HERMANN GOLLANCZ (1852–1930) was the son of Samuel Marcus Gollancz, minister of the Hambro Synagogue in London from 1854 to 1899. Born in Bremen, he was educated at Jews’ College and University College London; later he received rabbinical ordination from three Galician rabbis, becoming one of the few Jewish clergy in Britain who actually used the title ‘rabbi’. In 1880 he was installed as preacher to the New Synagogue in London; subsequently he succeeded the new chief rabbi Hermann Adler as rabbi of the Bayswater Synagogue, which he led for thirty years. The first Jew to receive a D.Litt. degree from the University of London (in 1900), he held the Goldsmid Chair in Hebrew at University College London, previously held by David Woolf Marks and Solomon Schechter, from 1902 to 1924. On 11 February 1922 he preached ‘on the completion of 50 years’ Service in the Anglo-Jewish Ministry’, recalling his first sermon, in the Hambro Synagogue as assistant to his father, at a thanksgiving service in 1872 for the recovery from life-threatening illness of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. In 1923 he became the first English rabbi to be knighted.

Gollancz published three volumes of his sermons. The first, which appeared in 1909, contains sermons delivered at the Bayswater and other synagogues between 1882 and 1908. In addition to sermons on various aspects of Jewish belief and practice (including the sabbath, the dietary laws, and mixed marriages), many deal with more topical issues such as the themes of Jewish patriotism and antisemitism. Several, delivered in 1890, 1903, and 1905, were written in response to the persecution of Russian Jews.

A number of Gollancz's sermons responding to the First World War were included in his second and third published volumes: in the second, ‘At War’ (5 September 1914), ‘War and the Belgian Refugees’ (24 October 1914), ‘Remember: a Word on Behalf of the Polish and Palestinian Jewish Exiles’ (27 February 1915), ‘A Year of War’ (sabbath before Rosh Hashanah 1915), ‘Darwinism and the War’ (Yom Kippur 1915), ‘The War and the Jews of Eastern Europe’ (Sukkot, 23 September 1915); in the third, ‘ “Noblesse Oblige”: The Motto for Nations as Well as for Individuals’ (9 September 1916), ‘The World's Guilt in the War’ (December 1916), and ‘On the Armistice’ (November 1918).