MOSES GASTER PROJECT

Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe Postdoctoral Fellowship 2011-12
Dr. Maria Haralambakis

'Moses Gaster's contribution to Jewish Studies: A case-study of his work in the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, folklore, magic and mysticism'

Who was Moses Gaster?

Moses Gaster (1856–1939) was an eclectic intellectual and a bibliophile as well as a religious and political leader. His scholarly output was vast and varied, and the same can be said of the collection of manuscripts, scrolls, fragments, printed books, and amulets that he assembled throughout his life. He was a figure of international significance. Born in Romania, he studied at the University of Bucharest and later in Germany (PhD in Leipzig and Rabbinical seminary in Breslau). After his ordination as Rabbi in 1881 he became lecturer in the history of Romanian literature and comparative folklore at the University of Bucharest and an inspector of schools. Following his expulsion from the country of his birth in 1885, he settled in England where he soon established himself as an influential leader. He became the Haham (chief rabbi) of the Sephardi community of the British Empire (1887–1918). In this period he also acted as principal of the Lady Judith Montefiore College, which he tried to turn into a rabbinic seminary (1888–1896). This experiment ended in bitter conflicts between Gaster and the Sephardi establishment and nearly cost him his position as Haham. After the closure of the college he dedicated much energy to Zionism, to which he had already been committed in Romania. He helped to found the English Zionist Federation in 1899. Around the 1920s, if not earlier, his influence seems to have started to decline. In spite of his considerable scholarly output and communal and political involvement, he seems to be best remembered for his difficult personality and lack of diplomacy, which led him to alienate those around him. This may have been one of the reasons that his positive contributions have not been duly recognised. Another factor is that his scholarship is often perceived as hasty and lacking in accuracy, which may have been caused at least in part by his increasingly failing eyesight.

What does this project set out to accomplish?

This project, which has received funding from the Rothschild Foundation Europe (Hanadiv) for one academic year, will start to reassess Gaster’s scholarship in order to restore him to his place in the history of scholarship. It also aims to increase the bibliographic control of the whole Gaster library, which has been distributed over various institutions, including the John Rylands University Library in Manchester (archival material, Hebrew, Samaritan and miscellaneous manuscripts, Genizah fragments, amulets, work by Gaster), British Library (mainly Hebrew manuscripts), Romanian Academy in Bucharest (Romanian manuscripts), University College London (archival material), School of Slavonic and East European Studies (printed books in Romanian and other European languages) and University of California at Los Angeles (printed books in Hebrew). Due to the limited duration of guaranteed funding for the project, for this academic year the priority will be to catalogue the material in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, and obtain basic familiarity with the material in other institutions. The results will be made available on a website. If further funding is obtained, it can be expanded to include a thorough assessment of Gaster’s collection as a whole, and of Gaster as a collector.

Similarly, with the evaluation of Gaster’s scholarship the focus for this year will be on a selection rather than attempt to deal with the whole of his areas of interest. As a scholar Gaster was interested in types of literature, such as magic and mysticism, apocrypha, folklore, and sectarian movements, such as Samaritanism, Karaism and Hasidism which his contemporaries would have considered to be peripheral to the understanding of Judaism. The focus for this project is on Gaster’s scholarship on what could be called ‘non-normative literature’, especially on his work related especially to apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, but also including folklore and magic and mysticism, as these areas seemed to have been strongly interconnected for Gaster. The first step is to analyse how he understood this literature, which includes his use of terminology. The second step will be to start to examine his studies and editions of a selection of individual compositions, such as the story of Judith, the Book of Tobit, or the Testament of Naphtali. With future funding, this be expanded to include his work on more compositions, and to compare Gaster’s scholarship with that of some of his contemporaries, such as M.R. James (1862–1936) and the important Serbian scholar and politician Stojan Novaković (1842–1915).

Bibliography

Alderman, Geoffrey. “Gaster, Moses.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online edition (2004).

Alexander, Philip S. “Gaster’s Exempla of the Rabbis: A Reappraisal” in G. Sed-Rajna (ed), Rashi 1040-1990 (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 793-805.

Deletant, Dennis. “A Survey of the Gaster Books in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library” in Solanus: Bulletin of the Slavonic and East European Group of SCONUL 10 (1975), 14–23.

Hill, Brad Sabin. “Preface” in The Gaster Collection of Rumanian Printed Books held in the Library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London: 1995).

Renton, James. “Reconsidering Chaim Weizman and Moses Gaster in the Founding-Mythology of Zionism” in M. Berkowitz (ed), Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 129-151.