Solomon Schechter and Medieval European Rabbinic Literature.

Abstract

Solomon Schechter’s contributions to our knowledge of the rabbinic texts in the Cairo Genizah are legendary. But Schechter also expressed a wide variety of important ideas and theories about rabbinic literature and thought from other locales and periods. Several broad examples of these interests will suffice. At the plenary session of the World Congress of Jewish Studies held in Jerusalem in 1997 – marking the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Cairo Genizah and Schechter’s role in that discovery – Ya’akov Sussman noted that at this point in his academic career, Schechter had been deeply interested in a series of talmudic works such as the Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, and in rabbinic theology as well.1 Moshe Idel, in an article that appeared in the centenary volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 2010, highlights how much Schechter had to say about Nahmanides and the disciplines that he represented, including and perhaps especially Kabbalah.2 And recently, Elliot Wolfson has re-assessed Schechter’s trenchant analysis of the mystical traditions in sixteenth-century Safed.3