Solomon Schechter

• Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza", by Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole (read online)

Solomon Schechter שניאור זלמן שכטר (December 7,1847 – 19 November 1915) was a Moldavian-born Romanian rabbi, academic scholar, and educator, most famous for his roles as founder and President of the United Synagogue of America, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and architect of the American Conservative Jewish movement.

Schechter's name is synonymous with the findings of the Cairo Geniza. He placed the JTSA on an institutional footing strong enough to endure for over a century. He became identified as the foremost personality of Conservative Judaism and is regarded as its founder. A network of Conservative Jewish day schools is named in his honor, as well as a summer camp in Olympia, Washington. There are several dozen Solomon Schechter Day Schools across the United States and Canada.

Born in Focşani, Moldavia (now Romania) to a Jewish Romanian family adhering to the Chabad Hasidic branch, he attended yeshivas in Eastern Europe. Schechter received his early education from his father who was a shochet ("ritual slaughterer"). Reportedly, he learned to read Hebrew by age 3, and by 5 mastered Chumash. He went to a yeshiva in Piatra Neamţ at age 10 and at age thirteen studied with one of the major Talmudic scholars, Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson of Lemberg.

In his 20s, he went to the Rabbinical College in Vienna, where he studied under the more modern Talmudic scholar Meir Friedmann, before moving on in 1879 to undertake further studies at the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and at the University of Berlin. Three years later he was invited to the UK, to be tutor of rabbinics under Claude Montefiore in London.

In 1890, after the death of Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy, he was appointed to the faculty at Cambridge University, serving as a lecturer in Talmudics and reader in Rabbinics. To this day, the students of the Cambridge University Jewish Society hold an annual Solomon Schechter Memorial Lecture.

His greatest academic fame came from his excavation in 1896 of the papers of the Cairo Geniza, an extraordinary collection of over 100,000 pages of rare Hebrew religious manuscripts and medieval Jewish texts that were preserved at an Egyptian synagogue. The find revolutionized the study of Medieval Judaism.

Jacob Saphir was the first Jewish researcher to recognize the significance of the Cairo Geniza, as well as the first to publicize the existence of the Midrash ha-Gadol. Schechter was alerted to the existence of the Geniza's papers in May 1896 by two Scottish sisters, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, who showed him some leaves from the Geniza that contained the Hebrew text of Sirach, which had for centuries only been known in Greek and Latin translation.

Letters, written at Schechter's prompting, by Agnes Smith to The Athenaeum and The Academy quickly revealed the existence of another nine leaves of the same manuscript in the possession of Archibald Sayce at Oxford University. Schechter quickly found support for another expedition to the Cairo Geniza, and arrived there in December 1896 with an introduction from the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, to the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Aaron Raphael Ben Shim'on. He carefully selected for the Cambridge University Library a trove three times the size of any other collection: this is now part of the Taylor-Schechter Collection. The find was instrumental in Schechter resolving a dispute with David Margoliouth as to the likely Hebrew language origins of Sirach.

Charles Taylor took a great interest in Solomon Schechter's work in Cairo, and the genizah fragments presented to the University of Cambridge are known as the Taylor-Schechter Collection. He was joint editor with Schechter of The Wisdom of Ben Sira, 1899. He published separately Cairo Genizah Palimpsests, 1900.

He became a Professor of Hebrew at University College London in 1899 and remained until 1902 when he moved to America and was replaced by Israel Abrahams.

American Jewish community

In 1902, traditional Jews reacting against the progress of the American Reform Judaism movement, which was trying to establish an authoritative "synod" of American rabbis, recruited Schechter to become President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA).

Schechter served as the second President of the JTSA, from 1902 to 1915, during which time he founded the United Synagogue of America, later renamed as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

Religious and cultural beliefs

Schechter emphasized the centrality of Jewish law (Halakha) in Jewish life in a speech in his inaugural address as President of the JTSA in 1902:

"Judaism is not a religion which does not oppose itself to anything in particular. Judaism is opposed to any number of things and says distinctly "thou shalt not." It permeates the whole of your life. It demands control over all of your actions, and interferes even with your menu. It sanctifies the seasons, and regulates your history, both in the past and in the future. Above all, it teaches that disobedience is the strength of sin. It insists upon the observance of both the spirit and of the letter; spirit without letter belongs to the species known to the mystics as "nude souls" nishmatim artilain, wandering about in the universe without balance and without consistency...In a word, Judaism is absolutely incompatible with the abandonment of the Torah." Schechter, on the other hand, believed in what he termed Catholic Israel. The basic idea being that Jewish law, Halacha, is formed and evolves based on the behavior of the people. This concept of modifying the law based on national consensus is an untraditional viewpoint.

Schechter was an early advocate of Zionism. He was the chairman of the committee that edited the Jewish Publication Society of America Version of the Hebrew Bible.

The Schechter Legacy

Bibliography

• Schechter, Solomon (1896) Studies in Judaism. 3 vols. London: A. & C. Black, 1896-1924 (Ser. III published by The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia PA)
• Schechter, Solomon (1909) Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology London: A. and C. Black (Reissued by Schocken Books, New York, 1961; again by Jewish Lights, Woodstock, Vt., 1993: including the original preface of 1909 & the introduction by Loius [sic] Finkelstein; new introduction by Neil Gilman [i.e. Gillman])

Select bibliography

• Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism I (London, 1896); Studies in Judaism II (London and Philadelphia, 1908); Studies in Judaism III (Philadelphia, 1924) (all 3 volumes reprinted by Gorgias Press, 2003).
• Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (London, 1909).
• Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. With an introduction to new edition by Louis Finkelstein (New York, 1961).
• Adolph S. Oko, Solomon Schechter, M.A., LITT. D.: A Bibliography (Cambridge, 1938). Lists 234 publications during Schechter’s lifetime.
• Meir Ben-Horin, “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Part I. Letters from the Pre-Seminary Period (1895-1901),” Jewish Social Studies 25.4 (1963): 249–86.
• Meir Ben-Horin, “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Part II. Letters from the Seminary Period (1902-1915),” Jewish Social Studies 27.2 (1965): 75–102.
• Meir Ben-Horin, “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Supplement to Parts I and II (Notes, Letters, and Corrections),” Jewish Social Studies 30.4 (1968): 262–71.
• Alexander Scheiber, Letters of Solomon Schechter to William Bacher and Ignace Goldziher” Hebrew Union College Annual 33 (1962): 255–27.
• Joshua B. Stein (ed.), Lieber Freund: The Letters of Claude Goldschmid Montefiore to Solomon Schechter, 1885–1902 (Lanham, Md., 1988).
• Avraham Yaari (ed.), The Letters of Shneur Zalman Schechter to Samual Abraham Poznanski (Jerusalem, 1943) [in Hebrew].spines

Select Secondary Literature:

• Cyrus Adler, Solomon Schechter: A Biographical Sketch (Philadelphia, 1916).
• Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography (Cambridge, 1938).
• Michael R. Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement (New York, 2012).
• Peter Cole, and Adina Hoffman, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York, 2011).
• Robert Fierstien, “Sabato Morais, Solomon Schechter, and K’lal Yisrael,” Conservative Judaism 64.3 (2013): 36–49.
• Moshe Idel, “On Solomon Schechter in the Pages of JQR,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100.4 (2010): 551–55.
• Nicholas de Lange, “Books and Bookmen: The Cambridge Teachers of Rabbinics 1866-1971,” Jewish Historical Studies 44 (2012): 139–63.
• Daniel Langton, “Wandering Jews in England’s Green and Pleasant Land: Wissenschaft des Judentums in an Anglo-Jewish Context,” in C. Wiese and M. Thulin (eds.) Wissenschaft des Judentums in Europe: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives (Berlin, 2015).
• Alexander Marx, Solomon Schechter (American Jewish Historical Society, 1917).
• George Foot Moore, “Schechter, Scholar and Humanist,” The Menorah Journal 2 (1916): 1–6.
• Michael Panitz, “Judaism in the Queen’s English: The Anglican Context of Schechter’s ‘Catholic Israel’ and Associated Terminology,” Conservative Judaism 64.3 (2013): 62–84.
• Stefan Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Richmond, Surrey, 2000).books 2
• Mel Scult, “The Baale Boste Reconsidered: The Life of Mathilde Roth Schechter (M.R.S.),” Modern Judaism 7 (1987): 1–27.
• Mel Scult, “Mathilde Schechter,” in P. E. Hyman and D. Dash Moore (eds.), Jewish Women in America 2 (1997), 1201–3.
• Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (London, 2009).
• David B. Starr, “The Importance of Being Frank: Solomon Schechter’s Departure from Cambridge,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94.1 (2004): 12–18.
• David B. Starr, “Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, A Study of Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish History” (PhD Dissertation; Columbia University 2003).
• Jack Wertheimer (ed.), Tradition Renewed: A History of JTS, 2 vols. (New York, 1997).