SCHECHTER, SOLOMON (c. 1847–1915), was a Talmud scholar and educator. A product of four distinct European cultural ambiences, Solomon Schechter came to New York in 1902 to lead a reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary of America. During the thirteen years of his presidency he exerted a formative influence on an emergent American Judaism by facilitating the gradual transfer of the academic study of Judaism from the old to the new world and by creating the institutions, leaders, and rhetoric of a movement for Conservative Judaism.

Born in the still largely traditional Jewish society of eastern Romania, Schechter came to Vienna in his mid-twenties with a formidable mastery of classical Jewish texts. A four-year stay in the 1860s at the rabbinical school founded by Adolf Jellinek gave him rabbinic ordination, command of the new Western methods of Jewish scholarship, and a lasting affection for his teacher, Meir Friedmann. In 1879 Schechter...