Moses Gaster

Moses Gaster
Moses Gaster in 1904
Born	(1856-09-17)17 September 1856 Bucharest, Wallachia
Died	5 March 1939(1939-03-05) (aged 82) Abingdon, Berkshire, England
Citizenship	British, after 1893
Alma mater	University of Leipzig, Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau
Employer	University of Oxford University of Bucharest
Title	hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, London
Spouse(s)	Lucy Gaster (nee Friedlander)
Children	Jack Gaster, Theodor Gaster

Moses Gaster (17 September 1856 – 5 March 1939) was a Romanian, later British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation, London, and a Hebrew and Romanian linguist. Moses Gaster was an active Zionist in Romania as well as in England, where in 1899 he helped establish the English Zionist Federation. He was the father of Jack and Theodor Gaster and the grandfather of Marghanita Laski. He was also son-in-law to Michael Friedländer and father-in-law to Neville Laski.

Gaster was born in Bucharest into a renowned Jewish Austrian family which had settled in Wallachia at the beginning of the 19th century. He was the eldest son of Abraham Emanuel Gaster, who was the consul of the Netherlands in Bucharest and the grandson of Asriel Gaster, a prosperous merchant and community leader. His mother, Phina Judith Rubinstein, came from a rabbinical dynasty which included Rabbi Levi Isaac ben Meir.

After having taken a degree in his native city (1874), he proceeded to Leipzig, where he received the degree of PhD in 1878 and then to the Jewish Seminary in Breslau, where he gained the Hattarat Hora'ah (rabbinical diploma) 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.