Ramana’s former home in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, and would have lived there permanently were it not for his inability to tolerate its fierce temperatures for long.
Ultimately the onset of dementia, combined with heart problems, brought an end to his writing. Yet he continued to disseminate mystical thinking online. The filmed readings of Alan’s book, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, have received more than 1.7 million views on YouTube.
He is survived by his three children, six grandchildren, Jacob, Sarah, Hannah, Jack, Louis and Harry, and his sister, Jane.
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