Solomon Schechter.  Abraham Lincoln: Memorial Address delivered at the Lincoln Centennial Celebration of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

In ceremonies marking the centennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1909 Solomon Schechter compared Lincoln to Hillel: “We may well be grateful to God for giving us such a great soul as Lincoln.” “[F]rom the moment Lincoln was assassinated, American Jews regarded the martyred president as a national icon who, though not a Jew by birth, was genuinely imbued with Jewish values and had a ‘Jewish soul.’” See Gary Phillip Zola, We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry, a Documentary History (2014); and David Starr, Saving The Union: Solomon Schechter and Abraham Lincoln, in: Modern Judaism (2015) Vol. 35 (3), pp. 302-17.