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November 29, 2007
Dear Board Member,
JEWISH FOLKLORE
The Foundation, since its inception in 1965, has provided over 13,000 scholarships
and fellowships to scholars all around the world and supported the publication
of almost 4,000 books. The vast majority of these people and publications have
dealt with what can be classified as “hard core” Judaica, scholarly,
textual, normative Jewish culture.
In this report I should like to report on another aspect of Jewish culture, the
cultural creativity of “amcha”, the spiritual and cultural heritage
of the Jewish people, transmitted from generation to generation in their communities
all around the world. One cannot hope to fully comprehend the culture of any
people if we focus only on its elite. Parallel to original, innovative, individualistic
creativity, there exists the culture of the society that inheres in these “traditional” folklore
creations, produced by generations of anonymous artists, writers and musicians
and transmitted onward as part of the society’s heritage.
This cultural creativity is mainly transmitted by oral tradition in the form
of folk literature and folk music. But it also consists of a visual genre, including
arts, crafts, costumes, ornaments and other material expressions of folk culture,
and a cognitive one, which includes popular beliefs that find their expression
in Jewish customs and practices.
Any attempt to understand the culture of our past cannot ignore these expressions
of our creativity because all these transmissions take place alongside, and have
multitudinous mutual contacts with, normative Jewish culture and literature.
Jewish folklore and Jewish religion, for example, have always influenced each
other; Jewish folklore has been profoundly imbued with the Jewish religious spirit,
and in turn, left its mark on Jewish religion.
In this report I should like to deal with the Foundation’s important role
in this area by focusing on the work of the major folklorists who have made vital
contributions to our contemporary understanding of this field, which will simultaneously
demonstrate the long-range impact of the Foundation’s work on behalf of
Jewish culture.
DOV NOY
Prof. Dov Noy is the major figure today in the renaissance of
the preservation and perpetuation of the tradition of Jewish folklore
in Israel. His work encompasses all aspects of Jewish folklore
and touches on almost all periods and communities in Jewish culture.
Prof. Noy created Jewish folklore as an academic discipline in Israel, where
it had formerly been viewed by many main-line Jewish intellectuals as marginal
to Jewish life. He received numerous institutional grants from the Memorial Foundation
from 1969 thru 1985 for his work on Jewish folk literature and folktales in which
he specialized, and other folklore studies and publications at the Folklore Research
Center he established at the Hebrew University.
Born in Poland, Prof. Noy was influenced early in life by the oral folklorist
traditions. He immigrated to Israel in 1938 and began his studies as a student
of rabbinic literature at the Hebrew University. This source is ever present
in his work. In his earlier research, Prof. Noy acted primarily as a midrashic
scholar, and folkloristic methodology provided him with fresh insights to deal
with ancient materials.
Subsequently, the systematic folklore studies he conducted inspired his future
scientific work in new directions. He began collecting folktales from the new
immigrant communities in Israel after the creation of the State of Israel. There
was a great sense of urgency at that time for this enterprise because of the
rapid acculturation of the new ethnic groups in Israel stemming from their modernization,
and the accelerating pressure for their integration into Israeli society. Prof.
Noy created the Israel Folklore Archives at the Museum of Photography and Folklore
in Haifa to house those materials, which today contain over 23,000 folktales.
He also applied the international classification system to these traditional
Jewish narratives.
Prof. Noy experienced the destruction of the European Jewish folkloristic culture
through his encounter with Holocaust survivors in Cyprus after World War II,
during which he served in the British army. Subsequently, Prof. Noy hastened
to integrate the perspectives of that past by summing up the work of the folklore
scholars that perished in the Holocaust, notably the writing of S.Z. Pipe and
Sh. Anski. In this way Prof. Noy came to exert an important role as a mediator
between the former generation of European Jewish folklorists and the young Israeli
folklorists, who were mostly his disciples.
In addition to his scholarship, Prof. Noy has succeeded in inspiring public and
community institutions to deal intensively with the study of folklore. His institutional
leadership, open minded scholarly personality, and his equally serious approach
to all sectors of the population and non-elitist conception of culture have contributed
to his stature as one of the most influential Jewish folklorists. He was awarded
the Israel Prize in 2004 for his pioneering work in Jewish folklore. I had the
great pleasure of being present at that ceremony.
OTHER FOLKLORISTS
Prof. Noy’s students and colleagues at the institutes he established,
many of whom the Foundation supported early in their careers and whose names
are listed below, today populate various universities in Israel and elsewhere
and make up a large part of the infrastructure of research in Jewish folklore:
Galit Hassan Rokem, who completed her doctorate at Hebrew University under Prof.
Noy, is a specialist in the proverb genre. She is currently the incumbent of
the Max and Margarethe Grunwald chair in folklore at Hebrew University, the first
endowed chair in folklore in the world [Memorial Foundation doctoral scholarships
in 1975 and 1976, fellowship in 1979].
Eli Yassif, another disciple, is currently professor of Folk Literature at Ben
Gurion University. His main subject of research is Hebrew literary folklore,
especially from the medieval period. His book, The Hebrew Folktale: History,
Genre, Meaning, received the National Jewish book award in 1999 [Memorial Foundation
fellowships in 1989 and 1997].
Dan Ben-Amos deals with Jewish Folklore in the wider historical perspective,
which has added significantly to our understanding of the development of Jewish
folklore. His volume of Folktales of the Jews: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion,
the first in a 5-volume series, received the National Jewish Book Award in 2006.
He currently serves as professor of Folklore and Middle Eastern studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. [Memorial Foundation doctoral scholarship, 2003].
Aliza Shinhar is engaged in the study of folk literature in Israel. Her appearances
in the mass media there have contributed to the public’s growing interest
in Jewish and Israeli folklore [Memorial Foundation doctoral scholarships, 1971
and 1972].
Hedda Jason, another of Noy’s students, who studied the ethno-poetics of
Jews from Islamic countries, has developed a comprehensive genre system for Jewish
folk literature. [Memorial Foundation fellowships in 1973 and 1977].
Yael Zerubavel, who has written on modern Israeli national myths, like Dan Ben-Amos,
also deals with Jewish folklore in the wider historical perspective. [Memorial
Foundation doctoral scholarship, 1974].
Other important folklorists who the Foundation has supported include:
Chaim Schwarzbaum, the last of the major members of the generation of folklorists
who preceded Dov Noy, examined Jewish folklorist texts within the wider context
of the Talmud and Midrashim, medieval Jewish literature, and Jewish culture of
both east and west. He also studied the affinity between Jewish and Arab folklore
and the contemporary encounter between these two cultures in the Middle East.
[Memorial Foundation fellowship, 1967].
Olga Goldberg Mulkiewicz, who immigrated to Israel from Poland in 1968 has dealt
with the image of the Jew and Jewish symbols in Polish folk art. Her later work
focused on Jewish folk artists [Memorial Foundation fellowships 1976, 1978].
Tamar Alexander, who received her folkloristic training in the United States,
deals with folk tales of Judeo-Spanish Jews and the expression of ethnic identity
in folk literature of Judean-Spanish Jews. Together with Galit Hassan Rokem,
she edits the journal Jerusalem Studies and Jewish Folklore. [Memorial Foundation
doctoral scholarship, 1974 and fellowship in 1983].
Harvey Goldberg, an anthropologist, has studied folkloristic aspects of Jewish
society in North Africa [Memorial Foundation fellowships in 1979 and 1982]. A
fellow anthropologist, Yoram Bilu has dealt with the phenomenon of folk healing
and popular saints in Israel. [Memorial Foundation fellowship, 1984].
In the United States, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the most important
folklorists there, has served as past president of the American Folklore Society.
Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and her associates have studied a broad range of
materials that reflect the amazing folkloristic and ethnographic creativity in
the Jewish community here, ranging from Jewish Renewal to the Chassidic communities,
including music, ritual objects, the use of media, sacred spaces and the production
of books. Her range of expertise is extraordinarily broad both in general and
Jewish folklore. Among her many publications, she has co-edited two volumes,
The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature; Fabric of
Jewish Life: Textiles from the Jewish Museum Collection; and Image Before My
Eyes, A Photographic Image of Poland Before the Holocaust, a volume whose preparation
and publication was originally supported by the Memoriall Foundation. Her most
recent volume, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood
in Poland Before the Holocaust, was co-authored with her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt.
[Memoriall Foundation fellowships in 1973, 1980, and 1989].
This brief survey of the contribution of the Memorial Foundation to the study
of Jewish folklore illuminates two aspects of the Foundation’s work. The
first, as I indicated above, is our modest contribution in the evolution of a
marginal Jewish cultural area to recognized academic status. Our support has
undoubtedly contributed to a greater understanding and appreciation of the role
of Jewish folklore within the larger dynamic of Jewish culture.
The second is the cumulative impact of the Foundation’s policy of support
of creative Jewish scholars, especially in early phases of their career. This
report of our activity in the area of Jewish folklore, as well as earlier reports
about other areas of Jewish scholarship about which I have written in the past,
again and again amply validate the Foundation’s policies and posture to
which we have adhered over the last decades. As with Jewish folklore, the very
attractive returns from our investments become marvelously manifest in time.
Best wishes for a joyous Chanuka.
Warm regards.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jerry Hochbaum
Executive Vice President
Information about the folklorists cited in this report was drawn
largely from The Study of Jewish Folklore in Israel by Galit Hasan-Rokem
and Eli Yassif. Many thanks to Prof. Hassan-Rokem for sharing this
material with me. |
