counter- reform 491
Conservative Judaism
The story of ‘positivist historical’ Judaism begun by Zacharias Frankel
at the same time as Hirsch’s neo- orthodoxy in the mid- nineteenth cen-
tury belongs even more than Hirsch to the Jews of the United States. In
Germany, the rabbis who graduated from Frankel’s Jüdisch- Theologische
Seminar in Breslau, where they received a basically orthodox training
alongside critical study of the ancient sources in the spirit of the univer-
sities, went on to serve either relaxed orthodox communities or, in some
cases, Reform congregations. In America, however, Frankel’s emphasis
on the history and tradition of Israel as the source of law and tradition
became the basis of Conservative Judaism under the inspiration of Solo-
mon Schechter in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In 1883, three years before Moses Gaster, after studying in the Bre-
slau Seminar, was to move to England to teach in Oxford and become
the haham of the orthodox Sephardi community, as we have seen (p.
444), Solomon Schechter, another Romanian, was persuaded by Claude
Montefiore, a fellow student at the newly founded Reform Hochschule
für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, to go to London as Mon-
tefiore’s tutor in rabbinics. That Montefiore had needed to use his ample
means to import such teaching illustrates the dearth of rabbinic learning
in the United Kingdom at this time. But Schechter, the son of a Habad
hasid, rapidly proved himself a remarkably productive critical scholar,
and in 1890 he was appointed to a post teaching talmudics at Cam-
bridge. There he became famous for bringing to Cambridge much of the
huge archive of manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah which provides
such an important source of evidence for Judaism in the Middle Ages.
It was from this scholarly, academic background that Schechter was
lured in 1902 – in the same year that his erstwhile employer and pupil
Claude Montefiore founded the radical Reform Jewish Religious
Union – to head the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which
had been founded fifteen years earlier by the Italian rabbi Sabato
Morais. (Morais himself had at one time worked for the Spanish and
Portuguese Congregation in London where Gaster became haham, and
saw the role of the Seminary as the training of rabbis in traditional
Judaism precisely in order to counter the lure of radical Reform. One of
the eight students in the first class at the Seminary was Joseph H. Hertz,
who, as we have seen (p. 479), was later to be chief rabbi of the British
Empire.) Schechter’s ability to tread a path between orthodoxy and