Background
Solomon was born on December 7, 1850 in Focşani, Moldavia (now Romania), son of Isaac and Chaya Rachel Schechter.
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Solomon was born on December 7, 1850 in Focşani, Moldavia (now Romania), son of Isaac and Chaya Rachel Schechter.
Solomon received his early education, which was confined exclusively to Hebrew literature, from his father; at ten he went to a Hebrew school at the neighboring town of Piatra and at fourteen to Lemberg, where he studied under a great Talmudist, Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson.
In 1875 he went to Vienna; there, under the guidance of Isaac Hirsch Weiss and Lector Meir Friedmann, the knowledge he had acquired in the Roumanian schools became methodized. He received the rabbinical diploma in 1879 but never exercised the functions of that office. After studying in Berlin, at the Hochschule fur die Wissenchaft des Judenthums and he attended lectures at the University of Berlin.
Schechter went in 1882 to England, where he began an active scholarly and literary career. He was a lecturer in Talmud at Jews' College in London when in March 1890 the readership in Talmud and rabbinical literature at Cambridge University fell vacant and he was appointed to the post.
Among his first scholarly publications were a number of Hebrew ethical wills (1885), which he found in the British Museum; Saadya's explanation of the rules of interpretation; and a critical edition of the Aboth de Rabbi Nathan (1887), one of the minor tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. He received a traveling scholarship to Italian libraries in 1893 and two years later he was invited to Philadelphia to deliver a course of lectures at the newly inaugurated Gratz College.
In 1896 he made a discovery that gave him a world-wide reputation. He identified a fragment of a manuscript as a part of the lost original Hebrew of the oldest book of the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus. Shortly thereafter he undertook a visit to Cairo to investigate the so-called Genizah, a sort of literary burial place, which it was known existed in Jewish synagogues. For months he worked underground with great hardship, which was detrimental to his health, but he finally brought back to Cambridge some fifty thousand manuscripts and fragments, mostly in Hebrew and Arabic, probably the largest collection of manuscript material ever found by one man. In it he discovered many of the remaining chapters of Ecclesiasticus, published in 1899 as The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Portions of the Book Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection.
He gave a series of lectures based upon this on the social life of the Jews in the age of Jesus, the Son of Sira (Studies in Judaism, 1908), which tended to disprove many theories that had been advanced concerning the dates of various books in the Biblical canon. Besides being reader at Cambridge, he had been appointed a curator of the university library, Goldsmith professor of Hebrew at the University of London, and an examiner at the University of Manchester.
When in 1901 he was invited to become president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, he accepted, breathed new life into the seminary, collected a new faculty, and within a very short time became the acknowledged leader of Jewish scholarship in America.
After arranging his administrative work he issued a number of publications, some of them based upon the Cairo manuscripts. The first of these (1903) was entitled Saadyana Geniza Fragments of R. Saadya Gaon, mostly, though not exclusively, unpublished documents of Saadia Gaon, the great scholar of the ninth century; in 1912 he published a document relating to the conversion of the King of Khazars to Judaism.
Under the modest title of Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, he published in 1909 the first approach to a methodical presentation of Jewish theology. He wrote many charming essays, collected under the title Studies in Judaism, in three series (1896, 1908, 1924), and Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (1915).
He also edited the Midrash Hag-gadol to Genesis (1902), a collection of ancient homiletic interpretations of the Bible. His papers and articles in journals run into the hundreds.
He died in 1915.
Solomon Schechter founded the United Synagogue of America, was one of the editors of the Bible Translation of the Jewish Publication Society, of the Jewish Quarterly Review, and of the first edition (1901) of The Jewish Encyclopaedia. His most important publications: The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Documents of Jewish Sectaries, Studies in Judaism and others. 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.
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Schechter emphasized the centrality of Jewish law (Halakha) in Jewish life. 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.
Schechter had great interest in general affairs, and at the time of the Boer War, to which he was opposed, he did not hesitate to speak his mind even in England. When the World War broke out, his sympathies were with the Allies, and he was impatient because America did not at once support what he considered a righteous cause.
Schechter was very imposing-looking, with a massive leonine head. Besides a distinguished reputation for knowledge, he had great charm of presentation that earned for him real celebrity.
He was not happy in England. As a lover of freedom he had long been attracted by America; moreover, he wished for a more Jewish atmosphere and field of activity.
In 1887 Schechter married Mathilda Roth, a native of Breslau who was then teaching in England; by her he had a son and two daughters.
