Hebrew typescript. The collection comprised over 10,000 fragments in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic from the Cairo Geniza (the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo); some 350 Hebrew codices and scrolls including prayer-books of many Jewish communities, apocryphal writings, commentaries, treatises, letters, marriage contracts, piyyutim, and thirteen scrolls of the Law; some 350 Samaritan manuscripts, among them manuscripts of the Pentateuch, commentaries and treatises, and liturgical, historical, chronological and astronomical codices, detailed census lists of the Samaritans and lists of manuscripts in their possession; and almost 1,500 uncatalogued Arabic fragments on paper from the Synagogue of Ben Ezra. In 1954 the collection was purchased by the John Rylands Library (since 1972 part of the University of Manchester), where it remains. The Rylands Cairo Genizah Project has been in progress for a number of years on the identification of fragments and digitisation of images of the texts. The 'Gaster Collection,' a number of mainly Karaite and Yemenite manuscripts were purchased from the library of Dr. Moses Gaster in 1927, and are currently housed at the British Library. An important early Hebrew codex called the First Gaster Bible was also acquired by the British Library from his collection. Private life Moses Gaster 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. Literary works 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. Gaster also wrote various text-books for the Jewish community of Romania, made a Romanian translation of the Siddur, and compiled a short Hebrew Bible history. 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. His study of Romanian folklore led Gaster to conclusions at odds with those shared by most scholars of his time, who found there traces of pre-Christian beliefs. 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. A list of major works follows: Literatura populară română (1883) Jewish Folk-Lore in the Middle Ages (1887); Ilchester Lectures on Greeko-Slavonic literature (1887); Chrestomatie Română (2 volumes, 1891) The Sword of Moses from an ancient manuscript book