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Cedars of Lebanon:
A Jewish Boswell
- Abstract
Solomon Schechter is best known as an important Biblical and Talmudic scholar, but there was a lighter side to him as well. Before coming to this country to assume the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902, Schechter had been Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, and like many British dons of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, he enjoyed escaping scholarly discipline from time to time by putting his learning to more fanciful uses in belle-lettristic essays. The following piece, in which Schechter compares Boswell to Rabbi Solomon of St. Goar, a scholar of the 15th century who faithfully recorded the sayings and habits of his master Rabbi Jacob the Levite (“Maharil”), is an example of this characteristically English genre. “A Jewish Boswell” is taken from Scheduler’s Studies in Judaism, First Series (Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1938).
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