Solomon Schechter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) was a Romanian Jewish 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.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Born to a Chabad Hasidic family in Romania in 1850, he attended yeshivas in Eastern Europe. He received his early education from his father who was a shochet. "The unusually gifted boy" learned to read Hebrew by age three and by five mastered Chumash. He went to a yeshiva in Piatra at age ten and at age thirteen studied with one the greatest Talmudic authorities, Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson of Lemberg [1]. In 1879 he went to study at the Berlin Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums and at the University of Berlin, and several years later was invited to London to be a tutor of Rabbinics.
[edit] Academic career
In 1890 he was appointed to the faculty at Cambridge University, serving as a lecturer in talmudics and reader in rabbinics.
His greatest academic fame came from his exposition in 1896 of the papers of the Cairo Geniza, an extraordinary collection of over 100,000 pages of rare Hebrew manuscripts and medieval Jewish texts that were preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. The find revolutionized the study of Medieval Judaism.
Initially, Schechter forwarded the collection unopened to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, but in 1896 two Scottish sisters, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, showed him some leaves from the geniza that contained the Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus, which had for centuries only been known in Greek and Latin translation. He quickly found support for an expedition to the Cairo Geniza, and carefully selected for the University Library a trove three times the size of any other collection.
He became a Professor of Hebrew at University College, London, in 1899.
[edit] 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.
Schechter served as the second President of the seminary, from 1902 to 1915, during which time he founded the United Synagogue of America, later known as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Under his leadership the Seminary obtained a distinguished faculty, and a dynamic momentum.
[edit] 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 Jewish Theological Seminary 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 was an early advocate of Zionism.
Schechter was the chairman of the committee that edited the Jewish Publication Society of America Version of the Hebrew Bible.
[edit] Legacy
A chain of Conservative Jewish day schools is named in his honour. There are several dozen Solomon Schechter Day Schools across the United States and Canada. The first Principal of the only school in Canada (Montreal) was Rosa Finestone.
[edit] External links
- Solomon Schechter, from Neil Gillman's book on Conservative Judaism
- Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library
- Solomon Schechter Collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary
[edit] References
- Conservative Judaism: The New Century, Neil Gillman, Behrman House
- Studies in Judaism, Solomon Schechter
- Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, Solomon Schechter
- Solomon Schechter and the Ambivalence of Jewish Wissenschaft, David J. Fine, Judaism p. 4-24, 1997
