Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) was born in Romania to a Lubavitch Hasidic family. He was initially educated at the Lemberg yeshiva and continued his studies in Vienna and Berlin. He was a professor of rabbinic subjects in Cambridge, England, when he discovered the Cairo Genizah documents. This gave him worldwide renown, and he was soon approached by representatives of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to join their faculty. Although it was not easy to convince him, he eventually arrived at the seminary, where he became president.

The impact Schechter had on the seminary during his thirteen years as president was enormous. He managed to assemble a group of outstanding professors, experts in diverse subjects, who soon made the seminary recognized worldwide as the most prestigious and advanced center in the field of Jewish studies. Also, in a series of letters and articles, he laid the foundations for what would become the movement he was already leading. In 1913, he founded the United Synagogue of America, with the aim of building alliances among all religious groups.

Schechter epitomized the entire philosophical position of the seminary. He spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and German, and had studied in traditional yeshivot as well as in schools in Vienna, Berlin, and London, where he learned the Science of Judaism. He wrote about the mystics of Safed as well as Abraham Lincoln. In his inaugural address, he quoted Whitman, Goethe, and George Eliot along with passages from the Bible, the Talmud, and other religious texts.

He declared his commitment to modernity by criticizing those who refused to acknowledge the great movements and revolutions that occurred in all fields of human thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, reducing them to nothing, as if they had never happened. But he also defended the traditional foundations of Judaism, with all that distinguished it from other religions. He maintained that the Torah was the foundation of Jewish thought, as it had been for thousands of years, always responding to the conditions of each era.

Schechter, like Frankel in Breslau, was able to reconcile seemingly opposing elements of modernity with traditional classical Judaism. His approach was based on the historical and critical study of Judaism, thereby distancing himself from both Orthodox currents, which refused to accept the fact that Judaism had evolved over time, and from the Reform movement, which had eliminated many historically classical Jewish practices.

Schechter did not write a declaration of principles for the new movement, unlike the Reformists, who, with their Pittsburgh Platform, provoked a break with traditional sectors of the American Jewish community. Their ideological openness made them the most flourishing Jewish religious movement in the first half of the 20th century. Without a doubt, Solomon Schechter was the great architect of Conservative Judaism.

By: Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Conservative Judaism by Neil Gillman and other sources.