Schechter, Solomon 1850-1915

SCHECHTER, SOLOMON 1850-1915

Scholar and president of the jewish theological seminary

Humble Beginnings

Solomon Schechter was born in or about 1850 in the village of Fokshan (Focsani), Romania. His father was a ritual slaughterer, and the family adhered to the Hasidic sect of Judaism that Schechter would come to disavow as a young scholar. From his early years Schechter, who would become a giant among scholars of Judaism, was recognized as an Iluy, the Hebrew word for a wonder child of learning. His early education, administered by his father, centered on religious texts. At the age of ten Schechter attended a Talmudic college in Piatra, Romania. By sixteen he was in the rabbinical school at Lemberg, where he studied with Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson, the great scholar of the Talmud. Schechter returned to Fokshan and remained until 1875. His parents had arranged a marriage, as was the custom, but the marriage failed, ending in divorce within a year. In 1875 Schechter left Romania for good, traveling to Vienna, the cultural hub of central Europe. He received his rabbinical diploma in 1879, but he never practiced the functions of a rabbi. Instead he became a scholar whose thought would influence Judaism greatly in the new century.

A Scholar Emerges

Schechter lived and studied in Vienna for four years. He attended the Jewish Bet haMidrash, or house of study, which charged poor students no fees. It was there that he synthesized his previously unfocused study and became an outstanding scholar under the tutelage of three great teachers, Adolph Jellinek, Isaac Hirsch Weiss, and Meir Friedman. In 1879 Schechter traveled to Berlin to study at the German "Academy for Jewish Science," which had been founded only eleven years before. He studied with Israel Lewy and Pincus Friedrich Frankl, to whom Schechter would dedicate his first book in English, Studies in Judaism (1896). Schechter made two discoveries in Berlin that would affect him deeply. The first was the critical and historical approach to Judaism that was still relatively new. The Bible was being as much examined as revered, and Schechter would come to take controversial stands on points of historical veracity, such as questioning the actual existence of Moses and concluding that Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes. His second discovery was that Germany's intellectuals were aggressively applying scientific methods to support anti-Semitism. Schechter had seen plenty of anti-Semitism in Romania, but seeing it so entrenched among the educated led him to leave Germany. In 1882 at the suggestion of Frankl, Schechter traveled as a tutor with Claude Goldsnid Montefiore to London. He was expected to stay a year. He stayed for twenty.

England

Although he arrived in London with little knowledge of English, Schechter found a culture that would allow him to pursue his work. The British Museum and Oxford's Bodleian Library contained a massive number of ancient books and manuscripts. Schechter also enjoyed the intellectual freedom the country afforded and felt little of the anti-Semitism in academic circles that he had encountered in Germany. He quickly began embracing English culture, literature, and language. He joined a small group of fellow scholars—including Moses Gaster, Israel Zangwill, Israel Abrahams, Lucien Wolf, and Asher Myers—who were keeping Jewish scholarship alive in England. They called themselves "The Wanderers" and would have an enduring influence on the English-speaking Jewish world. Schechter married Mathilda Roth, a native of Breslau, in 1887. He continued his study of manuscripts, teaching and writing in London until 1890, when a readership in Talmud and rabbinical literature opened at Cambridge University. He took the post and entered his most fruitful scholarly period.

Genizah

Schechter traveled a great deal during the 1890s, visiting Italy for library study, Philadelphia and Baltimore for lectures, and Palestine to see his twin brother, who had settled there. His journey to Cairo in 1896 profoundly affected his life. Having identified a fragment of a manuscript as an original piece of the oldest book of the Apocrypha, Schechter was convinced that a treasure of manuscripts must lie in Genizah (or burial place) in the Egyptian city. Although the Genizah had been known about for a century and some of its pieces had filtered into private collections, no one had systematically explored its contents. "All I wanted was to empty the Geniza," he wrote when he was done. "In this I have succeeded." The arduous work underground, lasting months, would be detrimental to his health. "He has been choked with dust and bad air and has worked like a horse. He wishes he had a respirator," wrote a friend to Mrs. Schechter. He emerged with more than fifty thousand manuscripts and fragments in Hebrew and Arabic, the largest collection ever found by one man. He found the remaining chapters of Ecclesiasticus, which he published in 1899 as The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Portions of the Book Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection. The discovery made him world famous and led to the final stage of his career.

America

In 1901 Schechter was invited to become president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a post he would hold from 1902 until his death in 1915. Jews, especially those from eastern Europe, had poured into the United States during the previous twenty years, creating a large Jewish community in New York. Schechter desired to work within such a community after years of living in a small, isolated Jewish group. It was in New York that Schechter would have his greatest impact on Jewish thought and practice. He reorganized the seminary and within six years made it a center of contemporary scholarship with a star faculty.

Conservative Movement

Developing and organizing Conservative Judaism was Schechter's great work in America. He was able to find the center in the debate between the devotional Orthodox Jews and the iconoclastic Reform Jews who were questioning all aspects of the faith. The Conservative Judaism Schechter championed was a devotional doctrine in practice but one that kept Judaism contemporary. He bridged the gap between Western and Eastern Jewry with his notion of a "catholic Israel" (K'lal Yisrael), a Jewish option for the twentieth century. He believed that Judaism for each age was what that age made of it without abandoning ancient traditions. "Conservative Judaism united what is desirable in modern life with the precious heritage of our faith … that has come down to us from ancient times," he wrote. In 1913 he helped found the United Synagogue of America, a union of twenty-two congregations that had broken free of Orthodox Judaism. Schechter felt that the survival of Judaism in America depended on its adaptability to the emerging culture in the new century. Schechter also continued his own scholarly work, publishing the important two-volume Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology in 1909 and Documents of Jewish Sectaries in 1910. He died in November 1915.

Sources:

Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938);

Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).