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 Folklore, Literature, and Scripture:The BratslavTale The generic title, “Folklore, Literature, and Scripture” is neither a promise of an all embracing formulation pretending to solve a series of nagging methodological problems, nor a threat of pages groaning with tiring technical terminology. It is, rather, the preface to a cumbersome subtitle, too long to publish in a program: “A Study of the Bratslav Theory of the Folktale and Its Implication for Our Understanding of Narrative Art and Genres of Literary Composition.” The basis for my theoretical discussion is the main cycle of Bratslav tales that are considered sacred scripture by Bratslav Hasidim, even today. Aside from their intrinsic charm, the Bratslav tales hold for the literary scholar a specific fascination in that they strategically straddle three genres we normally separate one from the other. And since this conference is dedicated to Jewish folklore, much of which is verbal, often considered sacred text by traditional Jews, we should not disregard this opportunity to continue the discussion that must always accompany a serious consideration of Jewish folklore. At the thematic climax of the enigmatic story “Iddo Ve’Enam,” Agnon has Mr. Gamzu, a traditional Jew who traffics in manuscripts, declare: “Folklore! Folklore! They have taken our Holy Torah and made it a topic of research or folklore.”1 Agnon thus raises pointedly one of the central issues of that story and, for that matter, of the far-reaching social and religious implications of Die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Judaic scholarship ) for several generations. The story was written during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948, only three years after Gershom Scholem’s seminal essay “Hirhurim al hokhmat Yisrael” (Reflections on Die Wissenschaft des Judentums) which impugned the cultural and psychological 129 presuppositions of the Judaic scholarship of the previous 125 years. It is, perhaps, no mere coincidence that when Agnon composed “Iddo Ve’Enam,” he was living in Gershom Scholem’s apartment in Rehaviah, since his own home in Talpiot had to be evacuated. Agnon characteristically qualifies his thematic statement by a situational paradox: after all, Gamzu, who laments the desecration of these sacred texts by the ethnographer, Dr. Ginat, was the very man who often sold such texts to Ginat and his colleagues; and when Gamzu’s wife, Gemulah, the personification of the sacred aura of the manuscripts, climbs to a rooftop to commit suicide, it is Dr. Ginat, not Gamzu, who climbs up to save her, and dies in the attempt. The implied author knows that the issue is serious, but not simple, that though right and wrong are not easily assigned, the basic act involves the soul of a culture, its history and its destiny. With these concerns in mind, I approach the study of the Bratslav tales, which have intrigued many critics and seduced many writers : I cannot ignore the fact that these tales, which are for me essentially the object of my literary concerns—for I am not a Bratslav Hasid—are for the faithful sacred texts. The Bratslav hagiography, we should note, lists a tradition of five Tzadikim: Moses, Shimeon bar Yohai, the Ari, the Besht, and Rav Nahman of Bratslav. This is the stuff that our studies are made of. Before entering a discussion of Bratslav poetics, I should define some of my terms: by folklore I refer to subject matter and not to method or scholarly discipline. Within subject matter I restrict myself to what some call verbal art, of which I know something, and omit song, dance, and the crafts, of which I know little. Within the verbal arts, I will deal not with riddles, incantations, or sermons. This latter distinction is crucial since it eliminates the sihah, the reputed statements of the Tzadik, which were intensely cultivated by Hasidic writers. The distinction between the plot-dominated tale and the sihah was important enough to precipitate the dissolution of the contracted collaboration between Buber and Agnon in the 1920s. They had agreed to do an anthology of Hasidic tales together, but while Buber wanted to elucidate theological points and would stress the sihah, Agnon wanted to retell good tales. While I believe the collaboration would have disintegrated on personal grounds, the published evidence, i.e. what each writer collected independently, does confirm the account that there were varying concepts of anthologizing. Literary research of the past generation has blurred the rigid boundaries once drawn between folk-literature, on the one hand, and literature , on the other. Anyone who has studied the structuralists, from Propp 130 Interpretation...

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