Theodor Gaster

Theodor Herzl Gaster (July 21, 1906 – February 2, 1992) was a British-born American Biblical scholar known for work on comparative religion, mythology and the history of religions. He is noted for his books, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East (1950), The Dead Sea Scriptures, about the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as his one-volume abridgement of Sir James Frazer's massive 13-volume work The Golden Bough, to which Gaster contributed updates, corrections and extensive annotations.

Gaster was born in London, the son of the folklorist Moses Gaster, then Chief Rabbi of the English Sephardi community, who was Romanian by birth and a well-known linguist and scholar of Judaica. He was also a leading Zionist, and named his son after his friend, Theodor Herzl, who had died in 1904, shortly before the boy's birth. Theodor recalled that the first draft of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was prepared in his father's home. His mother was the daughter of Michael Friedländer. Visitors to the Gaster home included Churchill, Lenin, and Freud.

Educated at the University of London, Gaster received an undergraduate degree in classics in 1928 and a master's degree in Near Eastern archaeology in 1936. His master's thesis, a preview of his key work, was titled "The Ras Shamra Texts and the Origins of Drama."

In 1939 or 1940 Gaster moved from London to New York and began work on a PhD at Columbia University. While pursuing his doctorate, he continued to publish.

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