Avot de-Rabbi Natan (The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan), one of the so-called extra-canonical minor tractates of the Talmud, generally printed at the end of the fourth division Nezikin, of the Babylonian Talmud. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan is clearly a commentary, that is, a kind of Talmud on treatise Avot. To be precise, in its 41 chapters, Avot de-Rabbi Nathan is a commentary on an early form of the Mishnah Avot, before that treatise was finally edited by R. Judah ha-Nasi and his successors. It is even possible that Avot de-Rabbi Nathan is so called, because it was organized as a commentary on a recension of Avot prepared by the Babylonian R. Nathan who was an older contemporary of R. Judah ha-Nasi. The Avot underlying Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, for example, preserves the original order of the statements from the Men of the Great Assembly down through the leading disciples of Rabbi Johanan b. Zakkai (in existing Avot editions that order has been interrupted by interpolations which constitute the block of sayings between 1:16 through 2:7); the original form of certain ancient sayings is still to be discerned in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (for example, compare Avot 1:5 as it reads in the Mishnah, with Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, chapter 7); on occasion the reading in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan makes intelligible a difficulty in the received Avot text (compare, for example, the statement attributed to R. Eliezer in Avot 2:10 with the Avot de-Rabbi Nathan reading in chapter 15).

Solomon Schechter was the president of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; formerly reader in rabbinics at Cambridge University; born in Rumania in 1847. His youth was devoted exclusively to the study of rabbinical literature. He then went to Vienna, where he studied Jewish theology in the bet ha-midrash under Weiss and Friedmann, and attended lectures on philosophy and other secular branches of learning in the University of Vienna. After receiving his rabbinical diploma from Weiss, he continued his secular and theological studies in the University of Berlin, and attended Talmudical lectures by Dr. Israel Lewy. In 1882 Schechter went to England as tutor in rabbinics to Claude G. Montefiore. In 1885 he published his first essay, "The Study of the Talmud," in the "Westminster Review." In 1887 appeared his edition of "Abot de-Rabbi Natan," and he then wrote various essays and lectures in the "Jewish Chronicle," "Jewish Quarterly Review," "Revue des Etudes Juives," and "Monatsschrift." Some of these lectures and essays were afterward collected and published under the title "Studies in Judaism" (1896). In 1890 Schechter was elected lecturer in Talmud at the University of Cambridge, and in 1891 the degree of M.A. ("honoris causa") was conferred upon him.