Schechter was taking courses at the University of Vienna in biblical grammar and other related subjects (he was just three years younger than Wellhausen), biases of this sort extended to the most fundamentallevel of scriptural interpretation, including philology, where, for instance, Wellhausen derived the key Hebrew word “Torah” from the root suggesting the casting of lots or the pronouncement of oracles, rather than from the three-letter radical indicating “the thing taught or reported” or “come down by tradition.” “Wellhausen’s hypothesis,” Schechter noted, “is … strangely in harmony with [his] conception of the law, which thus would originate in a sort of priestly fetisch [ sic ].” For Schechter, however, the heart of Judaism was its unbroken (if often battered) line of transmission—precisely what had been reported or what had come down by tradition—without any loss of revelation’s power. The teaching of Judaism embodied “the effluence of God’s mercy and love,” and its yoke was joyfully taken on through history by “all sorts and conditions of men, scholars, poets, mystics, lawyers, casuists, schoolmen, tradesmen, workmen, women, [and] simpletons.”
Put in the plainest terms, for Schechter Higher Criticism was poorly or barely disguised “higher anti-Semitism”—“German dogs,” he called the beer-loving Wellhausen and his followers—and the Hebrew Ben Sira was the newest weapon with which he could combat them.
It had already been a long fight. The very first article Schechter published under his own name was a short 1881 piece treating the essential distortion of actual Jewish practice and tradition that anti-Semitic bias in scholarship brought about. Two years later he wrote to a younger colleague studying in Germany, “It is sad to see the ways in which Wissenschaft des Judentums [the science of Judaism] is neglected here [in England]. As in Germany with the Bible, here the entire literature of Judaism is taken care of only by Christians.… There is no spiritual life and I feel like death. My only comfort is the manuscripts in the British Museum.”
Over the course of the next seven or eight years, Schechter poured out a steady stream of articles on a wide range of Jewish subjects spanning the centuries, from the Hasidim to the presence of women and children in Jewish literature, from medieval figures such as Maimonides to modernhistorians such as Leopold Zunz—one of the founding fathers of that “scientific,” which is to say also broadly humanistic, Jewish scholarship. Schechter summed up Zunz’s project in an 1888 essay: “To restore the missing links between the Bible and tradition, to prove the continuity and development of Jewish thought through history, to show their religious depth and their moral and ennobling influence, to teach us how our own age with all its altered notions might nevertheless be a stage in the continuous development of Jewish ideals and might make these older thoughts a part of its own progress—this was the great task to which Zunz devoted his whole life.” From that visionary if indirect statement of Schechter’s own mission—he was clearly aligning himself with the great leaders of the Jewish past—it isn’t far to Ben Sira’s heart and substance. For an authentic Hebrew Ben Sira would confirm the existence of a moral and spiritually vital Second Temple Judaism far removed in both time and practice from the “source” revelation and yet hardly desiccated by excessive legalism or the mechanical maintenance of priestly rites.
Because of its core ethical focus and concern with transmission, Ben Sira was beloved among the rabbis of the early talmudic period. In fact, they prized the collection of hymns and homiletical verse so (one might think of it as a kind of rabbinic self-help manual—an epigrammatic miscellany of manners, morals, and the ways of wisdom and the world) that they set it almost on par in importance with the
Put in the plainest terms, for Schechter Higher Criticism was poorly or barely disguised “higher anti-Semitism”—“German dogs,” he called the beer-loving Wellhausen and his followers—and the Hebrew Ben Sira was the newest weapon with which he could combat them.
It had already been a long fight. The very first article Schechter published under his own name was a short 1881 piece treating the essential distortion of actual Jewish practice and tradition that anti-Semitic bias in scholarship brought about. Two years later he wrote to a younger colleague studying in Germany, “It is sad to see the ways in which Wissenschaft des Judentums [the science of Judaism] is neglected here [in England]. As in Germany with the Bible, here the entire literature of Judaism is taken care of only by Christians.… There is no spiritual life and I feel like death. My only comfort is the manuscripts in the British Museum.”
Over the course of the next seven or eight years, Schechter poured out a steady stream of articles on a wide range of Jewish subjects spanning the centuries, from the Hasidim to the presence of women and children in Jewish literature, from medieval figures such as Maimonides to modernhistorians such as Leopold Zunz—one of the founding fathers of that “scientific,” which is to say also broadly humanistic, Jewish scholarship. Schechter summed up Zunz’s project in an 1888 essay: “To restore the missing links between the Bible and tradition, to prove the continuity and development of Jewish thought through history, to show their religious depth and their moral and ennobling influence, to teach us how our own age with all its altered notions might nevertheless be a stage in the continuous development of Jewish ideals and might make these older thoughts a part of its own progress—this was the great task to which Zunz devoted his whole life.” From that visionary if indirect statement of Schechter’s own mission—he was clearly aligning himself with the great leaders of the Jewish past—it isn’t far to Ben Sira’s heart and substance. For an authentic Hebrew Ben Sira would confirm the existence of a moral and spiritually vital Second Temple Judaism far removed in both time and practice from the “source” revelation and yet hardly desiccated by excessive legalism or the mechanical maintenance of priestly rites.
Because of its core ethical focus and concern with transmission, Ben Sira was beloved among the rabbis of the early talmudic period. In fact, they prized the collection of hymns and homiletical verse so (one might think of it as a kind of rabbinic self-help manual—an epigrammatic miscellany of manners, morals, and the ways of wisdom and the world) that they set it almost on par in importance with the
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