Solomon Schechter

Born in Focșani, Russian Empire (today in Romania), Solomon Schechter was brought up in a Hasidic home, his father a follower of the Chabad movement. After studying in Lemberg (today Lviv, Ukraine), Schechter moved to Vienna, attending both the university and the rabbinical seminary there until 1879. Moving to Germany, Schechter attended the University of Berlin for a time before being invited in 1882 by Claude Montefiore to study in London. Schechter established himself as a scholar in the United Kingdom, becoming a lecturer of Talmud at Cambridge University by 1890. Schechter’s most important scholarly accomplishment consisted of the work he did to gather together into a useable collection the contents of the Cairo Geniza, in which successive Jewish communities of Fustat and Cairo had stored an extraordinary range of texts and fragments in Hebrew and other Jewish languages dating back well over a millennium. To this day, these materials continue to revolutionize scholarly understanding of medieval Jewish life in the Mediterranean world, medieval Mediterranean and Arab society more generally, and the history of Judaism. In 1899, along with Charles Taylor, Schechter published The Wisdom of Ben Sira based on documents found in the geniza, and the same year, he became a full professor at University College London. Two years later, Schechter accepted the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He lived the rest of his life in New York, where he decisively influenced the development of Conservative Judaism.