Folktales of the Jews. Vol. II: Tales from Eastern Europe (original) (raw)

2010, European Journal of Jewish Studies

AI-generated Abstract

The second volume in the series "Folktales of the Jews" focuses on Eastern European Jewish folktales, presenting a selection of stories that reflect rich cultural themes, including historical context and cultural interrelations. Edited by Dan Ben-Amos, Dov Noy, and Ellen Frankel, this volume emphasizes the importance of translating Jewish folklore recorded primarily in Hebrew, while addressing the linguistic losses inherent in the process. It serves as a valuable resource for researchers interested in Jewish folklore, history, and culture.

Jews and Sinti in Ludwig Bechstein’s Folktale (Märchen) Collections

Schriften aus der Max Weber Stiftung

Nineteenth centuryG ermanyk new an unprecedented blossoming of folk-narrativep ublications. The folk-narratives were gathered by ethnographers, philologists, folklore scholars and others according to national or regionalcriteria and were published in approximately 500 collections comprising more than 20,000 folk-narratives. 1 In this periodthe folk-narrative emerges as ameaningful elementinthe perception of the past and the identity of the group narrating it and preserving it within its tradition. The folk-narrative's uniqueness lies, among others, in its collective natureand continuous reworking that articulates stratified world views and ac o-existing of differenta nd sometimes clashing ideologies and cosmologies. 2 Minorities, such as Jews and Sinti,a ppear in hundreds of these folk-narratives. In this article, Iwill focus on the figures of these minorities in two of the main collections of Ludwig Bechstein (1801-1860), the head of the libraryand archive at the courto fB ernhard II, the Dukeo fS axe-Meiningen. Although Bechstein is af orgottenfigure in contemporaryW esternculture, his folk-narrativec ollectionsd ominated the market in terms of books ales during the nineteenth century. 3 *R esearch for this paper was supported by the ISF (Israeli ScienceFoundation)u nder grant 1492/13,a nd by the GIF (German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development) under grantI-2317-1083.4/2012. The paper is based on parts of my dissertation,conducted under the wise and generous supervisiono fP rof. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Dr.A ya Elyada (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). 1R udolf Schenda, Te lling Ta les-Spreading Ta les. Change in the CommunicationForms of a

"Bridges to a Bygone Jewish Past? Abraham Tendlau and the Rewriting of Yiddish Folktales in Nineteenth-Century Germany," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16 (2017), 419-36 [Pre-published version]

From the late eighteenth century, as German Jews gradually replaced Yiddish with German, the publication of Old Yiddish literature practically ceased in Western and Central Europe. But this rich and once very popular literary corpus was by no means forgotten there. Rather, it gained a "second life" in the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, in the form of annotated anthologies and translations, bibliographic lists, and literary surveys. This article focuses on one prominent example, that of the German-Jewish folklorist Abraham M. Tendlau (1802-1878). In his popular anthologies, Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (1842) and Fellmeiers Abende: Märchen und Geschichten aus grauer Vorzeit (1856), as well as in his renown collection of proverbs Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (1860), Tendlau incorporated German translations of older Jewish folktales, which he took primarily from the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh (1602) and Seyfer mayse nisim (1696). The article analyzes Tendlau's translations of the Old Yiddish folktales against the backdrop of Jewish modernization and acculturation on the one hand, and, on the other, the culture of remembrance and nostalgia, which permeated Jewish culture in nineteenth-century Germany. By this, it hopes to shed light on the important yet hitherto underestimated role of Old Yiddish Literature in the formation of a distinct German-Jewish identity in the modern era.

K. Pilarczyk, Bibliological and Religious Studies on the Hebrew Book (Eastern and Central European Voices, ed. R. Pietkiewicz, K. Pilarczyk, vol. 5)

Bibliological and Religious Studies on the Hebrew Book

The presented essays are divided into three groups. The first article concerns the book produced by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe against the background of the world production of Hebrew books. The second, the printing of the New Testament in Yiddish (Hebrew fonts) in the first half of the 16th century in Krakow. This also includes two articles on the Talmud. The first article illustrates the intellectual effort of Polish Jews who faced the challenge of printing Talmudic tractates with valuable documentary annexes. The second presents the difficulties that the Jewish printers had to face when persecuted by the Polish censorship authorities. The last group opens with an article describing one of the most valuable European collections of Judaica - old prints from the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, from the former Prussian State Library in Berlin. The second presents a part of the Saraval's collection - priceless Hebrew incunabula that were transferred from Prague to Wrocław. The third concerns the 14th-century Wolff Haggadah with a "Polish" episode in the background. Together, all the articles form a selective introduction to the little-known world of the Hebrew book.

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