Solomon Schechter: a Jewish scholar in Victorian England (1882–1902)

Abstract

November 2015 marked the centenary of the death of Solomon Schechter, one of the most original, accomplished and wide-ranging Jewish scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To explore Schechter’s life, work and legacies, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS) at the University of Pennsylvania joined forces to convene a pair of conferences. One conference, at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, focused on the American chapter of Schechter’s life (1902–15), framed in large part by his stewardship of the Jewish Theological Seminary and his role in the emergence of Conservative Judaism and in American Jewish life generally. The other conference met at the Old Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge, built on the site of the Church of All Saints in the Jewry (the pre-expulsion Jewish quarter).This second conference focused on the English chapter of Schechter’s life (1882/3–1902) and especially his work as a scholar in Cambridge (1890–1902). Five of the seven essays in this special issue of Jewish Historical Studies were delivered as lectures to the Cambridge conference; a sixth, by Mirjam Thulin, is a revision of the lecture she delivered at the Philadelphia conference; and a seventh, by David Starr, builds on his lectures at both conferences.