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Schechter and Schiller-Szinessy on Scholarship, Theology, and Anglo-Jewish Culture
Tue 02 Dec
|Trinity College, Old Combination Room
Time & Location
02 Dec 2025, 20:00
Trinity College, Old Combination Room, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
About the event
The JHSE Cambridge Jewish History Hub event
Our speaker Aaron Koller (University of Cambridge) will discuss how the place of rabbinic literature in a humanistic education was hotly contested in Victorian intellectual society. The Talmud was regularly vilified or lionized but rarely studied dispassionately. In Cambridge, Talmud was taught by Solomon Schiller-Szinessy, a former Hungarian soldier and Reform rabbi who in 1863 became was the University's first Reader in Rabbinic.
Schiller-Szinessy played a remarkable social and intellectual role on campus in his 25 years here. He also left behind writings that show a profound theological pluralism and which testify to a fluid circle of devoted non-Jewish students around him. On the public stage, he played the role of bête noire of Solomon Schechter – who in an ironic twist of fate, was also his successor. While Schechter’s fame now far eclipses that of Schiller-Szinessy, the differences between them in ideology,…
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