The last published work of the prolific European folklorist Angelo S. Rappoport, The Folklore of the Jews presents its fraught topic within the shadow of the Nazi threat. Three years after the book’s 1937 publication, Rappoport (b. 1871) would be jailed by the Nazis for his writings, and eventually sent to a concentration camp (he would survive, and pass away in a Versailles nursing home in 1950). The Folklore of the Jews clearly placed Rappoport’s political position front and center within a field that propagandists had used popularly to justify Jewish persecution.
Rappoport never named the Nazis outright in his work. He did, however, use his book to address critiques of barbarism leveled at Jewish practices, and (in a by-now familiar strategy) to make counterclaims for Jews as a supremely rational, monotheistic people who placed earthly law above superstition. While Jews did have their share of supernatural folk beliefs, he argued, most of those beliefs could be traced to the dominant populations among whom the Jews dwelled; rabbinic authorities, moreover, constantly and strenuously denounced such superstitious practices as un-Jewish. As if to address the political situation of his time, Rappoport peppered his Jewish rationalist claims with repeated jabs at what he saw as the irrational, superstitious folk beliefs of the “Teutonic” peoples (referencing Teutonic folklore’s “coarseness and obscenity” at one point [127], for example), seemingly leveling his own critique of the racialist arguments propounded by Nazi propagandists.
Rappoport’s arguments are couched within a relatively conventional litany of folkloric narratives, arranged by category and designed to “giv[e] the reader a bird’s-eye view of the whole field of Jewish Folklore” (ix) in the absence of a similar handbook-style work. The categories themselves appear to take a cue from contemporary taxonomic practice, with the selected narratives grouped according to nature, lifecycle events, supernatural beliefs, and “folktales”: in each case Rappoport contextualizes Jewish folklore’s dependence upon rationalism and “monotheism” within larger bodies of folk material before launching into his narratives. The work as a whole thus attempted to provide the layperson with a general understanding of Jewish folkways in a scholarly form at a time when Jewish demonization was gaining increasing currency--and political capital--throughout Europe.
Whatever the merits and weaknesses of Rappoport’s seventy-year-old work today, my main charge here is to evaluate the book’s second republication, by the publisher Keegan Paul.[1] To this effect, well, there’s little to review save perhaps the cover illustration of a stereotypical “Jewish” man, in furry hat, with white beard and prayer shawl, poring over a tome presumably containing Jewish legal and devotional texts. Aside from that image--which, generously considered, perhaps reinforced the old-school methods of the book--and a one-paragraph blurb apparently supplied by the publisher, the edition lacks a good justification for its reissue: it offers no background on the author, no historical context, and no explanation of the publisher’s “classic work” status claim. Even the publication history has been omitted, with Keegan Paul the only publisher listed on the copyright page. Perhaps more perplexing still is the small volume’s phenomenal price, which at over $200 places the book completely out of reach of most scholars, and even some libraries. (Note to such libraries: the original 1937 edition of this work can still be purchased for less than $50 through on-line used book merchants.) The decision to republish this book now is therefore puzzling: surely an attempt to reassert this book’s status in the canon of Jewish folklore study deserves better treatment.
Sheldon Halpern, in reviewing the The Folklore of the Jews’s first reprinting in 1972, noted of Rappoport’s work: “the datedness of the folklore and the quaintness of the Jewish self-image come together to give us a picture of Dr. Rappoport cherishing his scientifically enlightened European present and his chastely monotheistic Hebrew past while somehow managing to avoid responsibility for the two thousand years of untidy peoplehood that stretched between them.”[2] Today, with a new generation of Jewish folklorists firmly entrenched in academic discussion, a fully transformed vision of Jewish folklore that tends to revolve around Israeli archives (founded largely by American-trained scholars) and ethnographic excursions, and the very concept of folklore under scrutiny, even Halpern’s critique might seem strikingly quaint, superseded by such in-depth recent writings as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s introduction to the 1951 work Life is With People.[3] That The Folklore of the Jews has attracted the attention it has argues for its place within the history of the Jewish folklore (sub-)field. Unfortunately, those wishing to understand that history must go beyond the reissued text itself, which, kept in a pristine (nearly ahistoric) state, has obscured rather than illuminated arguments for its significance. As a standalone work on Jewish folklife this book therefore offers a familiar if aged face. As a re-presented text in a “Library of Jewish Studies” series, however, it leaves much to be desired.
[1] The Folklore of the Jews was initially published by the Soncino Press in 1937, and then republished by the Singing Tree Press in 1972.
[2] Sheldon Halpern, “Jewish Folklore: A New Image,” Journal of Popular Culture 8, No. 2, 1974:340.
[3] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Introduction to Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by M. Zborowski and E. Herzog, New York: Schocken, 1995.
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[Review length: 866 words • Review posted on January 29, 2008]