Schechter, Solomon

Schechter, Solomon

(?1847–1915) Hebraic scholar, educator; born in Focsani, Romania. Educated in Vienna and Berlin, he went to England in 1882, where in 1890 he was appointed lecturer in the Talmud and rabbinical literature at Cambridge University. He gained wide notice for identifying a Hebrew fragment, brought from Egypt, as a lost portion of Ecclesiasticus (one of the Apocrypha of the Bible); he went off to Cairo and located some 50,000 old Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts (including some more parts of Ecclesiasticus) which would provide the basis for many of his subsequent books, such as Documents of Jewish sectaries (1910). In 1901 he accepted the post of Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York City). He soon became the major Jewish scholar in the U.S.A. while the seminary and its lay arm, the United Synagogue of America, became important centers of Conservative Judaism. He wrote what is regarded as the first modern approach to Jewish theology, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1909).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.