The Solomon Grayzel Everyone Knows—and the One I Met in a Trial Transcript

Most people who know the name Solomon Grayzel know it in the big, public ways.

They know him as a rabbi, a historian, and a towering figure in American Jewish letters. He led the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) in the mid-20th century for almost 40 years, when JPS helped shape what Jewish learning looked like in English for an American audience. He was the author of A History of the Jews, a book that for decades has been a familiar presence in Jewish classrooms and home libraries. And he conducted groundbreaking scholarship on the Catholic Church and the Jews, work that took medieval Christian policy toward Jews seriously, rigorously, and at scale.

But I came to know him differently—first, as a family name that hovered at the edge of my childhood, and later as a voice I didn’t expect to hear in American constitutional law.

Here’s the strange personal timing: Grayzel died the year after I was born. So I never met my great-great-uncle. I knew of him as the uncle of my grandfather, Bernard Meislin, who was impressive in his own right. A renaissance man, Meislin pitched for the University of Michigan in the late 1940s, became a successful lawyer, and then followed in Grayzel’s tradition by writing Jewish Law in American Tribunals and other works about the intersection of Jewish tradition and American legal life. When he died—far too young—in 1988, he was working on a book about the Ten Commandments.

When I went to law school in the early 2000s, I dedicated my law note about the Ten Commandments and the Constitution to my grandfather. I learned a lot about my grandfather’s work during the writing process. But I learned even more about my “Uncle Sol,” who was not a lawyer.

Grayzel, I learned, testified as an expert witness in a watershed case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

One detail that matters, even if you’ve never read a Supreme Court opinion: the Justices almost never name-check expert witnesses. They did here. In recounting the record, the Court summarized Grayzel’s testimony, which was also discussed multiple times at oral argument.

That alone tells you that Grayzel wasn’t background noise—his testimony helped frame the problem the Court was trying to solve.

The question in the case was whether a public school could sponsor Bible readings or the Lord’s Prayer as part of the school day. Abington defended its practice as “nonsectarian” in part because it was supposed to be done without commentary: no introductions, no questions, no explanations, and no interpretation—on the theory that silence prevented proselytizing and other negative ramifications.

Grayzel’s testimony helped explain why that theory didn’t work. As he testified in dramatic fashion (see below), “no comment” didn’t neutralize the exercise, because the text itself—especially some New Testament passages—could land as sectarian or even hostile to Jewish students even before anyone said a word about it.

The point was not that morality or literature could not be taught. The point was that a state-sponsored devotional exercise is not neutral simply because the teacher stays silent—and that silence can even make the problem worse.

When I spoke to my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins about Grayzel’s role in the Bible-reading case, their memories of it were vague or non-existent.

Book cover: "ELLERY'S PROTEST" with a red vertical stripe over faded text of the Lord’s Prayer in the background.

But in 2007, the story of Grayzel’s testimony got a new lease on life when the aptly named author and journalist Stephen Solomon wrote Ellery’s Protest, about Ellery Schempp and the school prayer/Bible-reading case. In chapter 10, Solomon described a dramatic moment in which Grayzel shined in the face of cross-examination by the school district’s lawyer, C. Brewster Rhoads.

According to Solomon, Rhoads was a well-regarded attorney but was “perhaps a bit unfamiliar with biblical scholarship.” Specifically, Rhoads was “only superficially familiar with the Good Samaritan story,” i.e., the parable found in the New Testament (Luke 10:30-37) about the Samaritan man, who cared for an injured traveler when a Jewish priest and Levite would not.

In Rhoads’ attempt to portray the King James Bible as a “non-sectarian book” that could be used to teach morality and literature, Rhoads asked Grayzel whether the King James Bible contained any passages with moral value or literary merit. When Grayzel admitted that it did, Rhoads broke the most important litigation commandment.

As Solomon put it, Rhoads made “the mistake of asking a question to which he did not already know the answer.” Rhoads asked Grayzel whether the Good Samaritan story was a good example of a biblical story with “substantial moral value.”

In response, Grayzel turned the tables.

After conceding the narrow point—acknowledging that the Good Samaritan was a “good story” with “moral value”—he explained that the passage exemplified the problem with school-sponsored Bible readings. It was “the sort of story which . . . can . . . leave a very harmful effect, destroying, at least for the Jewish child, all the good that the moral element can offer.”

Further, it appeared to Grayzel—a serious biblical scholar—that the Good Samaritan story “was not told originally as it is now told in the New Testament.” In fact, it probably never involved a Samaritan at all. Rather it was likely an Israelite that originally played the heroic role, caring for the injured traveler.

“In the story as it came to be told,” Grayzel testified, “the Israelite was obviously removed and the Samaritan put in. Why a Samaritan? Well, the Samaritans and the Israelites in those days . . . were not on good terms.”

The rest of Grayzel’s testimony on this point is worth quoting in full, because it captures, in a single passage, the problem with the school district’s “neutrality” claim:

Very likely the Samaritan was deliberately put in as a slap at the Jews of that day who refused to join the Christian Church, because the story on the face of it must have been, must have included priest, Levite, Israelite. That was the division. There was no such division as priest, Levite, Samaritan.
Now, you tell this story in a school to a Jewish child or in the presence of a Jewish child and a Christian child and the Christian child has every right to say, “See, you come of a people that is cruel, that doesn’t understand the decencies of life.” And even if the Jewish child is not told that, [the Jewish child] is made to feel that, and I submit to you, sir, that that destroys all the moral value of the story. And I don’t think that that kind of story ought to be read in a public school where there are – in any public school – because it makes for [dissension] rather than for union. [Emphasis added.]

After reading about this in Solomon’s book, I had to get the full transcript of Grayzel’s testimony for myself. So I chased it down. After months of back-and-forth with court archives, I finally obtained it.

Gratz College has now made the transcript of Grayzel’s expert testimony in the Bible-reading case available online. You can read it here.

This is what digital archive projects do at their best. They restore the missing connective tissue between private lives and public history. In Grayzel’s case, that tissue runs straight through a Supreme Court decision that still shapes what public schools can—and cannot—ask a child to endure.

About the Author:

David Charles Pollack is a former editor and writer for the Jewish Daily Forward. He is currently a lawyer in Manhattan and lives on Long Island. He is the great-great-nephew of Solomon Grayzel.

The Solomon Grayzel Everyone Knows—and the One I Met in a Trial Transcript

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