He was a disciple of Jacob Voorsanger, the rabbi of Congregation Emanu-El, and with his encouragement he went to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He was there from 1901 to 1902, studying archaeology, ethnology, and Semitic philology while writing several important articles for Jewish periodicals on the condition of Jews in the Holy Land.
He was president of the California Conference of Social Work, the Big Brother Movement of San Francisco, the Pacific Coast Branch of the Jewish Chautauqua, and the Young Men's Hebrew Association.
He was a member of the California Commission of Charities and Corrections from 1911 to 1920, serving as its president for eight years, and a vice-president of the Jewish Publication Society of America.
[4] Meyer's 1907 dissertation, History of the City of Giza, was a scholarly work on Arabic Semitic culture.
His library of Judaica and general religious and philosophical literature was one of the largest private collections in the country.
He was a director of the San Francisco branch of the Archaeological Institute of America and a member of the board of consulting editors of the Menorah Journal when it was launched in 1915.
Murder was suspected as the cause, but it was later concluded he was accidentally poisoned after mounting a Mexican butterfly he received that day; he was an amateur entomologist with one of the largest collections of giant moths and butterflies in the Pacific coast, and at the time a solution of cyanide was used to preserve insects after mounting them.