Benrubi was born in
Thessaloniki, Ottoman Empire, in 1876. He came from an old family of
rabbis, from the same
Jewish community of
Portuguese provenance, to which
Spinoza belonged to in
Amsterdam. He presented his thesis in German, under the direction of the great philosopher Eucken, on the "Moral ideal of
J.J. Rousseau" (1904). According to Benrubi, Rousseau is the source of all German philosophy- from
Kant to
Nietzsche - and the spiritual father of the great poets
Goethe,
Schiller, and
Holderlin. He studied philosophy and was educated in
Jena, Berlin, and Paris (1898–1914). In 1904, he participated in the
2nd Congress of Philosophy in
Geneva, where he stayed, teaching the history of European philosophy until his death. Between 1927 and 1933 he was appointed by the
Prussian Government to teach French philosophy at
Bonn, a job that he considered as a cultural mission for fostering the intellectual ties between France and Germany. In his work Benrubi tries to go beyond the agnosticism and timidity of modern philosophical reflection, to re-establish the bridge between the Self and the things, to abolish the dualism of speculative and practical thinking. The author attempts to exhibit the universe as a whole: terrestrial unity, solidarity of the living, the existence of a human race, united in its diversity, arriving in conclusion at a moral: Natural obligation of cosmic and human solidarity. In a second work, Benrubi studied at depth the great movements of moral philosophy in a manuscript of more than 600 pages, that is archived at the
Bibliothèque de Genève, in which the essential ideas of the sceptics, relativists and utilitarians are analyzed in detail and compared - from the
Greek Sophists to
Max Stirner and
Herbert Spencer, passing through
Montaigne,
Blaise Pascal,
La Rochefoucauld, and
Helvétius, among others (J. H. Zeilberger). == Works ==