The Breslau Seminary and Conservative Judaism's American Descent

In 1854 Frankel became founding director of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, the first rabbinical school explicitly organized around his Positive-Historical method, combining traditional Talmudic training with the critical historical scholarship of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement his own approach was closely allied with. He led the seminary until his death in 1875, training rabbis who carried his method across German-speaking Europe and, through their students in turn, to the United States.

That American transmission proved to be Frankel's most durable legacy. Solomon Schechter and the other founders of the American Jewish Theological Seminary in the early twentieth century drew directly on Frankel's Positive-Historical principle, that Jewish law binds while also developing historically through communal practice, in building what became Conservative Judaism, the movement that today occupies roughly the position between Orthodox and Reform that Frankel had staked out in Dresden and Breslau nearly a century earlier. Frankel himself never used the name Conservative and never set foot in America, but the seminary model he built at Breslau, and the specific balance of binding law and historical development he argued for against both of his era's more polarized alternatives, is the direct ancestor of the movement that bears that name today.