Introduction to the Reprint Schechter's Seminary: Polarities in Balance*

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 Judaism appeared prominently in Schechter's edition of The Fathers According to Rabbi 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 diminished 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 rabbinic 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 Conservative Judaism 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 rabbinic Judaism. 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. Louis Finkelstein, 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 edition 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 Torah is to be found in the libraries of Oxford and London 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 after." 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 Claude Montefiore 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 rabbis. Similarly, he set about re- covering fragments of the Talmud Yerushalmi, even as he increasingly focused his attention on the possibility that a lost Hebrew original underlay the Greek text of the apocryphal book of Ben Sira.

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