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Friedrich Jacobs studied at Göttingen under Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), to whom he dedicated his first publication. As he planned to be a Gymnasium teacher he had no need of a graduate degree. Despite an offer from the newly founded University of Berlin, he chose to remain in the city of his birth, where he would spend his career directing the library at Gotha. 

          A prolific scholar for six decades, Jacobs is best known for his extensive work on the Greek Anthology including a 13-volume critical commentary using the 1776 text of Richard François Philippe Brunck’s (1729-1803) Analecta (1772-6), a revised edition in 1814-17, the first modern edition to use the Codex Palatinus, which became the standard text for scholars, a separate commentary (Animadversiones….), a school text of selections (1826), and a translation of over 700 poems into German verse (1803-23). He edited the first complete edition of John Tzetzes’12^th-century Homeric studies (1793). He edited Achilles Tatius (1821) and Aelian (1832). With Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1764-1868) providing the notes, Jacobs edited the Philostratorum imagines et Callistrati statuae (1825). His Hellas consisted of lectures on Greek antiquity delivered to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1808–9. He contributed to several journals and projects, including Charaktere der vornehmsten Dichter aller Nationen, a supplement to Johann Georg Sulzer's Theorie der schönen Wissenschaften 7 vols. (Leipzig, 1793–1803), Neues Attisches Museum, which he co-edited with Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Jakob Hottinger (Zürich, 1802–1810), and Friedrich August Wolf's Litterarische Analekten, 4 vols. (Berlin: Nauck, 1816, 1818). His translations of Demosthenes were done with anti-Napoleonic intent.

       True to his roots in the Gymnasia, Jacobs published a four-volume Greek primer,  Elementarbuch der griechischen Sprache für Anfänger und Geübtere which became widely accepted throughout Germany. Jacobs modeled the structure and the readings for many later school texts by others. The Scot Andrew Dalzell’s (1750-1826) Analecta Graeca Majora and Graeca Minora drew much from Jacobs and became standard texts in Britain and the United States throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In America, Charles Anthon (1797-1867) published Greek Reader Selected Principally from the Elementarbuch of F. Jacobs in multiple editions.  

            Though Jacobs as a librarian and Gymnasium teacher with no advanced degree was not a part of the German university system, he was nonetheless one of the most renowned German classicists of his time. His extraordinary productivity drawing on his wide breadth of learning and his acute textual criticism gained him unusually wide acclaim for one in his position, as attested by his membership in five academies, each in a different country. In the generations that followed, his reputation declined (he is not included in ADB  or Brill) and he was thought to be a productive scholar of a subordinate rank who produced much that was valuable, but none that reached the greatness of some in subsequent generations.