| Moses Gaster | |
|---|---|
Moses Gaster in 1904 |
|
| Born | September 17, 1856 Bucharest |
| Died | March 5, 1939 (aged 82) |
| Citizenship | British, after 1893 |
| Alma mater | Jewish Seminary in Breslau |
| Employer | University of Oxford University of Bucharest |
| Title | hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, London |
| Religion | Judaism |
| Children | Theodor Gaster |
Moses Gaster (September 17, 1856 – March 5, 1939) was a Romanian-born Jewish-British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, London, and a Hebrew linguist. He was also the son-in-law of Michael Friedländer, principal of Jews' College. The surname Gaster is taken from Spanish Castro, indicating his Sephardic origin. He was the father of Theodor Gaster.
Contents |
Born in Bucharest, after having taken a degree in his native city (1874), he proceeded to Leipzig, where he received the degree of Ph.D. in 1878 and then to the Jewish Seminary in Breslau, where he gained the Hattarat Hora'ah in 1881. His history of Romanian popular literature was published in Bucharest in 1883.
He was lecturer on the Romanian language and literature at the University of Bucharest (1881–85), inspector-general of schools, and a member of the council for examining teachers in Romania. He also lectured on the Romanian apocrypha, the whole of which he had discovered in manuscript.
Having been expelled from Romania by the Ion Brătianu government in 1885 for allegedly "being a member of an irredentist society", he went to England, where he held a lectureship, 1886 and 1891, in Slavonic literature at the University of Oxford, his lectures being later published as Greco-Slavonic Literature, London, 1886.
He had not been in England many years before the Romanian government cancelled the decree of expulsion, presented him with the Romanian Ordinul Naţional "Pentru Merit" of the first class (1891), and invited him to return; however, he declined the invitation, and in 1893 became a naturalized British citizen. In 1895, at the request of the Romanian government, he wrote a report on the British system of education, which was printed as a "green book" and accepted as a basis of education in Romania.
In 1887 Gaster was appointed hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation in London, in which capacity he presided over the bicentenary of Bevis Marks Synagogue. He was also principal of Judith Lady Montefiore College, Ramsgate, from 1891 to 1896, and wrote valuable essays accompanying the yearly reports of that institution. He was a member of the councils of the Folklore, Biblical, Archaeological, and Royal Asiatic societies, and wrote many papers in the interest of these bodies.
Gaster made a special study of the Samaritans and became a recognized authority on their language and literature. He visited Nablus, the headquarters of the Samaritan community, and induced them to part with manuscripts covering the whole range of their literature. Where he could not secure the originals he had copies made for him by Samaritan priests.
Gaster was among the most active leaders of the Zionist movement in England, and even while in Romania he assisted in establishing the first Jewish colony in Palestine. He was vice-president of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and was a prominent figure in each succeeding congress.
He was a great collector of manuscripts, having over two thousand, mainly Hebrew, Samaritan and Slavonic. At the outbreak of the second World War his collection was moved for safekeeping to cellars in the centre of London. However, water used to quench London fires saturated a large part of the collection, which made some of them illegible in whole or in part. Fortunately many of them had previously been transliterated into Hebrew typescript.[1]
The collection comprised over 10,000 fragments in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo; some 350 Hebrew codices and scrolls including prayer-books of many Jewish communities, apocryphal writings, commentaries, treatises, letters, marriage contracts, piyyutim, and thirteen scrolls of the Law; some 350 Samaritan manuscripts, among them manuscripts of the Pentateuch, commentaries and treatises, and liturgical, historical, chronological and astronomical codices, detailed census lists of the Samaritans and lists of manuscripts in their possession; and almost 1,500 uncatalogued Arabic fragments on paper from the Synagogue of Ben Ezra.[2]
In 1954 the collection was purchased by the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, where it remains. The Rylands Cairo Genizah Project has been in progress for a number of years on the identification of fragments and digitization of images of the texts.
Gaster's major work, in which he invested ten years of his life, was a Romanian chrestomathy and glossary covering the period from the dawn of Romanian literature down to 1830. Gaster also wrote various text-books for the Jewish community of Romania, made a Romanian translation of the Siddur, and compiled a short Scripture history.
A list of major works follows: