Rabbi Solomon Grayzel’s Warning Under Oath
When the Supreme Court struck down school-sponsored Bible reading in 1963, it did something rare: it named an expert witness. In Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court repeatedly identified Dr. Solomon Grayzel — a rabbi and renowned Jewish scholar — in its opinion.
Supreme Court majorities almost never do that. But the Schempp Court didn’t merely mention Grayzel in passing. It summarized his testimony at length, and Justice William Brennan quoted him directly in a separate concurrence.
Grayzel was a towering figure in American Jewish scholarship. He led the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) for nearly three decades, authored the influential A History of the Jews (1947), and became one of the country’s most respected religious historians and biblical scholars.
He was also my great-great-uncle.
Gratz College has now published his full trial testimony online for the first time, and reading it — sixty years later, with Louisiana and Texas moving to require state-approved versions of the Ten Commandments displayed in public-school classrooms — feels less like archival recovery and more like a sober reminder.
Like many American school districts during the post-war years, Abington, Pennsylvania began the day with Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer. The school district defended the practice as “nonsectarian,” in part because it prohibited commentary before or after the reading, arguing that outlawing introductions, explanations, or interpretations prevented proselytizing.
Grayzel’s testimony explained why that theory didn’t work. The text itself, he argued, could land as hostile to Jewish students before anyone said a word about it.
The newly digitized transcript lets us hear that argument as it unfolded, including a dramatic exchange the Court’s opinion did not fully capture.
On cross-examination, the school district’s lawyer tried what must have seemed to him a safe example. Even if devotional prayer were controversial, surely the parable of the Good Samaritan could be defended for its “substantial moral value.” Grayzel initially acknowledged that it was generally “a good story.”
But when the lawyer pressed for a broader concession, Grayzel clarified. What followed wasn’t a debating trick. It was the kind of explanation only a scholar (and a rabbi) could give under oath. He explained that the Good Samaritan story was “modified” in a way that “destroy[ed], at least for the Jewish child, all the good that the moral element can offer.”
Grayzel then elaborated, informing the three-judge panel that in the original story, it was a Jew, not a Samaritan, who helped the injured man after the priest and the Levite passed him by in a “cruel act.” Because the Jew was an ordinary Israelite, who did not have to maintain the heightened purity of the priest and the Levite, the moral of the original story is that heroism does not require heightened ritual purity.
However, in the New Testament version of the story, the heroic third figure is not an Israelite but a Samaritan, a religious outsider historically in tension with Jews.
Grayzel testified that the Samaritan character was “deliberately put in as a slap at the Jews of that day who refused to join the Christian Church.” The moral lesson was thus filtered through a contrast in which Jewish authority fails and only the non-Jewish character embodies compassion. Accordingly, Grayzel concluded, children hearing only the New Testament version of the story, might very well be led to believe that Jewish people don’t “understand the decencies of life.”
Grayzel’s conclusion was unambiguous: “I submit to you, sir, that that destroys all the moral value of the story. And I don’t think that kind of story ought to be read in a public school . . . because it makes for division rather than for union.”
That insight — that state selection of sacred texts can divide rather than unite — is what gives Grayzel’s testimony renewed force today.
Louisiana’s 2024 Ten Commandments law and Texas’s similar 2025 bill both require public schools to post a state-approved version of the Decalogue. Supporters describe the displays as civic and historical. But the Ten Commandments, like the Good Samaritan story, are not as ecumenical as they might seem at first glance.
Consider one of the most familiar lines from the King James Bible: “Thou shalt not kill,” which appears in Louisiana’s mandated text, and in Texas’s as well.
In Hebrew, the commandment reads lo tirtzakh, with the verb often rendered as “murder,” not “kill.” That difference isn’t a pedantic quibble. A blanket prohibition on “killing” carries implications that spill into debates about war, self-defense, and abortion in ways that “murder” does not. A state that requires one English phrasing on every classroom wall is not merely encouraging moral reflection; it is choosing which moral universe the commandment will suggest, and whose tradition will feel like the default.
Grayzel’s warning in 1963 was that the text itself can be divisive even — and sometimes especially — “without comment.” The modern Ten Commandments push tests the same idea. Once the state selects, formats, and displays a sacred formulation in a compulsory classroom, neutrality becomes a label, not a reality.
That said, Schempp remains good law. Public schools may not organize devotional Bible readings or mandate prayer, even with opt-out provisions. But Grayzel’s testimony reminds us why the constitutional inquiry has never been only about explicit coercion. It has also concerned civic equality, i.e., the subtle ways in which state-sponsored religion shapes belonging, even when no one is forced to kneel.
The issue was not hostility to religion. It was humility about what happens when the state itself chooses which sacred story will stand for morality in a room full of children.
Sixty-three years later, that room is still full.