The Hebrew Folktale in Premodern Morality Literature (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)

This pioneering exploration shows that in the early modern world, printed works on morality and ethics served as an important conveyor of classic Jewish folktales and as an important channel of leisure reading in premodern Jewish culture. Utilizing a corpus of over 400 Musar tales, author Vered Tohar carefully opens a path to understand the thematic and poetic features of those tales. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and emphasizes the continuity of Hebrew literature from medieval to modern era. Tohar classifies these stories, which she calls "the Musar folktales," into four genres adapted from classic poetic studies: tragedy, comedy, parable or social exemplum, and theological allegory. As parables of vice and virtue, the works featured here were originally printed and circulated in early modern Jewish communities, and each contained themes of love and hate, good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, or life and death. Beyond their traditional function of ethical and moral edification, Tohar advances the Musar texts as an archive of Hebrew tales and their ideological traditions. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and a new way to read those texts.

Vered Tohar is a researcher, author, editor, and poet with special interests in the diachronic aspects and reception of Hebrew literature. She is a faculty member in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. She has previously published works in the fields of Jewish studies, Jewish folklore, the Hebrew book, Hebrew literature, and Hebrew literature for children and youth.