The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter's Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement by Michael R. Cohen (review)

Michael Cohen's book returns discussion of the Conservative movement to the charismatic figure of Solomon Schechter and the disciples who set out from New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) to re-make American Jewry. Cohen rejects earlier foci on either the European ideological origins of Breslau's Jüdisches Theologisches Seminar or the earlier American version of JTS founded in the 1880s by Sabato Morais, Alexander Kohut and others. Instead, Cohen argues from an impressive number of previously ignored seminary records, unpublished letters from disciples, and other sources that Conservative Judaism must be understood as a twentieth-century American phenomenon. Cohen's argument may come as no surprise given the sort of inquiries into Reform Judaism inaugurated by Leon Jick's The Americanization of the Synagogue and Jeffrey Gurock's numerous studies of American Orthodoxy. But nobody in recent years has examined the Conservative movement along these lines, and the results of Cohen's inquiry are persuasive. Cohen succeeds in showing that Schechter (and his wife Mathilde) exerted the kind of charismatic appeal limned in Max Weber's theory and that Schechter's disciples successfully routinized his vision after his death in 1915.

Cohen also goes beyond the standard characterization of the Conservative movement as a product of a rabbinic leadership mediating the demands of a non-observant laity and an imperious seminary faculty. While acknowledging the tension between folk and elite, Cohen demonstrates the myriad ways in which Schechter's disciples (including Louis Epstein, Solomon Goldman, Charles Hoffman, Jacob Kohn, Israel Levinthal and Herman Rubenovitz) applied Schechter's vision in the respective congregations they served. In many cases, they provided each other the encouragement to stay the course against challenges from the Orthodox right, the Reform left, and their own congregations. The role of their rabbinic colleagues gets highlighted relative to the role of their rebbetzins, which might have been explored further, following Shuly Rubin Schwartz's work.

While Cohen discusses the usual suspects such as Louis Finkelstein, Louis Ginzberg and Mordecai Kaplan, one of the great merits of Cohen's book is to cast light on these lesser luminaries. The disciples did not always see eye-to-eye. Cohen's third chapter details the different paths taken by a "heretic" (Mordecai Kaplan) and a "maverick" (Herbert Goldstein) as they both pulled away from Schechter's vision of a Catholic Israel toward more ideological formulations. (In the case of Kaplan, Cohen assumes readers will know that Kaplan continued at the JTS Teachers Institute long after he had articulated his Reconstructionist philosophy.) The disciples' rabbinic work went beyond serving their congregations to create the umbrella organizations typical of American Judaism. While the congregational umbrella, the United Synagogue of America, struggled to achieve influence in the interwar years, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA) proved more durable. Cohen accounts for the varying degrees of success with due attention to Conservative Judaism's in-fighting. Schechter's successor at the helm of JTS, Cyrus Adler, disliked the way the United Synagogue shared power between seminarians and pulpit rabbis, while the RA enjoyed greater autonomy. Cohen carefully qualifies his findings and acknowledges that movement coherence often conflicted with the desire to provide a "big raft" for traditional-minded American Jews. In Cohen's view, the conflicts came from the religious right more than the left, with several key figures personally associated with Schechter ultimately joining the Orthodox Union outright, rejecting the RA's preferred solution to the agunah issue, and denouncing the disciples' implementation of Schechter's sometimes cryptic dicta.

Cohen's focus on Conservative Judaism sometimes leaves Reform and Orthodoxy less than fully drawn, but that is a small quibble over a terrific book, and I am more inclined to fault overzealous editors than the author. This is a book more likely to be read by professional historians than laypeople. For...