Moses Gaster

Moses Gaster (1904)

Moses Gaster (born September 16, 1856 in Bucharest , † March 5, 1939 near Abingdon , England ) was the Sephardic Chief Rabbi ( Chacham ) of England 1887-1918, a Jewish scholar and folklorist.

Life

Gaster came from a respected Jewish family in Bucharest, his grandfather was the founder of a synagogue and his father a Dutch consul in Romania. Gaster went to grammar school in Bucharest and from 1876 studied at the Jewish theological seminary in Breslau with Heinrich Graetz and Zacharias Frankel and at the University of Breslau (oriental studies, linguistics, biblical studies). In 1877 he received his doctorate at the University of Leipzig with a thesis on the historical phonetics of Romanian. In 1878 he was a member of a committee in Berlin that campaigned for Jewish emancipation in Romania. In 1880 he returned to Bucharest, where he dealt, among other things, with Romanian folk literature, on which he published his Magnum Opus in 1883 , on which he had worked for ten years, and gave lectures on comparative mythology, Romanian language and Romanian literature at the university. He was also general inspector of schools and on the teachers' examination board. He was one of the first Chowewe Zion in Romania and was on their central committee from 1882 to 1884.

He was expelled from Romania in 1885 because of his public protest against the anti-Jewish policies of the Romanian government. He went to London , was a lecturer in Slavic studies at Oxford University from 1886 to 1891 and had been a rabbi in the Portuguese (Sephardic) community in London from 1887, despite his Ashkenazi descent. He was director of Montefiore College in Ramsgate , which he organized along the lines of the Breslau seminary. He had a leading role in English Jewish circles and the English Zionist movement.

The Romanian government also rehabilitated him, honored him with the Order of Merit and invited him to return, which he refused. In 1891 he received the Romanian Ordre pour le Mérite first class and he wrote a report on the English school system for the Romanian government, which was also influential in the reform of the teaching system in Romania.

He was the vice-president of the first Zionist congress in 1897 and the second, third, fourth and seventh congresses. At the third Zionist Congress in Basel in 1899, he had a heated argument with Theodor Herzl , in which Gaster finally had to admit defeat. At the fourth Zionist Congress (London 1900) Gaster held the presidency together with Max Nordau for a time .

Moses Gaster was friends with Sir Francis Montefiore (1860-1935), whom he won for Zionism.

As a folklorist, Moses Gaster published first editions of Hebrew and Samaritan works from the early Middle Ages, as well as English translations of ancient Yiddish literature (e.g. the Ma'assebuch ). Alongside those of Sassoon , Seligmann and Schocken, his private library was one of the most important of the first half of the 20th century. Jewish topic and included u. a. Thousands of valuable Hebrew, Samaritan and Slavic manuscripts. In the collection with over 2000 manuscripts there were also over 10,000 fragments from the Genizah of the Ben Ezrah Synagogue in Old Cairo. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved to a London cellar, it suffered severe water damage - but large parts had already been transcribed. In 1954 it was acquired by the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester .

He was President of the Folklore Lore Society , President of the Jewish Historical Society, and Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society .

His nephew was the physicist John Ziman .

Fonts

• Studies and Texts in Folklore-Lore, Magic, Medieval Romance, Hebrew Apocrypha and Samaritan Archeology , three volumes, London, Maggs Brothers, 1925–1928 (collection of his essays), Reprint New York 1971
• Literatura populară română , Bucharest 1883 (his history of Romanian folk literature)
• Chrestomaţia română , 2 volumes, Brockhaus, Leipzig, Bucharest, 1892
• Ilchester Lectures on Greco-Slavonic Literature and its relation to the folk-lore of Europe during the Middle Ages , London 1886 (lectures Oxford)
• The Samaritans. Their history, doctrines and literature , Oxford University Press 1925
• Samaritan oral law and ancient traditions , The Search Publishing Company, London 1932
• The sword of Moses. An ancient book of Magic , London, Dutt 1896
• Editor and translator of ha-Levi El`Azar ben Asher The chronicles of Jerahmeel , London, Royal Asiatic Society 1899
• Publisher The Exampla of the Rabbis , London, Leipzig, Asia Pub. Comp. 1924
• Editor and translator from Yiddish: Ma'aseh book - book of Jewish tales and legends , 2 volumes, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America 1934
• Editor Hebrew illuminated Bibles of the IXth and Xth centuries (codices or. Gaster, no. 150 and 151) , London, Harrison and Sons 1901
• Editor The tittled Bible, a model codex of the Pentateuch, reproduced in facsimile from ms. no. 85 of the Gaster collection now in the British museum, with a dissertation on the history of the tittles, their origin, date and significance , London, Maggs Brothers 1929
• Jewish Folk-Lore in the Middle Ages , London 1887
• History of the Ancient Synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews , London 1901 (commemorative volume commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Bevis Marks Synagogue)

literature

• Elisabetha Manescu: "Moses Gaster, viata si opera sa" :
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 230.
• Stuart Cohen: English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895-1920 . Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1982
• Geoffrey Alderman : British Jewry since emancipation . Buckingham: The Univ. of Buckingham Press, 2014

Web links

Commons : Moses Gaster  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Moses Gaster in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography, english

Individual evidence

1. ^ Moses Gaster / Yivo Encyclopedia Elisabetha Manescu / Yivo Encyclopedia - Suggested Reading
2. ↑ Cacheprod. Romania Elisabetha Manescu / Moses Gaster
3. ↑ OKAZII-ROMANIA Elisabetha Manescu / Moses Gaster, original copy for collections