In 1902 Solomon Schechter moved from Cambridge/ England to New York City in order to take office as the director of and instructor in Talmud and history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA). The image displayed shows the first page of Schechter's acceptance letter to Max Cohen, member of the Board of Trustees of the JTSA. After the demise in 1873 of Maimonides College, the first modern rabbinical seminary in the United States, the reform-oriented movement of Judaism established the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1875. In 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the successor to Maimonides College's more traditional orientation, was founded in New York under the supervision of the Reverend Sabato Morais, who had taught Bible at Maimonides College and was the minister of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregaton Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. In 1902, five years after Morais' death, the JTS merged with a new legal corporation: the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA). During the previous decade, the Seminary's leaders had recruited Schechter to succeed Morais and lead the institution.
In his acceptance letter, Schechter expresses his thoughtful balance of reasons about his decision whether or not to follow the call to New York. As Schechter writes, he finally came to the solution to accept the position offered because he felt it was his "duty." In the same letter, he already started the negotiations with the JTSA board about his post, e.g., he raised the question if he was actually going to be the director of the seminary or rather in charge to change and advancing the outdated curriculum. In fact, with Schechter's move to America the curriculum of the seminary was transformed towards the concepts of the European Wissenschaft des Judentums. Higher requirements to the instructors and students and an emphasis on the academic approach would finally change American Jewish scholarship to a great extent and not least cement the formation of a "Conservative" understanding and practice of Wissenschaft des Judentums in the United States.
