He received his early religious education from his father Isaac, who was one of the associate rabbis in Worms and instructed him in Hebrew and the Biblical and Rabbinic literature of the Jews.

[2] When Rabbi Isaac Adler died on December 23, 1822, thirteen-year-old Samuel, his four young siblings, and their mother were left in straitened circumstances.

Adler also revised the German prayerbook introduced by Merzbacher and authored the bilingual A Guide to the Instruction in the Israelitish Religion (Leitfaden für den israelitischen Religionsunterricht)[3] for use in Emanu El's Hebrew Sunday school.

[editorializing] During the twenty-one years of his career in Germany, he campaigned for the emancipation of the Jews from their civil disabilities, especially for the removal of the humiliating oath known as the more judaico.

Adler succeeded in having the Jewish religion taught on equal terms with Protestantism and Catholicism in the lower and higher schools of Worms.

In this endeavor, he frequently drew upon the storehouse of his great Talmudic learning for the arguments that he used in his struggle for progress, always seeking to rest the reformation of manners upon a basis of inward conviction and favoring a gradual transformation rather than an abrupt transition from the old to the new.