The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre and Meaning (review)

Eli Yassif's work streaks like a comet through the black night of folktale babble penned by countless anthology writers, none of whom are folklore specialists. By contrast, Yassif takes us on a magic carpet ride from ancient, priestly Israel to the modern Israeli present, and over the course of these twenty-nine centuries we come to see what is actually meant by the term folklore scholarship.

The Hebrew Folktale traces evolutionary relationships between successive bodies of traditional Hebrew literature and gains access to their cultural meaning by examining each corpus in its own historical and societal context. Noting that transitions from orality to literature serve the political interests of the transformers and that literacy varies with respect to period, locale, gender, and class, Yassif approaches these transitions, as well as translations and innovations, with the same critical eye. All are thoroughly examined as dynamic social forces with significant expressive consequences.

In his acknowledgments (p. xviii) Yassif explains that he has divided the book in two, directing his notes at scholars and students, his text at the general public. The notes comprise a book within a book, filled with condensed monographs on sources of the tales and their variants, relevant scholarship on controversy, methodology, and interpretation, and ample bibliography. But in the body of the text, terms like oicotype, motif, and tale type go unexplained for lay readers. Time and again, it is hard to account for the author's (or perhaps the translator's) choice of esoteric terms, left unexplained for a general audience. Literary genres like myth and legend are defined, but even these definitions can be problematic because of the inclusion of technical terms that are not explained. For example, readers are told that "the fable in folk literature is a story that takes place in the world of animals, plants, or inanimate objects, told in the past tense but applied to the present day by virtue of the epimythium" (p. 23).

It is difficult to do justice to a major work of this proportion. Both text and notes seem best suited to trained folklorists or others with access to definitions of folkloristic terms. Had Yassif avoided words like "epimythium," and defined folkloristic terms as they arose in the text, his general audience would be better served. Nevertheless, from the biblical and Second Temple periods, through rabbinic and later generations, with special attention to the Hasidim, and to tales of faith in modern secular Israel, Yassif's knowledge is encyclopedic. His contribution is unrivaled, illuminating historical periods while adding deep and meaningful insight into the spirit and mentality of the many different peoples who have maintained, modified, and transformed the Hebrew folktale.