Born in Pilisvörösvár, Hungary, into a family of German-speaking merchants, he studied with his maternal grandfather rabbi Simon Wiener. At the age of twelve he entered the yeshiva of Nitra, but returned to study with his grandfather until he could enroll in the Pressburg Yeshiva, then headed by Rabbi Samuel Benjamin Sofer. He then proceeded to university studies and eventual doctorate in Mainz, where he became acquainted with rabbi Marcus Lehmann, one of the leaders of German Orthodoxy. He married Sophie, youngest daughter of rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch of Frankfurt, in 1876, and soon after accepted the rabbinate of Pápa in Hungary. His father-in-law died in December 1888, and Breuer succeeded him as the rabbi of the Frankfurt Austrittsgemeinde in 1890. In Frankfurt he participated in the Freie Vereinigung, a national organisation of Orthodox communities, and created its rabbinical representative body, the Verband der orthodoxen Rabbiner Deutschlands. He would later also be one of the founding members of Agudas Yisroel, and was a strong opponent of political Zionism; he viewed participation in the Zionist movement as an implicit approval of the idea that a Jewish state can replace Jewish religious identity. As part of his efforts to foster Jewish education in Frankfurt, he opened a yeshiva, the Torah Lehranstalt, in 1893, which he modeled after the yeshivot he had attended in Hungary. Little of Breuer's work remains in writing. Collected sermons were published in English under the title Chochmo u'Mussar in three volumes between 1972 and 1977 by his grandson Jacob Breuer, and some of his responsa appeared in the Hebrew volume Divrei Yosef, which mainly contained the work of his son Joseph. He had eight children. Simon died in childhood. was rabbi in Aschaffenburg, Joseph Breuer taught at the Torah Lehranstalt and recreated the Frankfurt community in 1940's New York, Isaac Breuer was an ideologue of Agudat Yisrael, Moses Breuer was a linguist, a mathematician and actuary, and Joshua Breuer a pediatrician. His daughter Hannah Breuer married Edmund Meyer, a lawyer in Cologne. Breuer died in Frankfurt.
