Moses Gaster was a Romanian, later British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation, London, and a Hebrew and Romanian linguist.
21 Facts About Moses Gaster
2.
Moses Gaster was an active Zionist in Romania as well as in England, where in 1899 he helped establish the English Zionist Federation.
3.
Moses Gaster was the eldest son of Chevalier Abraham Emanuel Gaster, who was the consul of the Netherlands in Bucharest and the grandson of Asriel Gaster, a prosperous merchant and community leader.
4.
Moses Gaster was lecturer on the Romanian language and literature at the University of Bucharest, inspector-general of schools, and a member of the council for examining teachers in Romania.
5.
Moses Gaster lectured on the Romanian apocrypha, the whole of which he had discovered in manuscript.
6.
Moses Gaster was a central figure of Hibbat Zion in Romania and played a central role in the 1882 establishment by Jews from Moinesti of the Samarin settlement, known since 1884 as Zichron Ya'akov.
7.
In 1887 Moses Gaster was appointed hakham of the Sephardic or Spanish and Portuguese Congregation in London, in which capacity he presided over the bicentenary of Bevis Marks Synagogue.
8.
Moses Gaster was invited to give the Ilchester Lectures at Oxford which were published in 1887 as Ilchester Lectures on Greeko-Slavonic literature.
9.
Moses Gaster was a member of the councils of the Folklore, Biblical, Archaeological, and Royal Asiatic societies, writing many papers in their interest.
10.
In 1925, Moses Gaster was appointed one of the six members of the honorary board of trustees of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Wilna, alongside Simon Dubnow, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Edward Sapir and Chaim Zhitlowsky.
11.
Moses Gaster made a special study of the Samaritans and became a recognised authority on their language and literature.
12.
Moses Gaster visited Nablus in Palestine, the headquarters of the Samaritan community, and induced them to part with manuscripts covering the whole range of their literature.
13.
Moses 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.
14.
Moses Gaster was a great collector of manuscripts, having over two thousand, mainly Hebrew, Samaritan and Slavonic.
15.
An important early Hebrew codex called the First Moses Gaster Bible was acquired by the British Library from his collection.
16.
Moses Gaster was the father of Jack and Theodor Gaster and the grandfather of Marghanita Laski.
17.
Moses Gaster was son-in-law to Michael Friedlander and father-in-law to Neville Laski.
18.
Moses 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.
19.
Moses Gaster wrote various text-books for the Jewish community of Romania, made a Romanian translation of the Siddur, and compiled a short Hebrew Bible history.
20.
Moses Gaster believed in a scientific study of folklore and did not sympathize with those believing that preserving folklore should mostly serve a political nationalist purpose.
21.
Moses Gaster argued that nothing found in Romanian folklore pre-dated Christianity, and that what appeared as pre-Christian to other scholars in fact derived from a Christian heresy, Bogomilism.