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The day William Frankel moved into the editor's chair of the Jewish Chronicle in a dark corner of the little-known Furnival Street — within four minutes’ slow walk of Fleet Street — it was hardly more than a parish magazine with attitude. He transformed it almost overnight into a national newspaper that was also internationally quoted and discussed. He did so with little money. It was his own high intelligence, limitless interest, boundless energy and ceaseless curiosity, allied to a total absence of deference to chief rabbis, presidents of the Board of Deputies of British Jews or any other Establishment grandees, that wrought a journalistic miracle.

He knew everyone and was impressed by no one. Among his personal friends were Harold Wilson, David Ben Gurion, the founding Prime Minister of the state of Israel, the artist R. B. Kitaj, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the Oxford philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin. And he memorably met Albert Einstein in Princeton. He was taken to his home by a friend, the federal judge Philip Forman. As Frankel put it in his memoirs, published in 2006 and entitled Tea with Einstein and Other Memories: “Almost immediately the door was opened by a stocky man wearing a sweater, baggy slacks, slippers over his bare feet and an unruly halo of white hair which crowned the gentle, beaming face of Albert Einstein. He later told me that he never wore socks; they were ‘useless garments’.”

Frankel’s achievement was the greater because he came to the editor’s chair with the training and experience of a practising barrister, and none in journalism. With such resources as the owners did place at his disposal, he hired staff who were qualified way beyond their modest salaries, and sent them to cover stories around the world, from Vietnam to the civil rights movement. He was able to inspire their loyalty by his fairness and by a personal warmth that was sometimes well hidden behind a sardonic exterior.

His Jewish Chronicle made Anglo-Jewish history when he took up the cause of the most able of London’s younger rabbis, Louis Jacobs, when he was barred from the prestigious post of Chief Rabbi for doctrinal reasons. With front page headlines week after week, Frankel turned a communal row into a cause célèbre. For the first time it exposed the narrow and implacable views of the Court of the Chief Rabbi, known as Beth Din, to public scrutiny.

But the fierce daylight he cast into the darkest corners of the Anglo-Jewish Establishment did not manage to shift or soften its hard line against any attempt to reconcile its fundamentalist theology with modern Bible scholarship. And the post went to Immanuel Jakobovits, who maintained the hardline theology but softened its public face and was ultimately elevated to the House of Lords by Margaret Thatcher.

Jacobs, whom Frankel’s Chronicle called “the best Chief Rabbi we never had”, remained sidelined. Frankel’s stand did not soften with time. In 2004 he wrote: “Ultimately, this was a battle for the soul of Anglo-Jewry, between those advocating a free spirit of inquiry, as reinforcement to faith and tradition, and those who shunned reason out of blinkered, diehard, fundamentalism.”

Because of the anti-Establishment stand Frankel took on issue after issue, a takeover by a consortium backed by religiously — and mostly politically — right-wing figures was mooted. To pre-empt such a move, a trust was formed to safeguard the paper’s independence into an indefinite future. That was not the least of Frankel's legacy to the self-styled “Organ of Anglo-Jewry”.

Frankel was born in the East End of London to Polish immigrant parents who rarely managed to live above the bread line. But at a near-slum elementary school his high intelligence was easily spotted by his teachers and they got him to pass the entrance exams for a nearby grammar school. And there began the bright boy’s ascent into an educated elite.

When East London became the target of ceaseless nightly bombardment in the autumn of l940, Frankel moved to Cambridge. There he enrolled at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which had also sought refuge from the bombs in the university town. He took a degree in law and for ten years practised as a barrister.

But he yearned for a more public role. And this came with the offer of the Jewish Chronicle editorship in l958. The directors took a chance on this lawyer without newspaper experience. He did not let them down, and held the editorship for nearly 20 years. He was appointed CBE in 1970.

After stepping down as editor in 1977 he remained a director of the paper for another l7 years and continued to write for it and other publications, including The Times. In l991 he went back to active involvement with the paper as chairman of its board of directors, charged with overseeing a campaign to stem its plummeting circulation.

In retirement he wrote two books, Israel Observed: An Anatomy of the State in l981 — praised by the New York Times reviewer as the “best introduction to the organisation of Israel’s internal government and society that I have read” — and Tea with Einstein.

His first marriage, to Gertrude, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Claire Neuman, to whom he was married for 35 years, and by a son of his first marriage. A daughter predeceased him.

William Frankel, CBE, writer and editor of the Jewish Chronicle, 1958-77, was born on February 3, 1917. He died on April 18, 2008, aged 91