Solomon Schechter and medieval European rabbinic literature

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. And recently, Elliot Wolfson has re-assessed Schechter’s trenchant analysis of the mystical traditions in sixteenth-century Safed. The present study sets its sights on another area of rabbinic creativity in the medieval world – rabbinic writings from Christian Europe – where Schechter’s work has gone relatively unnoticed and unremarked. In a brief period during the 1890s, from his vantage point at Cambridge, Schechter published a series of articles that present some of the rabbinic materials that he encountered in manuscripts held at Cambridge and in other European libraries as well. What strikes me as special about these studies is not only the great breadth of knowledge and the suggestive comparisons and associations that Schechter offers, but also the extent and quality ofhis “eye” and his intuition, which enabled him to see and to highlight rabbinic figures and texts that in many instances proved to be crucial to our overall understanding of medieval European rabbinic literature – even as modern scholarship did not fully realize the significance of these works until much later. Our focus will be Schechter’s treatment of five manuscripts from the libraries at Cambridge, the Palatina in Parma, and the Vatican. As we shall see, each of these works has an element of mixed geographic contexts and circumstances, just as they represent different rabbinic genres. Thus, these are all crossroad texts (parashat ha-derakhim), both geographically and intellectually, which I suspect is what attracted Schechter’s attention to them in the first place. Nonetheless, Schechter’s ability to put his finger on these particular texts, in talmudic commentary and Halakhah, piyyut (liturgical poetry), liturgy more broadly, and biblical interpretation – which were composed in Germany, northern and southern France, Spain, and Italy – and to grasp their significance is at times astonishing, especially given the lack of supporting texts and other relevant bibliographic data

Irven M. Resnick. Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages

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