Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) was a rabbinic scholar and president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America . Schechter was born in Focsani, Romania. His father, a Chabad Ḥasid, was a ritual slaughterer (Ger. Schaechter). In his teens he studied with the rabbinic author R. Joseph Saul Nathanson in Lemberg. From about 1875 to 1879 he attended the Vienna bet ha-midrash. He acquired a lifelong devotion to scientific study of the tradition and developed the central notion of the community of Israel as decisive for Jewish living and thinking. He was to call it "Catholic Israel." From 1879 he studied at the Berlin Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums and at the University of Berlin. When, in 1882, a fellow student at the Hochschule, Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, invited him to be his tutor in rabbinics in London, Schechter accepted. In England he rose to prominence as a rabbinic scholar and spokesman for Jewish traditionalism. In 1890 he was appointed lecturer in talmudics and in 1892 reader in rabbinics at Cambridge University. In 1899 he also became professor of Hebrew at University College, London. Schechter's first substantial work was his edition of Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (1887). His fame rests on the scholarly recovery of the Cairo Genizah . It created a sensation in the world of scholarship, and in its wake Jewish history and the history of Mediterranean society have been rewritten. Over one hundred thousand manuscripts and manuscript fragments were brought to England and presented to Cambridge University by Schechter and Charles Taylor, the master of St. John's College who had made Schechter's trip possible. Together they published the newly discovered fragments of the Hebrew original of Ben Sira (The Wisdom of Ben Sira, 1899). Late in 1901 Schechter accepted an invitation by a number of leading American Jews, notably his friend, Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, to assume the post of president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He served in this capacity from 1902 until his death.

בשער האנגלי: 1896. מסכת כריתות מתלמוד בבלי מכתב-יד משנת ד אלפים תתפ"ג, וקטעים מפרקים ב-ג של מסכת ברכות התלמוד ירושלמי, על פי כתבי-יד מן ה"גניזה" של קהיר. 6 עמ', משמאל לימין: מבוא באנגלית.