The University of Haifa is home to a unique institution that is of the highest importance to folklore scholars in general and to students of Jewish folklore in particular. This is the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), whose founder, the late Professor Dov Noy, was the consulting editor for this series. The archives’ holdings have now reached more than 24,000 folktales, transcribed and recorded as told by narrators from Israel’s many ethnic communities. The Jewish Publication Society was fortunate that its editor in chief, Ellen Frankel, realized the importance of this treasure and decided to publish a series of folktales selected from the IFA. This luck was redoubled when Dan Ben-Amos, one of the leading folklorists in the world, agreed to take on the complex assignment of editing it.
This volume is the third in the series, having been preceded by Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion (volume 1) and Tales from Eastern Europe (volume 2). The present installment contains Jewish folk narratives that were told by narrators from Arab countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. The sixty stories here, translated into English by Jacqueline Teitelbaum, are arranged in the following categories: legends (15 stories), moral tales (17), folktales (25), and humorous tales (2).
The stories address major topics in Jewish folklore, including assembling a minyan (prayer quorum), reciting Psalms, blood libels, biblical figures, holy rabbis and miracle workers, ritual and sacred objects, and the Jewish year cycle and lifecycle. The stories, which were selected with care, reflect the folk culture of the Jews of Arab lands: their values and behavioral norms, beliefs and opinions, distresses and desires, the world of men and the world of women, and the relations between the Jews and the Arabs among whom they lived.
The commentaries by the editor, Dan Ben-Amos, which accompany each story, merit special praise. They relate to a number of domains: basic information, including the story’s title and archive number, the names of the storyteller and transcriber, and where the story was recorded; the story’s cultural, historical, and literary background; parallel stories; and classification by genre, oikotype, and motifs. The material presented in the discussions and accompanying bibliography is a vast trove of knowledge, which the book makes available to students and scholars.
It is unfortunate that the story’s country of origin is not noted along with the story itself. The table of contents lists each story’s title and IFA archive number, and the names of the storyteller and transcriber are noted on the first page of each story. But to find the country of origin, readers must consult the list of storytellers and their biographies at the end of the volume. This is a nuisance that could have easily been avoided by specifying the country of origin in the table of contents and on the first page of each story.
As noted, the stories are arranged by category or genre. The criteria for this division are not explained in the present volume, though a short discussion of the issue was included in the earlier volumes in the series. Genre classification is one of the more complex areas of folklore studies, as Dan Ben-Amos himself has noted. Because of this complexity, we may assume that other scholars would have produced other (and equally legitimate) classifications. However, one topic should have been clarified for the benefit of readers who are not actively involved in the field. The title of this volume (and the series) is Folktales of the Jews, where “Folktales” serves as a general term for all folk narratives. In the classification into categories and genres here, we find both “Legends” and “Folktales,” where the latter designates what scholars refer to as Märchen. This overloading of the term “folktales” may unnecessarily confuse readers who are not familiar with the history of folklore research and should have been clarified further.
None of these caveats are meant to diminish the importance of this volume or the series. Thanks both to the stories they contain and the in-depth and broad scholarly discussion, they make a significant contribution to the study of Jewish folklore in general and, with the present installment, of folklore of the Jews of Arab countries. I believe that the entire series, when completed, will constitute a project of major importance based on the oral tradition, comparable only to the vast enterprise by Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, which is based on the written tradition.
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[Review length: 740 words • Review posted on October 10, 2013]