The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning

Introduction: Jewish Culture and the Hebrew Folktale

1 Introduction Jewish Culture and the Hebrew Folktale Varied and complex motives underlie the need for a comprehensive history of the Hebrew folktale. The foremost of these motives is the predisposition of each generation to reexamine its cultural heritage. The openness of recent cultural studies to areas of creativity largely ignored in the past, along with the notion that all branches of life and creativity are dynamically intertwined, has brought the scholarly study of folk culture out of the academic wilderness. This examination of the folk foundation of Hebrew storytelling throughout the history of Jewish culture is anchored in that notion. To be sure, attempts to understand the folk component of many works, and of more general folk phenomena, as well, have been made in the discipline known as “Jewish studies .” However, an inclusive study with regard for the uniqueness and development of Hebrew storytelling is important and productive in its own right. The ¤rst comprehensive work in this ¤eld, Emanuel bin-Gorion’s Shevilei haAggadah (Pathways of the Aggadah, Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1950) was published half a century ago. Despite its initial importance as a pioneering work, it was too eclectic—comprising a popular survey of international folk literature, some comments on folkloristics and its development through the 1940s, and a review of the main periods of Jewish folk literature—along with a healthy dollop of the author’s personal musings derived from nineteenthcentury German Romanticism as well as the individualistic outlook of his father, the great Hebrew writer and thinker, Micha Josef Berdyczewski. BinGorion ’s volume served as the Hebrew primer on the subject for some forty years. Since its appearance, drastic changes have taken place in folklore research in general, in the study of Jewish folk literature, and in the academic status of folkloristics within the ¤eld of Jewish Studies. Thus, it is no longer possible to regard bin-Gorion’s work as a re®ection of the status of the discipline in the latter part of the twentieth century. The study of Jewish folk literature has taken great strides forward in recent decades. The intensive activity of Dov Noy and his students continued the trail blazed by S. D. Goitein, E. Brauer, R. Patai, D. Sadan, and Y. T. Lewinski before the institutional establishment of the ¤eld as an academic discipline in Israel. The ®ourishing of the discipline is evident now in the publication of academic periodicals and doctoral dissertations on Hebrew folk literature and in the founding of large folk literature departments in Israeli universities.Perhaps the pinnacle of Hebrew folktale research in this generation is The Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), which has attracted and inspired hundreds of professional scholars, amateur folklorists, storytellers, authors, and students. Another outstanding development in Jewish folkloristics of the past generation is a new openness to international folklore research. In generations past, unlike today, awareness and use of the general research literature were most rare. The international literature constitutes a basis for new approaches to the Hebrew folktale. The beginning student, as well as the scholar, requires an indepth recognition of these developments in general theory. Researchers of the Jewish folktale now participate regularly in international forums and conventions for the study of international folk literature. Thus Jewish folk literature and its study have joined the list of research topics considered by the international community. This openness to general and theoretical research is of great importance in determining the image of the ¤eld in the academic world and in society at large.1 The escape of Jewish folkloristics from marginality in Jewish studies, similar to that of the study of folklore in the humanities and social sciences, spares us the need to apologize. No longer need we seek justi¤cation for dealing with folk literature in the various purposes to which this author or that philosopher applied folktales. We cannot hope to fully comprehend a culture if we focus only on its elite. Parallel to the displays of individualistic, original, and innovative creativity, there exists the culture of the society in its broadest sense, whose creations are traditional and archetypical. The true expression of a society’s being, from its intelligentsia through its most marginal cultural sub-strata, are those “traditional” creations that were produced by generations of anonymous artists and transmitted onward as part of the society’s spiritual heritage. Any attempt to understand the culture of the past, and certainly that of the present, while ignoring its most candid and unbiased expressions of creativity, can no longer...