The aim of this work is to understand the growing role of the philological research in the western literary history written by the Jewish-German romance philologist Erich Auerbach (1892-1957). His literary history was written during the Second World War (Mimesis - The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - 1946) and in the post- war period (Literary Language and its Public in late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages - 1956). We develop the assumption that his Jewish condition and his formation in the German discipline of Romance Philology (Romanistik) have contributed to a sui-generis vision of the origins and the path of western literature. This double condition, Jewish-German, also determined the core of his philological research, focused on texts of the pagan and Christian Antiquity, specially the patristical. The philological essays form, together with the literary history, a complex and articulated corpus, which constitutes the whole work of Auerbach. In this work, we seek to dig it`s Jewish and German roots.