INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT SCHECHTER'S SEMINARY: POLARITIES IN BALANCE*

It is not a stretch to imagine that on Solomon Schechter's week- long voyage to New York in April, 1902 to become the president of the reconstituted Jewish Theological Seminary of America his thoughts often turned to the founding of Yavne by Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. After all, this venerable foundation myth of rabbinic appeared prominently in Schechter's edition of The Fathers According to Nathan, which fifteen years earlier had unveiled his mastery of the medium of critical scholarship. Smug- gled out of a Jerusalem besieged by the Romans and wracked by the Zealots, ben Zakkai gained access to the Roman commander Vespesian. When questioned what he sought, ben Zakkai declared a school: "I ask of you only Yavne that I may go there and teach my students and create a liturgy and perform all the command- ments."1 In essence, at Yavne an academy would revitalize a dimin- ished Judaism bereft of Temple along the lines of study, prayer and praxis. Upon disembarking on April 14, Schechter seemed to invoke the spirit of Yavne to the delegation of Seminary leaders that greeted him. What America required more than anything was "learning, learning, learning," he said. Philip Cowen, publisher of The -American Hebrew reported the gist of Schechter's few remarks: "America had known some scholars, and he mentioned some

This essay, in embryonic form, began as a keynote address to the first joint convention of the Conservative movement on February 11, 2002 in Washington, DC. It appeared in its present form in Conservative ]uddsm 55/2 (Winter 2003) pp. 3-23. 1 Shneor Zalman Schechter, ed., both d'Rabbi Nathan (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1945), p. 12. vi* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT known to him, the late Drs. Morais and Kohut, and he felt sure that in America especially, learning was needed, inasmuch as all centers had been broken up and new centers had to be established. It was necessary that the old traditions, he said, should be taken up, in order that the heritage of the Jew, which is immortalized in his literature, shall not be lost."2 On the very next day, Schechter, atop one of the unpacked suitcases in his room, dashed off an urgent Hebrew letter to his friend in Warsaw, Samuel Abraham Poznanski, a scholar of rab- binic and geonic literature pleading with him to accept a professor- ship at the Seminary. The reason was, he wrote, that both Poznan- ski and Schechter were of Russian extraction and it was a matter of life and death for the thousands of Russian immigrants to America that a home for Jewish scholarship be set up for them.3 In the en- suing correspondence, which reverberates with the failed courtship of Poznanski by Schechter, Schechter often reiterated the need for a religious and academic center of gravity in a land where the future of the Jewish people would be determined. Though Yavne went unmentioned, its paradigm as the key to Jewish survival in radically altered circumstances seemed ever present in Schechter's mind. His knowledge of the past invigorated his sense of mission. Cowen surely expressed the exalted hopes of many which greeted Schechter upon his arrival that Thursday morning when he wrote that, "Professor Schechter will prove a tonic to American Judaism."4 Thirteen years later, Mordecai Kaplan, then the princi- pal of the Seminary's Teacher's Institute, would proclaim in his diary on the occasion of Schechter's funeral, the fulfillment of Cowen's prediction: "The crowd of people that had gathered, though large (about 1500-2000), was by no means commensurate with the significance of Dr. Schechter to Judaism."5 The history of the Seminary and over the next century would amply vindicate the courage of Schechter to relocate. Nor did the presence of his influence wane or vanish in the process.

2 The American Hebrew, April 18,1902, p. 657. 3 Avraham Ya'ari, ed., Iggrot Shneor Zalman Schechter el Shmuel Avraham Poznanski (Yerushalayim: Bamberger & Wahrman, 1943), pp. 18-19. 4 The American Hebrew, p. 656. 5 Communings of the Spirit. The journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, I, 1913- 1934, ed, by Mel Scult (Detroit: Wayne State Uni. Press, 2001), p. 98. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT vii*

What I shall argue is that his conception of Judaism, which ani- mated the institutions he founded, still does justice after a century of breathtaking scholarship to a Judaism more dynamic and diverse than even Schechter could have imagined.

I Schechter meant no less to the future of the Seminary than did ben Zakkai to Yavne. He was the greatest Jewish scholar of his age, a polymath equal to the pioneers of jüdische Wissenschaft, of whom he always spoke with respect. The leaders of the old Seminary had not erred in their tortuous pursuit of Schechter: to reach for institu- tional greatness and endurance, they needed a paragon of the new learning. His ever-expanding body of work consistently displayed an intimate knowledge of the vast array of traditional literary sources combined with a sophisticated command of the methodol- ogy of critical scholarship. In addition, he was lavishly endowed with the scholarly intuition which often marks the difference be- tween the pathfinder and the pedant. As others increasingly special- ized, Schechter ranged with ease and authority over the major per- mutations of . His scientific edition of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, which appeared in 1887, the same year that he married Mathilde Roth of Breslau, provided early testimony of his promise. It re- mains in print, unsurpassed and invaluable. At the Seminary the text stamped the Schechter legacy. , who held the Solomon Schechter chair in theology, taught it in class to rabbinical students and made it a focal point of his own research, while Judah Goldin, a Seminary product on the threshold of his own seminal career, translated it skillfully into English.6 Prof. Jacob Zussman of the Hebrew University, in a recent generous assessment of Schechter's scholarship, classified it as the first truly scientific edi- tion of any rabbinic work. What distinguished his edition was the assiduous collection of all surviving manuscripts of the text plus all known quotations of it in extant sources. On the basis of these variants and his philological expertise, Schechter could reconstruct

6 Louis Finkelstein, Mabo le'Massektot Abot ve-Abot d'Rabbi Natan (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950); The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, trans, by Judah Goldin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955). viii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT a more reliable reading of the original text as well as a history of its genesis and transmission.7 Science had diminished the realm of conjecture. The success of his labor demonstrated that the task of Jewish scholarship reached beyond the publication of texts that had been lost to include the critical preparation of classical texts cor- rupted by their popularity and diffusion. Schechter dedicated his benchmark work to Claude G. Mon- tefiore, his exceptional student and benefactor. In the preface he thanked him specifically for bringing him "to his blessed land of Britannia, to which the eyes of all Jewish scholars look longingly, because there the is to be found in the libraries of Oxford and with all the diverse commentaries on every one of its many facets in manuscripts and rare printed books."8 I agree with Prof. Zussman that the prospect of working in the midst of this treasure trove induced Schechter more than the stipend to accept Montefiore's invitation in 1882.9 Along with a copy of the book, Schechter sent him a letter in which he gave poetic voice to his scholarly vision. Professor Jowett has wisely said: "More often than we suppose, the great sayings and doings upon the earth, 'thoughts that breathe and words that burn' are lost in a sort of chaos to the apprehension of those that come af- ter." The older rabbinic literature is a striking illustration of the Professor's dictum. Than it there is no chaos more chaotic. To introduce a little order into this chaos, to mod- ify the darkness, to track out the "lost thoughts" through the mazes of the labyrinth—this is the task which the modern rabbinic scholar must put before himself.10

7 Yaakov Zussman, Schechter ha-Hoker," Madda'ei ha-Yahadut, 38 (1998), pp. 218-219. I am grateful to Prof. Menahem Schmelzer for bringing this essay to my attention. See also Goldin, p.xxiv and the prolegomenon by Menahem Kister to his reprint of both de'Rabbi Nathan Solomon Schechter Edition (New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997). 8 Aboth, p. v. 9 Zussman, pp. 217-18. 10 Joshua B. Stein, Ueber Freund, The letters of to Solo- mon Schechter, 1885-1902 (Lanham, New York, London: Univ. Press of America, 1988), pp. 61-62. Benjamin Jowett, the renowned Anglican min- ister, taught classics at Oxford, where Montefiore had studied with him. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT ix*

In retrospect, the incomparable collections of the Bodleian, the British Museum and later Cambridge would serve as Schechter's aquifer to restore the pristine beauty of the overgrown and ill-treated "orchard" of rabbinic Judaism. In the next decade, the most productive of his career, Schechter readied for publication a series of significant unknown midrashic texts that would greatly enrich the related fields of the literary and legal exegesis of the . Similarly, he set about re- covering fragments of the Yerushalmi, even as he increas- ingly focused his attention on the possibility that a lost Hebrew original underlay the Greek text of the apocryphal book of Ben Sira. In brief, Schechter's addiction to manuscripts had primed him to fathom quickly the importance of the hoard amassed in Cairo, when in spring 1896 his wealthy Cambridge friends and twin sis- ters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, showed him a sample of manuscripts acquired on their last trip. Schechter did not discover the Geniza in the ; others like the collector Elkan Nathan Adler had preceded him.11 His historic achievement was to ransack it, an electrifying exercise of good judgment dictated by his intimate knowledge of rabbinics and well-honed appreciation of manuscripts. As he wrote to Mayer Sulzberger at the end of his plundering: "All I wanted was to empty the Geniza of which I wrote to you. In this I have succeeded well. It was a hard piece of work; for weeks and weeks I had to swallow the dust of centuries which nearly suffocated and blinded me (I am now under medical treatment) and the annoyance with those scoundrels of which I had to bakshish constantly."12 Salvaging the inexhaustible contents of the Geniza not only immortalized Schechter's fame, but also determined the rest of his career. The unforgettable photograph of him at Cambride pouring over Geniza fragments while seated at a table in a bare room clut- tered with piles of them was emblematic of a life immersed in manuscripts.13 It also conveyed a sense of the talent and tenacity

11 On Adler, the brother of the Chief Rabbi, , see Great Books from Great Collectors (exhibition catalogue) (New York: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1996), p. 19. 12 Meir Ben Horin, ed., "Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzber- ger" Part I, Jewish Social Studies, 25: 4 (October 1963), pp. 260-261. 13 Stefan C. Reif, Jewish Archive from Old Cairo (England: Cur^on, 2000), p. 87. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT required to bring order out of such chaos. The revelations of the Geniza expanded Schechter's scholarly canvas. He now published in quick succession a host of major finds related to the early history of the Jews under Islam, ever mindful as he confessed to Poznan- ski, of his ignorance of Arabic.14 Simultaneously, his uncanny intui- tion enabled him to identify, on the basis of a medieval manuscript, a second Temple Jewish sectarian group in Palestine, whose library would be unearthed some four decades later at Qumran.15 Schechter's lifelong zeal for bringing unknown documents to light attests to his profound awareness of just how incomplete was the available knowledge of the Jewish past. At the end of his second survey of the 100,000 odd fragments (by his count) that he had rescued from oblivion, he wistfully wrote: Looking over this enormous mass of fragments about me, in the sifting and examination of which I am now occu- pied, I cannot overcome a sad feeling stealing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the results which the Geniza will add to our knowledge of Jews and Judaism. The work is not for one man and not for one generation. It will occupy many a specialist, and much longer than a lifetime.16 In the meantime, he felt strongly that neither ideology nor dogmatism should be allowed to fill in the gaps, or even worse, distort the dots. Nothing is more off putting to the non-scholar than archives and manuscripts. Were Schechter only an exemplar of the painstak- ing tedium of hard core Wissenschaft or the epitome of the austere scholar, he would never have ignited the fervor of the leadership of the old Seminary. But three noteworthy features of his public per- sona, beyond the scope of his scholarship, elevated him well above his peers.

14 Ya'ati,pp. 9, 14-15, 52. 15 S. Schechter, ed. and trans., Fragments of a Zadokite Work (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press., 1910), introduction. 16 Solomon Schechter, Studies in ]udaism, second series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), pp. 29-30. For confir- mation of Schechter's premonition, see the essays in Proceedings of American Academy for Jewish Research, 63 (1997-2001) (Jerusalem and New York, 2001). INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xi*

First, Schechter could tell his story as readily as unearth it. His popular works in English, which abound with knowledge and in- sight, are models of the narrative art. Aided by the literary and edit- ing talents of Mathilde, Schechter came across as a genial raconteur who deftly delivers his point of view with style, wit and convic- tion.17 Like Graetz, Schechter not only consciously lived the ro- mance of recovering the past, but also commanded the ability to imbue his findings with drama, dignity and humanity. His powers of empathy rendered the stones and struts of manuscripts and phi- lology into architectural designs of arresting charm and lasting meaning. Second, at the heart of Schechter's synthetic writings reso- nated a deep and abiding interest in religion. He deemed Judaism to be, above all, a religious phenomenon and labored to illuminate the character of both its normative and divergent expressions, without belittling one at the expense of the other. As he wrote to Richard Gottheil, his American Reform student in Berlin, after his unconventional essay on "The Chassidim:" You will have observed from my paper on the Hasidim, I honor and admire every warm and inner faith. Without faith we belong to the Felix Adler religion, Ethical Science, or to the so-called historical Judaism, which is no less re- pugnant to me ... Theology without God is unendurable. Every earnest man will seek to find a harmony between his thinking and his conduct.18 Schechter challenged the dominant rationalism of his age by writing with feeling about Jewish pietism and mysticism. Nor did he restrict his impressive knowledge of that literature to his essays on the subject. His pioneering Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology was also punctuated with passing references to the ideas of medieval mystics. Schechter's goal was not to turn the rabbis into Greek phi-

17 On the role of Mathilde, see Mel Scult, "The Baale Boste Reconsidered: The Ufe of Mathilde Roth Schechter (M.R.S.) Modern ]udaism 7:1 (February 1987), pp. 10-11. Schechter also benefited from the assistance of his devoted Seminary secretary Joseph B. Abrahams. See the transcript of his interview done by the Seminary in 1956-1957, tape #2 (in Ratner Center General Files for 1957). 18 Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, A Biography (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 71. xii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT losophers. On the contrary, he stressed the unreflective and erratic nature of their religious quest. Rabbis and mystics were cut from the same cloth. Mysticism was not a foreign transplant: "Those who are at all familiar with old rabbinic literature hardly need to be told that 'the sea of the Talmud' has also its gulf stream of mysti- cism ..." Not as theosophy or occultism, "but as a manifestation of the spiritual and as an expression of man's agonies in his struggle after communion with God, as well as of his ineffable joy when he receives the assurance that he has found it."19 Judaism, in other words, was a single tapestry of spiritual profusion that deserved to be judged on its own terms, an act of equity, Schechter contended repeatedly, as yet unaccorded it by Christian savants. Hence the moment and advantage of the insider.20 No one appreciated Schechter's rare capacity to do religion more incisively or earlier than Montefiore. Undeterred by the dedi- cation to him of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Montefiore admonished Schechter shortly after its appearance not to abandon himself to the arcane world of manuscripts. I cannot bear the idea of your devoting yourself to texts. You must train yourself to write, and you must write not only for the learned world. Not bibliography but theology, not antiquity but history, not archeology but religion, these are your themes. The peculiar texture of your mind is not revealed by editing a Hebrew classic; speak out you can, because you have no one to fear and no one to hurt. You have theological capacity. No other scholar that I know has it, and that is why I grieve when you have to work at manuscripts.21 When in the fall of 1901 Schechter informed Montefiore of his decision to leave Cambridge to assume the presidency of the Seminary, he again responded with mixed emotions. The growing corpus of occasional essays of a theological nature by Schechter over the years had only reinforced his judgment.

19 Solomon Schechter, Studies in ]udaism, first series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), p. xxiii. 20Ibid,pp. xxiv-xxv; Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theol- ögy(New York: Berman House, 1936), pp. 151-152, 157-159. 21 Bentwich, pp. 266-267. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xiii*

I grieve that you should leave England with Aspects unpub- lished. It is a great pity that Weber still rightly holds the field: He is criticized, but of what use is that? He is not supplanted ... You have theological capacity. No other Jew- ish scholar that I know of has it, and that is why I grieve when you have to work at manuscripts and trivialities. The years pass; your strength wanes; and that which alone you could have done—a great systematic book on Jewish the- ology—is left undone. There may not be another Schechter for 75 years.22 The final ingredient of the Schechter mystique was the excep- tional fact that his academic career had been spent at Cambridge. The Jewish scholars who spearheaded the turn to history in the nineteenth century had always held that the suitable venue for their new discipline was the university. Their tools and perspectives em- bodied its ethos, yet its halls were still home to the Christian views of Judaism that justified the perpetuation of Jewish disabilities. That rabbinical schools ended up as the institutional setting for most practitioners of ]iidische Wissenschaft came as a bitter disap- pointment. Indicative of the aspiration was the manner in which Heinrich Graetz signed his laudatory 1890 letter of recommenda- tion for Schechter to Cambridge: first came his appointment to the University of Breslau (unsalaried, part-time honorary professor, and only then his lifelong appointment (since 1854) to the Breslau Seminary.23

22 Stein, p. 46. The reference is to Ferdinand Weber's System der Alt- synagogalen Palästinischen Theologie (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1880) which fell far short on expertise, empathy or insight. 23 Unfortunately, I no longer know in which archive I discovered my copy of the letter. Graetz had attended Schechter's wedding on June 22, 1887 in London (Bentwich, p. 75). His complimentary letter reads as fol- lows (trans, mine): "Mr. S. Schechter [he had no earned doctorate] is highly regarded by specialists as an accomplished student of talmudic and rabbinic literature. His mastery has shown itself in several published monographs. To his great credit is his critical edition of Aboth de Rabbi Nathan in which he turned a neglected text into a fertile primary source. Through personal contact with Mr. Schechter, I have had the chance to admire his deep learning in this field as well as his critical acumen. He fully possesses the knowledge and capability to teach rabbinic literature.

Breslau 13 April 1890H. Graetz xiv* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT

Thus Schechter's original appointment to Cambridge in 1890, his promotion to Reader in Rabbinics in 1894 and his additional appointment as Professor of Hebrew at University College, Lon- don in 1897 (to ease his financial constraints) added up to a re- sounding realization of a Wissenschaft dream. In 1889, in the same Hebrew letter in which Schechter reported to his friend, the eastern European scholar and collector, Solomon Zalman Hayyim Halber- stam (whose library was later acquired for JTS by Mayer Sulzber- ger), that he was at work on an essay on Zunz ("of blessed mem- ory"), he revealed that he had categorically "vowed never to take a pulpit, in consequence of which earning a living has become as hard for me as splitting the Red Sea."24 The timing suggests that if not inspired by Zunz, whom he revered, the decision was certainly made in the spirit of Zunz. At great personal cost, Zunz had fought valiantly but futilely to gain admission for Jewish studies into the German university in the era of its ascendancy. To Schechter's great credit, once in the university he quickly became part of it. Though he languished religiously ("You see I become mystical," he wrote in 1897 to Sulzberger before Passover, "a feeling which overcomes me on the eve of our festivals which I must spend here among goyyim, without synagogue and without Jewish friends."), its ambiance steadily fertilized his sprightly world- liness.25 He and Mathilde regularly turned their home into a salon of sorts for Jewish students at the university. Perhaps most ex- traordinary of all in a period rife with religious polemics, Schechter enjoyed the respect and friendship of some prominent Christian members of the Cambridge faculty. Charles Taylor, an authority on early Christianity and editor of a scholarly edition of Virkei y\vot, funded his trip to Cairo26 and James G. Frazer, the renowned au-

Dr. phil. M.A. Prof, at Univ. of Breslau and the Jewish Theological Seminary Member of the Royal Historical Academy in Madrid 24 Yisrael Davidson, "Leqet Mikhtavim Me-Hahkhmei Yisrael le-Shlomoh Zalman Hayyim Halberstam," Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929), pp. 13-14. 25 Meir Ben-Horin, p. 261. 26 Bentwich, p. 126 INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT XV* thor of The Golden Bough, would accompany Schechter on long walks at least twice a week. After Schechter's death, Mathilde ob- served that "their long friendship for each other was verily like that of David and Jonathan."27 Frazer's encomium at the time not only proves the point, but also captures the aura of Schechter's magnetic personality. It would be difficult to say whether he was more admirable for the warmth of his affection or the generosity and nobility of his character, but I think it was the latter qualities even more than his genius which endeared him to his friends. It was a wonderful combination of intellectual and moral excellence, and the longer and the more intimately one knew him, the more deeply did one feel the impression of his greatness and goodness ... 28 Yet, Schechter was not blinded by the luster of the university. Both for personal and idealistic reasons, he was prepared to enter- tain the bold decision to step down from the pinnacle of the aca- demic world rarely reached by any of his peers, for a parochial school in which he might train a rabbinic elite for the modern world.

II Though Schechter served as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for only thirteen years, his imprimatur stamps the institution to this day. Long after his death, its detractors pre- ferred to label it "Schechter's Seminary," and in so doing they actu- ally caught the spirit of the place. The longevity of Schechter's in- fluence is partially a tribute to his singular status and partially a function of the fundaments he laid down. To begin with, Schechter assembled a young faculty of Judaica that blended the learning of the east with the critical tools of the west. Their scholarly attainments over the next half-century would not only vindicate Schechter's judgment, but quickly make JTS the standard bearer of the nascent field in America. In recognition of Schechter's dual role as scholar and institution builder, Harvard bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in 1911, the first time the

27 Scult, p. 27. 28 Bentwich, p. 254. xvi* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT university so honored an exemplar of Jewish scholarship.29 And in 1936 when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary and wished once again to single out Jewish studies, its choice fell on Schechter's bril- liant protégé at the Seminary, Louis Ginzberg.30 In contrast to the old Seminary, the new Seminary was pre- dominantly a graduate school. Admission to rabbinical school re- quired a B.A. Schechter wanted his rabbis to be as well educated secularly as their congregants. Moreover, he was convinced that knowledge of the classics would inculcate respect for antiquity and a conservative frame of mind. "Of course," he said piquantly in 1904, "Greek and Latin are no guarantee against skepticism, but my experience has been that what the thoroughly educated man doubted first and last was his own infallibility."31 By 1906, the rab- binical school had some twenty-one full-time students with another twenty-eight, still short of the B.A., pursuing a dual program in a preparatory division.32 The "of America" which was absent from the nomenclature of the old Seminary meant to underscore the national mission of the new. Neither regional nor partisan, the Seminary was to be a beachhead for critical scholarship and a center for traditional Juda- ism for Jews across America. Schechter aspired to creating a theo- logical school with a soul, "a spot on the horizon where heaven and earth kiss each other."33 He had long made it known to his suitors that "it is not orthodoxy which I wish to save but Juda- ism."34 Schechter's Judaism was to be largely recognized by its inte- rior design, an emphasis that elegantly informed the Colonial archi- tecture of the campus that came to house the Seminary in 1930. What went on inside defined the quality of the culture. From the outset, Schechter embarked on assembling a library that would facilitate the research of his faculty rather than the train-

29 Bentwich, p. 204. 30 Eli Ginzberg, Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginsberg (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), pp. 259-260. 31 Solomon Schechter, Seminaiy Addresses and Other Papers (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1959), p. 60. 32 Mel Scult, "Schechter's Seminary," Tradition Renewed, ed. by Jack Wertheimer, 2 vols. (New York; The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), I, p. 76. 33 Schechter, Seminaiy Addresses, p. 11. 34 Meir Ben-Horin, p. 256. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xvii* ing of his rabbinical students. In this task, he was fortunate to have by his side America's preeminent collector of Jewish books, Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who embodied the continuity between the old and the new Seminary. In 1904, Sulzberger launched the library with the unprecedented gift of his rare books and manu- scripts, along with a small collection of ceremonial art that would eventually proliferate into a full-fledged Jewish museum.35 For Schechter, these priceless remnants were not only objects of study, but also animate expressions of an ever-present past, as exemplified by his use in the Seminary synagogue of the ark from the Ben Ezra synagogue given to him by the Cairo Jewish community in 1897.36 Within the confines of this well-equipped academy, Schechter hoped to educate literate rabbis, at home with the ever more teem- ing canvas of the Jewish past. To be sure, more than sixty per cent of the curriculum was still devoted to the study of rabbinic litera- ture, including the Talmud Yerushalmi. But modern rabbis had to be more than halakhic experts; they had to serve their congregants also as scholars-in-residence for whom nothing Jewish was alien. While Schechter did not expect his graduates personally to advance the frontiers of Jewish knowledge, he groomed them to be able to discourse on the latest findings. More broadly, he wanted them by virtue of their exposure to great scholarship to transmit the feeling of awe that accompanies a moment of discovery. In his inaugural address, he waxed romantic out of deep conviction: ... the sensation we experience in our work is not unlike that which should accompany our devotions. Every dis- covery of an ancient document giving evidence of a by- gone world is, if undertaken in the right spirit—that is, for the honor of God and the truth and not for the glory of self—an act of resurrection in miniature. How the past suddenly rushes in upon you with all its joys and woes! And there is a spark of a human soul like yours come to light again after a disappearance of centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy ... You dare not neglect the appeal and slay this soul again. Unless you choose to become an-

35 Julie Miller & Richard I Cohen, "A Collision of Cultures: The Jew- ish Museum and JTS, 1904-1971," Tradition Renewed, II, p. 312. 36 Bentwich, p. 134; C. Davidson, Out of Endless Yearnings (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, Inc., 1946), p. 77. xviii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT

other Cain you must be the keeper of your brother and give him a fair hearing. You pray with him if he happens to be a liturgist; you grieve with him if the impression left by him in your mind is that of suffering; you fight for him if his voice is for that of ardent partisanship, and you even doubt with him if the garb in which he makes his appear- ance is that of an honest skeptic—"Souls can only be kissed through the medium of sympathy."37 These are the stirrings of a conservative spirit for whom his- tory was not a tool to justify rational views reached a priori. Schechter fully shared the pathos with which Graetz had imbued his nationalistic history of the Jews. Such sentiments made of the past a source of pride and commitment, a force for continuity in an age of unimpeded free choice. Yet on this key occasion, Schechter quoted not Graetz but Zunz, who, to his mind, had done "far more good for Judaism (in his historical works) than any man in the nineteenth century."38 Citing Zunz's credo that "real knowledge creates action," Schechter argued bitingly that "the usefulness of a minister does not increase in an inverse ratio to his knowledge—as little as bad grammar is especially conducive to morality and holi- ness."39 A long line of Jewish luminaries established the deep link between the life of the mind and leadership. The action he envi- sioned emanating from the Seminary would accord with the replen- ished reservoirs of Jewish memory. Later, in a decidedly unsympa- thetic essay on Abraham Geiger, he would declaim: "That history means remembrance, and that remembrance results in hope, which is the very reverse of absorption, was not foreseen by the few his- torians the Reform movement gave us."40 In December, 1906, Schechter publicly aligned his Seminary with the cultural of Ahad Ha'am, to the consternation of his board. A few months before he had composed a Hebrew trib- ute letter to him on the celebration of his fiftieth birthday on behalf of a group of nine admiring Jewish intellectuals that included Louis Ginzberg and . Had he not been abroad, Israel

37 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, p. 17-18. 38 Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, third series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), p. 114. 39 Schechter, Seminaiy Addresses, p. 20. 40 Schechter, Studies, III, pp. 71-72. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xix*

Friedlander also would have signed it. Schechter's signature ap- peared first. The tribute saluted Ahad Ha'am for serving for more than a quarter of a century "as the spiritual center for this genera- tion's refugees and national elite who worry about the survival of the soul of Israel and its Torah. In all this time, you have stood forth as a mighty rock against all the ill winds that blow in our midst."« The pamphlet that followed made it clear just how seamless for Schechter was the connection between Jewish history and cul- tural Zionism. Nationalism had always been a valid and vital com- ponent of Judaism. Tisha B'Av did not celebrate its liberation from the sacrificial cult of the Temple, but recalled the pain of its recur- ring defeat and degradation. What moved Schechter to embrace Zionism now was the misguided ideal of total assimilation through the loss of collective identity. To fortify Judaism and advance the cause of a Jewish state needed the regeneration of Jewish con- sciousness.42 Nevertheless, extreme nationalism had always been repugnant to Schechter. A bitter critic of imperialism, he weighed in against the British on the Boer War.43 His last public address some ten months after the outbreak of the First World War, in which na- tionalism had already run amok, was full of foreboding.44 In his correspondence with Ahad Ha'am Schechter reiterated his deeply held view that above all in Palestine the institutions of Zionism had to be led by leaders steeped in Jewish life and learning, or else secu- larization would unhinge it from the religious moorings which vali- dated and temporized it.45 Yet Schechter never retracted his alle- giance. Instead, abetted by Mordecai Kaplan and Friedlander, he turned the Seminary into a bastion of cultural Zionism in America. Not to be overlooked in this assessment of Schechter's insti- tutional legacy is the founding of the Teacher's Institute in 1909. The expansion did much more than add to the Seminary admini-

41 Norman Bentwich, Iggrot Shneor Zalman Schechter le-J\had Ha'am, Melilah 2 (1946), pp. 27-28. 42 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 91-104; also Schechter, Studies, III, pp. 75-80. 43 Bentwich, p. 103. 44 Schechter, Seminaiy Addresses, pp. 246-247. 45 Bentwich, Iggrot,pp. 28-29. XX* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT stration the young Kaplan as its principal. It eventually made of the Seminary a major catalyst in the chaotic field of Jewish education. As a rabbinical school alone, the Seminary operated at the apex of a pyramid that had no base. Without a network of feeders to provide proficient and motivated students, the Seminary constantly faced the prospect of diluting its curriculum or contracting its enroll- ment. In the decades to come, the Teachers Institute and its gradu- ates would stand at the forefront of the shift away from communal to synagogue schools, of the embrace of summer camping as a venue for serious Jewish education and of the founding of Jewish day schools. Indeed, the increasing synergy between the Teachers Institute and the rabbinical school after 1930 on their newly shared campus at 3080 Broadway greatly enhanced the operation and impact of both. T.I. graduates often made their way into rabbinical school. With Hebrew as its language of instruction, the Teachers Institute intensified the Hebraic and Zionist atmosphere of the entire Semi- nary. The Ramah camps, but an extension of the Teachers Insti- tute, though often led by directors who had graduated rabbinical school, served as seedbeds for future rabbinical students and in time for an ever more literate and observant Conservative laity.46

Still less appreciated is the fact that the Teachers Institute opened the portals of the Seminary to women students making the institution after 1930 just about co-educational. There is no ques- tion that Schechter displayed a lifelong interest in the undervalued role of women in Judaism, triggered either by the formidable pres- ence of Mathilde in his life or his innate liberal frame of mind or his persistent urge to enlarge the canvas of Jewish history. Before coming to America, he had broached the subject in two essays: "Woman in Temple and Synagogue" and "The Memoirs of a Jew- ess of the Seventeenth Century."47 The latter, an extensive review of the diary of Gliickel of Hameln not long after it was first pub- lished, is testimony to Schechter's acute antennae for fertile new

46 For expansive and evocative treatments of the Teachers Institute, see the essays by Harvey E. Goldberg and Baila R. Shargel in Tradition Renewed, I. 47 Schechter, Studies, I, pp. 13-325; II, pp. 126-147. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xxi* primary sources. His introductory comment to the review, despite its saccharin surface, belied an agenda. I found much pleasure in writing it, as the diary is quite unique as a piece of literature, and bears additional testi- mony to the fact that our grandmothers were not devoid of religion, though they prayed in galleries, and did not de- termine the language of the ritual. Theirs was a real, living religion, which found expression in action and in a sweet serenity.48 In conjunction with his own interest, he encouraged , whom he met first on his trip to the States in 1895, to write on the topic of medieval Jewish literature for women, and even urged the Jewish Publication Society in a generous letter of rec- ommendation to commission the work.49 Hence, his decision to let Szold study as a non-matriculated student in 1902 in his new rab- binical school was as consistent as it was courageous. Nor did Schechter drop the cudgels after she left the Seminary. In addition to creating the Teachers Institute, he chose to use his keynote ad- dress at the founding of the United Synagogue in 1913 to make a plea for the extension of religious education to Jewish women.50 On a trip to England several years after Schechter's death, his son Frank gathered information from people who knew him. His notes (courtesy of Prof. Mel Scult) record the following testimony which resoundingly confirms the consistently liberal thrust of Schechter's views on women. Prof. Alice Gardner of the University of Bristol, formerly of Newham College Cambridge, told me at Bristol, on May 18, 1919 that Schechter was one of the first and hottest advocates of degrees for women at Cambridge, and spoke with much contempt and annoyance of "those superior

48 Schechter, Studies, II, p. ix. 49 Bentwich, p. 247; Meir Ben-Hotin, "Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger", Part II, Jewish Sodai Studies, 27:2 (April 1965), pp. 95- 96. 50 Solomon, Schechter, "The Work of Heaven," Tradition and Change, ed. by Mordecai Waxman, (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1958), p. 171. xxii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT

young men, the undergraduates, who want the Universe all to themselves."51 In retrospect, Schechter seemed determined to admit women gradually into that small portion of the universe over which he ex- ercised some control. At services in the Seminary synagogue, men and women sat separately, without benefit of a mehi^ah equidistant from the bimah. In the Teachers Institute, though not in the rab- binical school, rabbis-to-be and women took the same classes. During the week they socialized in the Seminary's dining room and on Shabbat and festivals, at services and communal meals. Many a rabbinical student found his mate in that congenial ambience, often someone whose command of modern Hebrew exceeded his own. The appointment of Sylvia Ettenberg as the first female associate dean of the Teachers Institute in the late 1960's culminated this internal development even as it heralded the growing leadership of women at every level of Jewish education throughout the Conser- vative movement.52 Schechter had not left Cambridge for naught. In but thirteen years, he forged out of the reorganized Seminary a unique center that joined the piety and learning of the east with the aesthetic sensibility and critical scholarship of the west. The mix was both potent and stable. As the Seminary spawned a field of study and religious movement, its institutional culture would retain a remarkable degree of continuity.

Ill Schechter has often been criticized for failing to enunciate a coherent and cogent philosophy of Conservative Judaism. The fault is undeniable, partly because he tried to position the Seminary

51 I thank Prof. Scult for allowing me to quote this passage which he was kind enough to share with me in a personal letter dated July 10, 1993. 52 C. Davidson in her charming biography of her husband Israel Davidson describes the formal yet intimate Shabbat services in the Schechter synagogue ("high silk top-hats and black frock coats or cutaways," p. 77). Though she remained silent on the matter of seating arrangements, her warmth toward the whole experience leads me to conclude there was no mehi\ah to give a highly assimilated woman of German backgrouund a feeling of being excluded or discomforted. On Ettenberg, see Tradition Renewed, I, p. 557 n. 22. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xxiii* above the denominational fray and partly because of his preference for a theology that was neither consistent nor systematic.53 But that does not mean that he left the Seminary theologically rudderless. Schechter embodied rather than formulated the nature of Conser- vative Judaism, and a closer look at his larger-than-life persona, I think, will readily yield a vision of Judaism that is distinctly not Or- thodox or Reform. Schechter had frequent contact with his students. He inter- viewed them when they applied, taught them while in residence and assisted them in their search for a suitable pulpit. Not surprisingly then, it was a student after Schechter died who penned one of the most incisive cameos of him that I know. Judaism was embodied in him; he was its incarnation. He was kin to the great characters whom he interpreted in his Studies, and he understood them without effort, as a man knows himself. When he spoke, his utterances were the expression of all the centuries of Jewish life and experience, and we were awed, feeling that we heard the voice of Judaism speaking through him.54 What lends this portrait its ring of truth is that it highlights not only Schechter's vast knowledge of Jewish sources and history, but also the spectrum of Jewish communities in which he had sojourned for years. His biography recapitulated the odyssey of his people. He had deep firsthand experience of the diversity of Jewish life in the Carpathian Mountains of , German-speaking central Europe, England and America. He knew the fervor of a Judaism born of insularity and oppression as well as the anxiety- ridden Judaism evoked by partial emancipation. Schechter spoke effortlessly of the permutations of Judaism because he had absorbed them from books and in life. The experience of homelessness enriched the insights of scholarship. In an age of specialists, Schechter was entranced by the total- ity of the Jewish religious experience. Growing up in a part of the Jewish world still untouched by modernity imprinted him with the memory of just how truncated was its view of the Jewish past. Any reader of his three-volume Studies of Judaism (long a requirement for incoming JTS rabbinical students) is immediately struck by the

53 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 231. 54 Bentwich, Biography, p. 197. xxiv* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT bracing range of its topics. Schechter wrote with an impressive measure of expertise on the biblical, intertestamental, rabbinic, me- dieval and modern periods of Jewish history. His essays on Jewish mysticism, where he definitely broke new ground, were perhaps most noteworthy. Yet in general he moved effortlessly from Ben Sira to Jesus to the Vilna Gaon, from rabbinic theology to social history to the history of Jewish studies in the nineteenth century. At the end of an extensive review of an anonymously published theological novel on Jesus, Schechter put forth an agenda that ech- oed his own: Those who are so anxious for the rehabilitation of Jesus in the Synagogue had best apply themselves to the rehabilitation of Israel in the Synagogue, that is, to obtain a thorough knowledge of Judaism in all its phases of thought and all the stages of its history.55 The grasp for comprehensiveness attuned Schechter to the complexity of the phenomenon. The study of history constantly added to his appreciation of the fluidity inherent in the formation of Judaism. Against the backdrop of the profusion of plurality, Schechter came to personify a Judaism of polarities firmly held in balance. Time and again, he refused to cut the Gordian knot. Much like the nodes of a battery, the polarities generated the electricity that gave his Judaism its dynamism, his writing its vitality of expression. Though on occasion he yearned for the simplicity of his roots, where the Bible was looked upon as the "crown and the climax of Judaism," he conceded that history was also an arena of revelation. The irony is that while Schechter overtly rejected the "religious bimetallism" of his Wissenschaft patrimony (i.e., revelation in the form of Torah and history), he embodied it existentially.56 His many-sided nature with its appetite for inclusiveness and its tolerance for differences infused the Seminary with its centrist ethos.

55 Schechter, Studies, III, p. 46. The barb against those Jews eager to rehabilitate Jesus was aimed at Montefiore. See Daniel R. Langton, "Claude Montefiore in the Context of Jewish Approaches to Jesus and the Apostle Paul," Hebrew Union College Annual 70-71 (1999-2000), pp. 405- 428. 56 Schechter, Studies, I, pp. xx-xxi. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT XXV*

A few examples should drive home the point: Schechter was neither a mystic nor a rationalist, but rather a man of independent mind who took what he deemed best from both. He read mystical works extensively and wrote on mystical subjects to a degree un- matched by any scholar of his time. It could well be that his interest had its roots in his own Hasidic upbringing to which his Hebrew name, Shneor Zalman, after the founder of the Lubavitch move- ment, bore witness. And yet in the midst of a fascinating and fa- vorable essay on Nachmanides as a mystic, he felt obliged to reveal that he did not rank him above Maimonides. Some writers of a rather reactionary character even went so far as to assign to him a higher place than Maimonides. This is unjust. What a blank would there have been in Jewish thought but for Maimonides' great work, on which the noblest thinkers of Israel fed for centuries! ... None will persuade me that philosophy does not form an integral part of Jewish tradition.57 Obviously, then, Schechter's relationship to mysticism was not unalloyed. In his completed study of rabbinic theology, he admitted candidly that he was repelled by the "idle spirituality," the egotism of "sublime quietism" and the implicit "antinamonianism" that possessed the mystics from time to time.58 As he wrote to Sulzberger in 1896 at the height of his productivity: "The little time I can spare I must reserve for reading of mystics whom I both hate and love too much to neglect them."59 In the same vein, his sympathies for eighteenth-century Hasidism did not extend beyond the generation of its founder. He regarded the institutionalization of the ^addik as fraught with potential abuse and corruption.60 Still, it is interesting that for all of Schechter's ability to work himself into the life and thought of great minds he never wrote a biographical essay on a philosopher. Yet a second example of his bipolar conception of Judaism: Schechter verily bristled at the widely held notion of Moses Men- delsohn that Judaism was a religion without dogmas, with con- straints that were solely of a behavioral and not intellectual order.

57 Schechter, Studies, I, pp. 130-131. 58 Schechter, Some Aspects, pp. 78-79. 59 Meir Ben-Hotin, Part I, p. 255. 60 Schechter, Studies, I, pp. 43-44. xxvi* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT

His early essay on the subject was intended as a corrective based not on speculation but on an abundance of historical research, es- pecially in medieval Jewish philosophy. With Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith as his focal point, Schechter sketched a sweeping history of dogmas in Judaism. His conclusion: Judaism consistently exhibited an inviolable theological center of gravity. It was a his- torical travesty to classify Judaism "among the invertebrate spe- cies."61 It is true that dogmatic propositions often reflected the challenges of the age in which they were formulated, but Judaism never tried to be infinitely adaptable. Schechter cautioned his own confidentially rational age that Judaism is a divine religion with the universal mission to establish God's kingdom on earth. It de- manded of Jews that they invest their lives with holiness in thought and deed and never lose sight of their fallible and sinful nature.62 The polarities which give this essay its resonance are dogma and development. Schechter was prepared to surrender neither. Qua historian, he recognized the pervasive reality of change and diversity; qua theologian, he moved beyond the evidence to avow the existence of God and an immutable core to Judaism. There is indeed development in the history of dogma, but Schechter never allowed it to become the solvent of all continuity. More broadly stated, we have here an incarnation of the polar- ity between the historian and the believer. What makes Schechter a figure of endless fascination is precisely this relentless effort to bal- ance both dispositions. It was Schechter the historian who traveled to Cairo to advance the frontiers of Jewish knowledge, but Schechter the believer who spurned Cambridge to found in New York a fulcrum for the elevation of Judaism in America. It was Schechter the historian who buried himself in the drudgery of de- ciphering, transcribing and publishing lost manuscripts, but Schechter the believer who distilled the meaning of his research for a popular audience. In this regard he saw himself as heir to the leg- acy of Nachman Krochmal and Leopold Zunz, who served both truth and faith with equal fervor. The explosion of knowledge no longer allowed for the comfort of "saving ignorance."63 At the end

61 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 150. 62 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 180. 63 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 46. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xxvii* of his adulatory essay on Krochmal, he summed up their as well as his own two-fold commitment: The only hope is in true knowledge and not in ignorance; and ... his knowledge can only be obtained by a combina- tion of the utmost reverence for religion and the deepest devotion to truth. Reconciliation rested on motivation: Such a knowledge, which is free from all taint of worldliness and other-worldliness, a knowledge sought simply and solely for pure love of God, who is truth,—such a knowledge is in the highest sense a saving knowledge, and Nachman Krochmal was in possession of it.64 So the lodestars of Schechter's firmament were truth and reverence. The Reform revered only that which was both rational and politically correct (in both cases categories essentially defined by outsiders). In recounting the protracted struggle in Breslau between Geiger, the epitome of the modern rabbi, and Solomon Tiktin, who still personified the pre-modern, Schechter came down squarely on the side of Tiktin. Here is how he saw the issue: The one insisted upon his right, as a son of the nineteenth century to unsparing criticism of Jewish institutions and the biblical sources of these institutions, whilst the other, a product of two thousand years of thinking and suffering, clung to the privilege of living in and dying for the law of his fathers.65 Likewise, Geiger fell afoul of Schechter for discarding the ob- servance of Tisha B'Av. "Surely, self-denial will always be more admired than self indulgence."66 As Schechter had told Anglo- Jewry in his peroration, he far preferred "spiritual men" to a "spiri- tual religion."67 Or as he declaimed soon after arriving in America, the constant "occidentalizing (of) our religion — as if the Occident has ever shown the least genius for religion"68 did enormous vio- lence to that which Jewish history had sanctified.

64 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 72. 65 Schechter, Studies, III, pp. 55-56. 66 Schechter, Studies, III, p. 53. 67 Schechter, Studies, II, p. 189. 68 Schechter, Seminaiy Addresses, p. 23. xxviii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT

At the same time, Schechter took repeated aim at the Ortho- dox for their sacrifice of truth to reverence. "Artificial ignorance" could no longer block out the light of new discoveries.69 "It is not by a perpetual Amen to every utterance of a great authority that truth or literature gains anything."70 The educational system of that world put a premium on repetition converting its young men into mere "studying engines."71 The result was a leadership of weak au- thority by which Schechter meant "that phonograph-like authority which is always busy in reproducing the voice of others without an opinion of its own, without originality, without initiative and discretion. The real authorities are those who, drawing their inspiration from the past, also understood how to reconcile us with the present and to prepare us for the future."72

But Schechter was not entirely at home either in the world of scholarship. He described "true science" as a skeptical frame of mind "which looks not at things but into and if possible behind things.73 However, much of what passed for biblical scholarship in the university, he thundered, looked right past Judaism. It appeared intent on showing that the Bible contained nothing original or en- during. The operative assumption of Christian scholars still seemed to be the old theological doctrine that Christianity had superceded Judaism. The task confronting Jewish scholars was to produce a popular modern commentary for "the whole of the Bible (including the Apocrypha)," that drew on the unbroken history of Jewish bib- lical exegesis as well as modern findings.74 By no means did Schechter reject outright. He accepted some of its conclusions and even made a contribution by showing that the Hebrew of Ben Sira from around 200 B.C.E. (which he helped recover), being much closer to mishnaic than biblical Hebrew, precluded the possibility of any of the Psalms dat- ing from the Maccabean period, a theory that he himself once

69 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, p. 15. 70 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 164. 71 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 58. 72 Schechter, Studies, I, p. 212. 73 Schechter, Studies, III, p. 157. 74 Schechter, Studies, II, pp. 200-201. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xxix*

held.75 Rather, it was the excesses that infuriated him. For Schechter, the question was no longer whether the statements of rabbinic tradition on the Bible could be defended in all their details, but whether they contained any truth at all.76 The reason, I believe, that Schechter chose to exclude the study of the Pentateuch (the Torah), from the curriculum of the rabbinical school was not just the precedent set by the Breslau Seminary, where it was barely touched, but that no one quite knew how to teach it. The goal Schechter had in mind required a Schechter to figure out the road to get there. It follows from Schechter's dissatisfaction with his contempo- raries that no institution existed which pursued scholarship in a spirit of utter truthfulness and deep reverence. This was to be the mission of the Seminary, an academy where the value of truth would keep minds open while the attitude of reverence, privileged the past. The lodestars were linked: insight is a function of empa- thy. Schechter agreed with Zunz that scholars contemptuous of Judaism could never adequately write its history.77 Yet the past was not static. The commitment to truth reveals worlds obscured by ignorance. Schechter's interests ranged beyond what he thought to be normative Judaism. From the dust bin of the Geniza he person- ally brought to light documents vital to the history of Jewish sec- tarianism in the Second Temple and geonic periods. Indeed, his own scholarship chipped away at the cherished view of an unbro- ken and unilinear normative Judaism. The screen of our past was destined to show a narrative of untold subplots. To keep this creative polarity in balance, Schechter introduced the concept of "Catholic Israel as embodied in the Universal Syna- gogue."78 In time, he would drop the second half of the phrase. The nomenclature derives from Zunz, who in his dazzling history of (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden), which Schechter heralded as his greatest work, had posited the synagogue as the arena in which the national character of the Jewish people found its

75 Schechter, Studies, II, p. 44. 76 Schechter, Studies, II, p. 39. 77 Schechter, Studies, III, p. 70. 78 Schechter, Studies, I, p. xviii. XXX* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT most authentic expression, a portable homeland in exile.79 More abstractly, the synagogue functioned for Zunz as a conceptual con- struct that identified the purveyor of Jewish continuity and the ar- biter for what is normative. It did so for Schechter as well, irrespec- tive of the name change. Only a religious entity could serve as the bearer of authentic Judaism through the ages. The essence of the Jewish people itself was best refracted in a polarity that kept the national and religious in tandem. In this long view of the synagogue as carrier and court, Schechter embraced a source of authority both old and new. If for the Orthodox the ultimate source of authority was God and for the Reform, the individual, for Schechter it became the Jewish people itself as constituted in the synagogue. In Judaism the people had never been passive bystanders. The faith community had always determined which texts were to be accepted as revelation, even as it had always subordinated the freedom of the individual to the will of the group.80 The climate of nineteenth-century nationalism merely facilitated raising to consciousness the traditional unobtru- sive centrality of Jewish peoplehood in forging the contours of Ju- daism. That is why Schechter and his soulmates found cultural Zi- onism compatible. They had been Zionists long before Zionism came on the scene. Cyrus Adler, who first met Schechter in 1890, and would suc- ceed him as head of the Seminary, already then sized him up to a tee: "He is a devout Jew in his practice with a most liberal con- struction in his ideas."81 The vignette conveys just how pro- nounced were the polarities that pulsated in the man: Historian and believer on the one hand, religious conservative and political liberal on the other. Judaism shared a responsibility with other faiths to better the human condition. Schechter often addressed issues of social justice with evident anger. Few traditionalists of his day could match his condemnation of imperialism, the overheated na- tionalism of the Boer War or his advocacy of women's rights. Re- markably, as early as January 1913 at the dedication of the new

79 Schechter, Studies, III, pp. 112, 115. See also David J. Fine, "The Meaning of Catholic Israel," Conservative]udaism, 50:4 (summer 1998), pp. 41-47. 80 Schechter, Studies, I, p. xix. 81 Scult, Tradition Renewed, I, p. 46. INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT xxxi* campus of Hebrew Union College, he inveighed against the recur- ring massacre of Armenian civilians by the Turks without mention- ing either by name: It is only sufficient to mention here the terrible atrocities perpetrated under the eyes of Europe in the Near East. Men, women and children, all non-combatants, are slaugh- tered by the thousands every day, their number amounting to half a million already ... And yet, no real moral indigna- tion is seen anywhere. We simply put away our papers and enjoy our breakfast as if nothing had happened. We have become so infatuated with the doctrine of the survival of the fittest that we have lost all sensibility to the great moral catastrophes which are passing before our very eyes. And the more philosophy, the more heartless we become.82 Years later in 1927, Louis Finkelstein, then a pulpit rabbi in the Bronx, a member of the Seminary faculty and about to become president of the Rabbinical Assembly, in a memorable reformula- tion merged the persona of Schechter with the essence of Conser- vative Judaism: "We are the only group in Israel who have a mod- ern mind and a Jewish heart, prophetic passion and western sci- ence. It is because we have all these that we see Judaism so broadly .. ,"83 Put differently, Judaism has never turned on a single axis. But the legacy of Schechter's bipolar perspective outlived those who knew him personally. After the Holocaust, none other than Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose tapestry of Jewish worlds experienced was almost as variegated as Schechter's, incorporated the notion of polarities in the fabric of his own unique philosophy of Judaism. He perceived the deep structure of Judaism to consist of an almost endless series of polarities because its experience of God and the world could never be reduced to a cluster of single categories.84 His final two riveting works, in fact, turn on pairs of diametrically opposed religious personalities and constructions of reality—each written in the language of their disputes. The mystic and the rationalist, the lover of humanity and its unforgiving critic,

82 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, p. 243. 83 Louis Finkelstein, "The Things that Unite Us," Waxman, p. 323. 84 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956), pp. 341-347. xxxii* INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT individually entertain a perception which is at best only partial. To gain a full-bodied, three dimensional image, we need two lenses.85 Schechter personified this age-old culture of controversy, where illumination breaks forth from dialectic discourse, and that legacy of polarities in balance still nourishes the Seminary's distinc- tive ethos of complementarity.

Dr. Ismar Schorsch September, 2002

85 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah Min-hashamayim be-A.spaqlariah shel ha-Dorot, 3 vols. (London & New York: Soncino, 1962. New York , The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990). Idem, Kot^k, In Gerangelfar Emesdikeit, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1973). TO

THE EVER-CHERISHED MEMORY

OF

THE LATE DR. P. F. FRANKL, RABBI IN BERLIN

THESE STUDIES ARE REVERENTLY

DEDICATED