One of the unexpected pleasures of the dark days of lockdown was the enforced leisure time. For me, rediscovering books and photographs that I never knew I had, was part of that experience. I stumbled on one such book, an illustrated history titled The Jews in South Africa, superbly written and compiled by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain. On one of the pages in a section about South African Jewish women in the early part of the 20th century, my eye was drawn to a short piece titled “Ruth Schechter – A Radical Departure.”
Ruth Schechter was the eldest daughter of Solomon Schechter the great Cambridge scholar of the Cairo Genizah. Growing up in South Africa the name of Solomon Schechter meant very little to me. (Conservative Judaism did not embed itself in the South African Jewish community). It was only when I was an adult visiting my sister and her family in Dallas, Texas, that I first came across the name. The Solomon Schechter Jewish Day Schools are well known to American Jewry. There are five such schools in Texas alone and at least one in Dallas.
The schools are named after Rabbi Solomon Schechter. Solomon Schechter was a Moldavan-born rabbi, academic scholar and educator, and an architect of American Conservative Judaism. He was a child prodigy, at first educated by his father, a shochet (ritual slaughterer and hence the family name Schechter) and member of the Chabad movement. Ironically Solomon was named after the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi who founded Chabad. The young Solomon purportedly could read Hebrew by the time he was three years old. He mastered Chumash at the age of five. He learned in a yeshiva and studied Talmud with one of the major Talmudic scholars of the day, Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson of Lemburg. (Lvov). By the time he was 20 he began to embrace more radical ideas. He attended the Rabbinical College in Vienna under Meir Friedmann, a more modern Talmudic scholar. In 1879, Schechter moved to Berlin where he furthered his studies at the University of Berlin. In 1882 he was invited to London to be the tutor of rabbinics under Claude Montefiore the intellectual founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism. In 1887 Schechter met and married Mathilde Roth. She was born and raised in Breslau in Prussia (now Wroclaw, Poland). They lived in Cambridge and in London and in 1890 Schechter was appointed as a lecturer in Talmudics and a reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University. One of Solomon Schechter’s most prestigious accolades was his discovery and excavation of documents from the Cairo Genizah in 1896. The discovery included a unique collection of over 300,000 documents including rare Hebrew manuscripts and medieval Jewish texts that were concealed in the attic of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Fustat in Old Cairo. Schechter was ultimately responsible for bringing the documents to England which then led to the setting up of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah library and research center in Cambridge. The discovery completely transformed the study of Medieval Judaism.
In 1902 the Schechters immigrated to the US. The rabbi’s wife, Mathilde, was somewhat overshadowed by her husband’s celebrity at that time. Nevertheless, she was incredibly successful in her own right. Upon moving to the United States, she established and taught at the Colombia Religious and Industrial School for Jewish Girls on the East Side of Manhattan in New York. She also became acquainted with Henrietta Szold and helped her found the Hadassah organization. Mathilde appears to have been an unrecognized leadership role model for American Jewish women at the turn of the 20th Century. She may even have been an unwitting influence on the radical emancipation of her two daughters. The Shechters had three children, the eldest of whom was Ruth who was born in 1888. Their only son, Frank Schechter, was born in 1890 and the youngest daughter, Amy, was born in 1892. The Schechter family was a typical product of the Haskalah (enlightenment), an intellectual movement that endeavored to educate and influence Jews to integrate and be part of modern secular life rather than live within the confines of an ethnocentric Jewish community. It was the Jewish manifestation of the Age of Enlightenment which swept across Europe in the 19th Century.
The story of Ruth Schechter is a perfect example of the schisms which began to divide Jewish society at that time. Much of her history was researched and written up by a South African historian and anti-apartheid activist by the name of Baruch Hirson. Ruth was born in May 1888 in London. She first met her future husband Morris Alexander in Cambridge when she was 12 years old. She agreed to marry him in 1907 at the tender age of 18 when he decided to immigrate to South Africa. They had their honeymoon in Europe and attended the 8th Zionist Congress in The Hague on their way to Cape Town. Their decision to move to South Africa raised a few eyebrows among Ruth’s friends who asked:
“What will she do in that outlandish place?” To which her father answered: “Perhaps she will see Olive Schreiner.”
He had read Schreiner’s first novel, The Story of an African Farm. According to a lecture given by Ruth in 1929, Solomon Schechter had heard about Schreiner’s defence of the Jews who were being murdered in the pogroms of Czsarist Russia. Perhaps he had also heard of Olive Schreiner’s defense of the right of Jews to come to South Africa when she supported the idea of recognizing Yiddish as a European language. Without this recognition, Jews would have been denied entry to South Africa at that time. Morris Alexander, a qualified lawyer, played a huge part in getting legislation passed in the Cape to this effect. Ruth became acquainted with Olive and the two women established a close friendship. In 1910 Ruth’s father, mother and sister visited South Africa and were introduced to the famous writer whose company and friendship they enjoyed. Ruth, like her mother was a strong character with her own fixed opinions.
Nevertheless, her writer friend became her mentor and guiding light throughout her life. Initially Ruth’s marriage was a happy one. She and Morris enjoyed an orthodox Jewish way of life and had three children. She then began to move in different circles. Through Olive Schreiner’s tutelage she became friendly with a group of intellectuals many of whom were academics or connected to the University of Cape Town. Despite having only achieved a secondary school education, Ruth was a bright woman. In her youth she had assisted her scholarly father and learned a great deal from him. She found a job at the University while her husband advanced his career in mainstream liberal politics.
He also devoted much of his time to the Jewish community and eventually headed the Cape Jewish Board of Deputies. At that time non-white South Africans were beginning their struggle for equal rights. Morris Alexander supported Gandhi and campaigned for women’s suffrage. The suffragette movement was in full flow and Ruth and her circle of high profile women friends actively took part in the struggle not only for white women but for all women to have the vote. It was at about that time that Ruth met Benjamin Farrington, a lecturer in Classics at the University. He was an Irishman, three years her junior, not Catholic but a member of Sinn Fein and a fervent supporter of Irish nationalism and liberal causes. Ironically when he visited Johannesburg, he was less perturbed by the racial segregation and discrimination that he encountered there, regarding it as a natural phenomenon of colonial life. In Russia the Revolution had begun and Lenin was in the ascendancy. Olive Schreiner and her intellectual “set” saw revolutionary communists as redeemers who had come to save the world’s proletariat population from the poverty and suffering that had been inflicted upon them by Europe’s reactionary crowned heads, amongst whom were the Kaiser, the Czar and even the Catholic Church. Later on in her life, Schreiner became an avowed communist who hero worshiped Stalin.
At that time no one could have predicted what a monster Stalin would turn out to be. Schreiner was also an agnostic and soon exerted a strong influence on her young protégé. Ruth began to write articles and deliver lectures in Cape Town. Benjamin Farrington was a frequent visitor to the Alexander household. By now the Alexanders had three children, two daughters and a son. Ruth’s relationship with Farrington was turning into an affair. Her politics lurched to the extreme left. She deliberately chose to withdraw from Jewish and Zionist circles regarding the community as too bourgeois.
Her behavior and controversial activities did not escape the attention of the tightly knit Jewish community. Despite the fact that she and Farrington attempted to be discreet, Ruth Alexander was too high profile a figure for her conduct to have gone unnoticed. Tongues were wagging and by the time she left South Africa in 1933, she was virtually ostracized by the Cape Jewish establishment. She accompanied Farrington to the UK. Apart from his Sinn Fein affiliations, he was also an Irish Communist and propagandist for the British-Soviet Unity Committee. In 1935, she and Morris Alexander were divorced. Ruth subsequently married Farrington. She had gained custody of the three children. Sadly both daughters suffered from mental health problems. The eldest, Esther ended up in a mental institution for the rest of her life.
The younger daughter, Muriel, also suffered with mental health problems and was frequently put under psychiatric care, spending long periods in care homes for the mentally ill. Her youngest child, Solly, was an intelligent fellow. He studied science in Cape Town and medicine in London. He was married twice and had three sons. He eventually immigrated to Australia and seemingly severed all ties with his parents. The sad story of the Schechter children does not end there. Ruth’s younger sister Amy somehow followed in her sister’s footsteps although the two women were not always in touch. She returned to the US and became a card carrying member of the Communist party. She was sent to the Lenin School in Russia and spent time in Siberia immersing herself in Soviet communist doctrine. She returned to the United States and became an activist for workers’ rights.
Having renounced her faith and her heritage, she died in 1962 at the age of 69 in the Beth Israel hospital in New York. With very little money to her name she relied on handouts from loyal family members throughout her life and was buried in the Schechter family plot together with her parents and brother and other family members.
In researching this article I was dismayed to read about the family’s rather sad and controversial history. I wondered whether there were any redeeming aspects to the story. The redemption appeared when I stumbled on some photographs of Jewish headstones. The larger one was of a memorial to Frank Schechter and the smaller one was of the gravestone of Daniel S. Schechter, Frank’s only son. I read that Frank Schechter had become a renowned Trademark lawyer in America. He was a committed Jew and his son Daniel followed in his footsteps. Daniel died young at the age of 47 and left a widow. He chose a career in journalism as opposed to academia and lived his life as “a proud and learned Jew” according to his son Dave Schechter.
Dave, I discovered, is a prominent media man in his own right. He began his career as a newspaper man and then moved to television. He worked for CNN as bureau producer for CNN in Jerusalem in the mid 1980s and then as an editor for the next 26 years. He is now a distinguished freelance writer and often writes about the Jewish world. His brother is a retired Conservative rabbi, Rabbi John Schechter. The Schechter story reads like a novel or the screenplay of an epic movie with all its twists and turns. Despite all of this, Solomon Schechter’s Jewish legacy does live on in his two great-grandsons and in the family’s contribution to Jewish culture.