Poetic Emancipation: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Study of Folk-Narratives

1 Introduction

The scholarly study of Judaism and Jewish texts is considered a phenomenon of a little more than 200 years old. It is recognized in particular with German scholars of the nineteenth century who established what has become known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, which forms the scholarly basis of the international field of Jewish Studies.^[1] The new historicity pushed forward by this scholarly movement and its political implications cannot be overstated. Within this context, the immense investment of key scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in folklore-studies is evident when one examines basic publications in German, English and French. Yet much of this work remained within the confines of Jewish Studies and unfortunately during the time of publication received limited attention by scholars beyond this field. Scholars, such as Bernhard Beer, Wilhelm Bacher, Joseph Perles, Moses Gaster, Louis Ginzberg, Israël Lévi, Arthur Marmorstein and many others, contributed numerous studies in folk-narrative research. In addition – and beyond the scope of this paper – folklore was studied extensively by Jewish scholars in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.^[2]

The present article aims at explaining the unique role the study of folk-narrative played in the Wissenschaft des Judentums. After some preliminary remarks on the history of folkloristics in the present context, I examine the work of three key scholars from different generations of the Wissenschaft des Judentums who engaged three folk-genres, partaking in key debates in the study of folk-narratives. The final section examines the way this poetic legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums was negotiated after the Second World War in the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – the most important scholarly center in this field.

It is important to note that while there have been many studies that examined the role folklore studies played in national projects, such as in the Finnish, Irish and Greek cases,^[3] the present paper takes a different path, examining how Jewish folklore was constructed in the language of Wissenschaft. The underlying premise of this paper is that whereas Wissenschaft des Judentums, jüdische Volkskunde and Jewish folklore relate in different ways to Jews, the notions of Wissenschaft, Volkskunde and Folklore were used with an understanding that is independent of a Jewish subject.^[4] Indeed, as Briggs and Bauman show, folklore studies and science grew from various meta-discursive assumptions concerning knowledge, established in the course of modernity from the seventeenth century onward.^[5]

One cannot begin a discussion of the relations between folklore studies and the Wissenschaft des Judentums without first acknowledging Eli Yassif’s monumental Hebrew article, published in two parts, titled “Folklore Research and Jewish Studies: Directions and Goals”.^[6] This publication appeared in the 1980s when folkloristic approaches in Jewish Studies struggled to find their footing and recognition within Israeli academia.^[7] Given the importance of folklore studies in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, this marginalization merits some explanations that are suggested towards the end of this article. Writing on this topic today builds on Yassif’s work,^[8] as well as various reviews and studies carried out by scholars of his generation in Israel (Galit Hasan-Rokem, Tamar Alexander and Haya Bar-Itzhak) as well as the pioneering work carried out by their teacher in Israel, Dov Noy.^[9] In this new context, the present article also seeks to provide an explanation to the peculiar alienation expressed by some towards the legacy of Wissenschaft des Judentums’ studies in the field of folk-narrative research.

2 Folklore and the Wissenschaft des Judentums

Although “Folk-lore” as a concept was first coined by William John Thoms in 1846,^[10] it is problematic to expect one term to guide us here. The Brothers Grimm published much of their folkloristic work before 1846; in fact, their work is highly relevant as the backdrop to much of the publications of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in German. The identification of folklore as a unique form of human creativity was the product of a discourse which developed in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stemming from ideas that had developed in the eighteenth century, especially associated with Johann Gottfried Herder.

This article focuses on a limited number of works, stressing the interrelations between the Wissenschaft des Judentums and broader folkloristic trends, asking, how the language of Wissenschaft constructed Jewish texts in the language of folk-narrative studies. And how the language of folk-narrative studies constructed Jewish culture in the language of Wissenschaft. An attempt to answer such questions is confronted with a basic problem: what makes an article within the Wissenschaft des Judentums a folkloristic article? An examination of a key journal such as the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums does not provide an easy answer, since the journal did not have a clear thematic taxonomy (with the exception of the final volume which appeared after World War II and of course included a section on folklore).

Two broad engagements (which certainly do not exclude each other) characterize folkloristic discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the Wissenschaft des Judentums:

(i) Attention to practice employing concepts, such as “customs” or “traditions” (Sitten or Gebräuche) that relate to various times and contexts. In the course of the twentieth century this was a trajectory which had an immense influence on the way Jewish folklore developed and it is represented in some of the major publications of the Wissenschaft des Judentums already in the end of the nineteenth century.^[11] Ethnography is central to the work of some of the scholars who took part in the initiative of Max Grunwald (1871–1953), the founder of the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde (Society for Jewish Folklore), whose journal – the Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde – first appeared in 1898 in Hamburg. Further work in these fields was carried out by scholars in Eastern Europe who published most of their work in Yiddish, Polish and Russian and who themselves were to some extent impacted by the work of Grunwald.

(ii) A focus on narratives and their poetics, which is manifested mainly in a discourse on (folk) genre classification, notions of creativity, orality, collectivity, circulation and comparison. An engagement with genres placed units of narrative at the core of scholarly attention, in comparison to various forms of philology, which focused on the development of words or word-combinations, their changing meanings over time in an attempt to reconstruct textual authenticity. Nevertheless, philology was not foreign to engagements with genres and philological research was also carried out as part of narrative research.^[12] Genre divisions classified narrative-units, in ways that highlighted the plurality of narratives, as opposed to the way History focused on a linear chronological narrative progression. The application of genre taxonomies in relation to Jewish literary material characterized much of the folkloristic output of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century and onwards.^[13]

The first trajectory is closely related to a new understanding of the concept of a Jewish “Volk”, particularly evident in the work of Max Grunwald whose activity and work was acknowledged by folklorists, particularly in German-speaking countries, in recent decades.^[14] Grunwald’s endeavor represents the way scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums integrated ethnography in their work and their growing awareness of everyday life.^[15] It also represents the way scholarship partook in identity construction, bridging between being Jewish and being German in Grunwald’s case. Grunwald himself attended the university and the rabbinical seminary in Breslau – one of the key centers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. During his time there he was drawn to the activities of the Silesian Society for Folklore, which he joined.

The second trajectory is less acknowledged. The study of Jewish texts as part of a broader discourse that engaged folk-narratives was one of the central components within the writings of the Wissenschaft des Judentums – alongside works that can be classified today as history, philology, linguistics, philosophy and law. It begins at least half a century before ethnography was incorporated into the Wissenschaft des Judentums as part of a new stance towards ancient Jewish texts, which scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums introduced.^[16] The application of modern genre classifications was a reflection of a new historical consciousness, one which was grounded in key literary works written mostly by non-Jewish scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as Gabriele von Glasenapp persuasively argued.^[17] Once this new poetic sensitivity was applied to Jewish texts, many discrepancies became apparent, as the “universal” language of Wissenschaft was based on the application of European genre-classifications that enjoyed the status of not being situated.^[18] One of the characteristics of the development of folklore as a scholarly discipline was the idea that genres can be conceptualized in universal terms. In their discussion of the poetics of folklore, Amy Shuman and Galit Hasan-Rokem note that:

[…] in the Grimm brothers’ historical reconstruction of folk literature the tripartite genre distinction – Mythus (myth), Sage (legend), Märchen (folktale) – served as the basis for the various internal transformations of the system, such as the “sinking” of myth to the form of the folktale with the disappearance of the belief system that had earlier supported its normative and religious status.^[19]

As Shuman and Hasan-Rokem show, universal genres are seldom referred to as an essential idea; rather, scholars today in general pay particular attention to the affinities between various ethnic folk-genres;^[20] in short, genres are relational. However, in the context of the Wissenschaft des Judentums the validity of the prevalent European categorization was not relativized. Careful devices had to be employed to allow Judentum a role in what was taken as a universal discourse. Wissenschaft scholars acted as mediators between two forms of genre “canons”: one canonized by European modern scholarship and another canonized by Jewish tradition.^[21]

Importantly, much of this work focused on written material and not on oral tradition. As Heda Jason notes, Jews, like the Indians or Chinese for that matter, could rely on a vast textual “library” and did not necessarily need build one from oral poetry as in the Finnish case for that matter.^[22] In that sense, her fruitful suggestion to compare the Jewish case to those in East Asia is valid in relation to early scholarship that began by targeting texts and applying new sensitivities that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century: in her discussion of Chinese folkloristics Lidya Liu tells of how Zhong Jingwen (1903–2002) “and his fellow folklorists did not shun the use of extant printed sources from the past”.^[23] Such scholars had to face the vast recorded textual writings of past dynasties stretching a few millennia in a similar manner to the way scholars of Jewish texts had to. However, the political context is very different and the work of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums – although later instrumental in promoting Jewish national identity – was constructed mostly by scholars who were both Jewish and citizens of European nations.^[24] Their work was therefore both motivated by a search for Jewish collective identity, as well as securing their emancipatory rights.

The focus on genre classifications of texts does not exclude the different ways in which systematic genre classifications were used in relation to Jewish folk-narratives that were recorded by scholars. Jewish and non-Jewish scholars who studied contemporary folk narratives in Yiddish for example have also addressed them in relation to European genres, but such works were rarely part of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Such is the case of the renowned folk-narrative scholar, Walter Anderson (1885–1962), who collected Yiddish narratives when he was employed as a German teacher in Jewish schools in Minsk in the early 1920s, publishing his research on such narratives in German and in Yiddish.^[25] Anderson who was of course not Jewish was committed to trace the historical-geographical development of specific tale types (anecdotes, folk-songs etc.) accounting to all versions of a tale-type, Yiddish ones included. To be sure, such work was not carried out as part of the promotion of Jewish Studies.^[26] Studies of folk-narratives carried out by Jewish scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were occasionally distanced from Jewish identity construction. Friedrich Salomo Krauss (1859–1938), one of the most celebrated folk-narrative scholars of this period is an exemplary case.^[27] Although Krauss was the secretary of the Jewish Allianz organization in Vienna, he denounced any attempt to construct a Jewish subject through the study of folk-narrative. From his home in Vienna, he published on folklore of the South Slavs and edited the journals Am Urquell and Der Urquell, which also featured collections of folklore of Jews, but Krauss was consistently critical of a separate Jewish folklore. In his later work as editor of Kryptádia and Anthropophyteia he investigated comparative sexual folklore that was even more removed from the concerns of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.^[28] These journals featured works by some of the most celebrated scholars of the period, all were part of the universal folkloristics Krauss promoted and his contention that one should study humankind as part of a “Wissenschaft vom Menschen” in his terms. In short, neither Anderson, nor Krauss were interested in building a bridge between the Wissenschaft des Judentums and folk-narrative studies.

The application of genres to the study of Judaism raises different questions that are addressed here in relation to three works, which partook in different scholarly dialogues or conversations, correlating to the genre distinctions made by the Brothers Grimm, mentioned above. These works demonstrate the specific type of challenges that scholars within the Wissenschaft des Judentums faced. They hint to a much wider phenomenon that reflects the immense influence folk-narrative studies had on the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the great contribution scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums made to this discourse.

3 Moritz Steinschneider and the Application of Genres to Jewish Texts

In their introduction to Studies on Steinschneider, Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal query the reasons for the “lack of scholarly interest in Steinschneider himself” despite the continuous interest in his publications within Jewish Studies. They note that “Steinschneider’s work often seems to consist of endless listings of often highly valuable but unreadable biographical and bibliographical information”.^[29] They then relate to his encyclopedic Jüdische Literatur which Steinschneider worked on between 1845 and 1847,^[30] stressing that “From a biographical perspective Jüdische Literatur certainly laid the foundations for much of Steinschneider’s work”.^[31] By highlighting the importance of this work as a cornerstone through which Steinschneider’s oeuvre is interpreted, Leicht and Freudenthal discuss the type of historicity, which cuts across Steinschneider’s vast bibliographical achievements. Steinschneider’s contributions to folk-narrative studies are even less acknowledged beyond the circles of those who engage Jewish folklore per se.

Steinschneider (1816–1907) was one of four scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums who were instrumental in establishing the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde in the late 1890s.^[32] Yet, this is a marginal aspect of his contribution to folklore-studies, since he was active for half a century before, publishing works which are considered milestones in Jewish folk-narrative research and are in fact major contributions to the dissemination of folk-narratives in general. This is evident already in an early work of his, one which he worked on in parallel to his Jüdische Literatur: “Zur Sagen und Legendenkunde” published in 1845–1846 in Zacharias Fraenkel’s Zeitschrift für die Religiösen Interessen des Judentums, a key journal in the first generation of Wissenschaft.^[33]

Whereas Jüdische Literatur organized Jewish texts chronologically according to historical phases, “Zur Sagen und Legendenkunde” gave preference to a poetic organization of this vast corpus, emphasizing folk-genres as the central organizing principle of Jewish literature. Indeed, just as Jüdische Literatur prefigures Steinschneider’s historiography in his later work as Leicht and Freudenthal assert, so did “Zur Sagen und Legendenkunde” prefigure Steinschneider’s theoretical claims in the field of folk-narrative studies, especially in his “Über die Volksliteratur der Juden” from 1872 and the immensely influential Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher from 1893.^[34]

This early article opens with almost every Romantic metaphor about the Orient – “the dawn of human culture”, “the purity of childhood”, “the cradle of poetics” etc. Indeed, Steinschneider hints to what would become central to his ideas – the origin of Jews in the East and the history of migration to the West. He also relates to the way the Jewish spirit developed from the Bible onwards, a process in which the “Haggada” (i. e., die Sage in his presentation) played a crucial role. He writes: “Wir verstehen unter Sage die einzig im Munde sich fortpflanzende Erzählung”.^[35] That is, the notion of orality is crucial in this formulation. Steinschneider highlighted that the Sage of the Bible was transformed in post-biblical times with new material added that was based on the life of the people in that time who integrated their practical sense in reworking such narratives. Furthermore, Steinschneider argued that the transformation of the Jewish Sage continued with the adoption of material from Persian, Greek, Roman and Arab sources, stressing the continuous interaction of Jews with Arabs and its lasting influence on the way Jewish folk-narrative developed.

Steinschneider’s theory of the Jewish legend mirrors his own perspective: his scholarly output and that of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in general reflects the lasting influence of scholarly taxonomies which were conceived in German or European folk-narrative research.^[36] Steinschneider’s innovative approach to the history of Jewish folk-narratives is manifested in his systematic application of a genre taxonomy that was at least partially incompatible with traditional classification of Jewish texts. As an example we can see what he writes: “Die zuletzt erwähnten Phasen der geschichtlichen Haggada bieten im Verlaufe der Zeit immer mehr den Ubergang von der biblischen Legende zur Späteren jüdischen Sage überhaupt mit absolut neuen Stoffen.”^[37] (original italics) Here, Steinschneider describes a historical development with a language that differentiates Legende from Sage – the first, refers to sacred legends and the latter to other legends. This important distinction was treated extensively by Johannes Sabel in his analysis of the German manuscript of Louis Ginzberg’s multi-volume seminal Legends of the Jews, which was written half a century after Steinschneider’s article.^[38] Since the English ‘legend’ has two parallels in German, Ginzberg’s genre negotiation is better preserved in the German manuscript. Evidently, the two scholars differed in their understandings of Legende and Sage in the context of Jewish literature. Steinschneider in this early work of his was closer to classic understandings of these terms (such as those presented by Herder and the Brothers Grimm).^[39] For him, it was an essential step in situating Jewish traditional narratives in a broader discussion of legends, which on the one hand was essential for presenting the uniqueness of Jewish creativity and on the other hand enabled the demonstration of the important role Jews played in transforming folk-narratives in the East and in the West.

In the second part of his article, Steinschneider expands his discussion, producing some other genre distinctions.^[40] He introduces for the first time the genre of myth, which he discusses briefly in relation to Geschichte, Sage and Legende, focusing on the affinities between these genres and their sense of truth and awareness. In his view, whereas myths and History (Geschichte) describe an objective national narrative, the legend (Sage and Legende) reflect the subjective acknowledgement of what a people assume is true. Accordingly, the relation between the narrative at hand and the way it was adapted and transformed stands at the heart of his legend theory. Steinschneider’s observation is quite remarkable since it demonstrates his awareness of the performative dimension present in the way folk-narratives are shaped. This is exhibited in his emphasis of orality, as well as his engagement with audience reception – two crucial dimensions in the poetics of folklore.^[41] This is also reflected in his attempt to distinguish between rumor and legend,^[42] two genres that are very closely related to one another in contemporary folkloristic discourse.^[43] For Steinschneider the task of the modern scholar of legends was to discern between the original material and material that was added to it – something which he parallels to the work of the historian who has to differentiate between fancy and fact. From here Steinschneider arrives at his most compelling argument: legends evolve in their oral transmission according to everyday life experiences that are bound to the prevailing (and changing) Zeitgeist. Subjectivity thus is embedded in the changes legends undergo when they are communicated by subjects who not only assume the role of interpreters (Auffasser) of the Bible, but also communicate narratives as performers (Darsteller).^[44] These changes are reflected in the genre taxonomy that differentiates between the original biblical legends (Legende) and those legends (Sage) that were later conceived under different circumstances. This differentiation corresponds to narrative theories shaped in nineteenth century scholarship. In doing so, Steinschneider enabled a German public not fully acquainted with Jewish texts to grasp them, but he also managed to address scholars in the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums with seemingly “objective” poetic tools, by applying a set of terms that were introduced in complex ways to such material.

Perhaps the most important relevance in such genre distinctions is the notion of truth. Steinschneider’s focus on legends in his discussion was crucial since legends were not foreign to the traditional Jewish Aggadah (the narrative exegesis present in classical Rabbinic literature of the first centuries CE) and did not undermine it. However, Jewish traditional classifications contrasted Aggada with Halacha (the legal aspects present in this literature) and certainly were not set as a contrast to myths or folktales.^[45] Nevertheless, legends (Sage or Legende) did not undermine historical truth as a category per se, because as a genre they related in principle to real places, real figures and real historical events (in contrast to folktales or fables). By focusing on legends, Steinschneider neither jeopardized traditional understandings of ancient Jewish texts, nor robbed them from their sense of truth. By using a terminology which was acceptable by non-Jewish scholars, he was capable of adding another sense of truth, that became crucial in modernity: the idea of science.

“Zur Sagen und Legendenkunde” was an early approach to a systematic application of modern European (“scientific” – meaning, universal) genres in the study of Jewish folk-narratives. Steinschneider’s later better-known publications were already influenced by theories regarding the Aryan origin of European folk-narratives. Such diffusionist theories were manifested in Theodor Benfey’s study of the Pañcatantra (1859) – the Indian collection of fables, as well as the work of Steinschneider’s colleague in Oxford, Max Müller (1823–1900) in the field of comparative myth and religion. In Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (1893), Steinschneider discusses “Kalilah we-Dimnah” (the Arabic rendering of the Pañcatantra), where he explicitly relates to Benfey’s and Müller’s diffusionist theories. He posited arguments that position the Jews as part of the migration of narratives between East and West, noting that: “Kalilah we-Dimnah heisst ein Fabelbuch, an dessen Wanderung durch die Welt, von Indien bis West-und Nordeuropa, die Juden activ teilgenommen haben”.^[46] This formulation is directed against the claim of Müller that ideas of Humanity found in the Old Testament “are foreign to the ancient Aryan nations”.^[47] As we could see, Steinschneider already related to such East-West narrative migration theories in his article from 1845–1846.

In Steinschneider’s later works ‘myth’ became a key term, most probably because of its extensive use by comparative mythologists who transformed the public imagination. The discourse on myths would soon jeopardize the very idea of science of the kind Steinschneider strived to promote. This threat was addressed thoroughly by Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), whose work is discussed in the following section.

4 Ignaz Goldziher and the Bible as Mythology

Despite the generational gaps, Goldziher’s scholarly development parallels Steinschneider’s career in some ways. Growing up in Hungary, he continued his studies in Berlin, eventually writing his dissertation in Leipzig. His impact on other scholars in Hungary and beyond in Islamic Studies was immense, far beyond the confines of Jewish learning.^[48] Like Steinschneider, Goldziher left Germany to England which at the time was cast under the spell of Max Müller’s comparative mythology. It was his encounter with the latter’s work which inspired him to write Mythology among the Hebrews, a work which was based on lectures in Hungarian, published in German in 1876 and was translated into English with additions made by Goldziher himself a year later.^[49] The English edition was dedicated to Professors H. L. Fleischer, F. Max Müller and H. Vámbéry.^[50] The work was inspired intellectually by Müller, but also by the work of Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899), whose lectures Goldziher attended in Berlin alongside those delivered by Steinschneider.^[51] Oddly, Steinschneider is not credited at all.^[52] In his book on Goldziher, Robert Simon notes that “Goldziher received the greatest spiritual inspiration from H. Steinthal”.^[53] Mythology among the Hebrews refers extensively to the work of the latter. In the English translation of the book, two essays of Steinthal are fully reproduced in translation.^[54]

Steinthal is a particularly interesting figure in our present discussion as he was not only a key figure in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, but also the co-founder (together with his brother-in-law, Moritz Lazarus) of the science of Völkerpsychologie, a field that was later integrated into the German fields of Völkerkunde and Volkskunde.^[55] Steinthal published a couple of articles that served as the basis for a Hebrew mythology, which was taken further by Goldziher. Both scholars accepted some of the key ideas set forth by solar mythologists, whose influence at that time was immense. Writing on Müller’s unique status as a scholar who left his native Germany and settled in Oxford, Richard Dorson relates to his incredible success in England mentioning that when Müller died in 1900, Queen Victoria sent his widow a personal telegram of sympathy.^[56]

Müller and his fellow mythologists were puzzled by what they saw as wild and barbarous elements in the mythology of the Greeks who were regarded as the crown of human civilization. According to Dorson, Müller had a sound explanation:

All Indo-European peoples belonged to a common Aryan stock; after the migration of the European groups from their Indic homeland, the parent language, and the mythology it related, splintered into various offshoots. A time came when the original meanings of the Vedic gods were forgotten, and survived only in mythical phrases and proverbs of uncertain sense. Stories then developed to explain these phrases. From this ‘disease of language’ myths were born.^[57]

While the Aryan thesis concerning the origin of myths seems to bypass the culture of the Hebrews (and the Semites in general), the problem posed to scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums was much more severe. Goldziher’s argument countered

the exclusion of the Semites from the domain of Mythology, which was suggested by Ernst Renan. The denial of the capacity to produce myths was ascribed by Renan and his followers to the fundamental unity that underlies the monotheistic Semitic world-view and was coupled with the Semitic inability to produce art and most importantly, science.^[58]

The denial of myths from the Hebrews was not just a denial of a specific folk-genre, but a denial of the most esteemed modern intellectual faculty.^[59] Whereas in the case of Steinschneider we could see how the language of science was essential in transforming the approach to ancient narratives, here modern classifications had a profound effect on the capability of doing science because of the assumption that monotheists are deprived from doing myth and science, which were viewed as inseparable. Whereas Goldziher acknowledges that not all scholars agreed with Renan’s convictions, he manages to demonstrate how crucial the issue at hand was. Yet he accepts Renan’s conjecture (if one has no myths, one lacks the capability of doing science) and instead refutes the treatment of myth-making in racial concepts, demonstrating that mythology was a universal capacity, noting that “the Hebrew nation has always been a stepchild of mythological inquiry”.^[60] Goldziher provides various explanations to that, but his work is directed against the formulation of the Bible and of mythology as mutually exclusive phenomena.

As in the case of Steinschneider, Goldziher is also concerned with truth and he continuously brings Hebrew mythology into negotiation with other forms of truth, such as historical truth. So, while he finds it to be an undisputed historical fact that the ancient Israelites left Egypt, the series of miracles associated with it

[…] was involuntarily associated with characteristics of that Solar myth which forms the oldest mental activity of mankind in general […] the passage through the sea by night is to be compared with the myth of the setting sun, which travels all night through the sea, and arises again in the morning on the opposite side.^[61]

While this type of reasoning may seem strange, it is coherent with the prevailing logic of the solar mythologists who assumed that all mythology was essentially based on sun worship. It was the duty of the mythologist to uncover the “hidden” solar groundings of any mythology. While Müller was surely the most influential figure in this school and was a strong supporter of the Aryan thesis, other scholars accepted his emphasis of solar origin of myths, but at the same time they denied the exclusive importance of Aryanism. Scholars such as Robert Brown and Daniel G. Brinton extended the discourse on solar mythology to other domains, such as the Egyptians and the Semites in general or the American Indians. Goldziher’s emphasis of solar etymologies (that were also present in the work of Steinthal) was in line with the common reasoning of this school of thought. Eventually, after the death of Müller solar mythology became a marginal theory. Goldziher’s apologetic discourse became irrelevant once the general premise of the solar mythologists was criticized and replaced. Anthropological investigation became more influential regarding the scholarship of myths, especially with the rise of “the Myth and Ritual School”, led by Sir James Frazer (1854–1941).^[62] Frazer had an overwhelming influence both on the understanding of mythology in general and specifically on the connection between the Bible and mythology. In his classic works, “The Golden Bough” and “Folklore in the Old Testament” folklore of the Bible could be compared with that of any tribe on Earth.^[63] By then, the sense of scientific truth in the field of human and social sciences was radically transformed. Access to hidden or concealed realities became recognized in new emerging theories in psychology, especially psychoanalysis. New comparative methods in folk-narrative research became central for folklorists in their study of the folktale, which we will turn to next.

5 Bernhard Heller and the Comparison of Folktales

The work of Bernhard Heller (1871–1943) that is discussed here is different from the aforementioned works of Steinschneider and Goldziher as it was conceived as part of a multi-national research project: it was an extensive chapter on the Hebrew and Arabic folktales (divided into two sections) which was published in 1930 in the fourth volume of the five-volume Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Gebrüder Grimm, edited by Johannes Bolte (1858–1937) and Jiři Polívka (1858–1933).^[64]

Heller, a student of Goldziher, acknowledges his great debt to his mentor; the work makes ample references to Goldziher’s works, but not surprisingly does not refer to his work on Hebrew myths. Likewise, many of Steinschneider’s later works are mentioned in Heller’s chapter, especially, Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher.

Bolte was one of the key folklorists in Germany of his days, serving as the second editor of the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, the most important journal in German Volkskunde before World War II.^[65] On the eve of the First World War he set forth on a very ambitious comparative project, marking the centennial to the Grimms’ folktale collection: the Kinder und Hausmärchen. Setting off from some of the comparative aspects Wilhelm Grimm began, this project consisted of five volumes, which were published between 1913 and 1932. Since he realized that this undertaking could not be accomplished alone, he recruited Jiři Polívka, a Slavist expert from Prague. The first three volumes followed the structure of the Grimm folktales, relating to similar folktales found in various countries corresponding to the ones in the Grimm collection. To be sure, the unprecedented worldwide canonical status of the Grimm collection made it possible. This work points to the changing idea of comparison in folklore-studies: philological approaches that guided Goldziher, the solar mythologists and Benfey in their comparative works made way to comparisons of narrative or units of narrative. Bolte and Polívka’s project was guided by principles of the emerging “historical-geographical method” (the “Finnish school” following its key proponents, Julius Krohn, Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne) that compared versions of folk-narratives or other folklore items in order to arrive at an “original” form.^[66] Comparing folktales would reveal the tale-type, i. e., the original “core” of the folk-narrative. Bolte maintained close ties with Scandinavian folklorists, taking part in the prestigious Finnish series devoted to folklore (Folklore Fellows Communications).^[67] Bolte and Polívka treated the Grimm genre-classification in universal terms, taking it one-step further. In their comparative framework, the actual tales of the Grimms were addressed (at least in principle) as genotypes (models) to which other phenotypes were compared to, although the Grimm folktales were in fact phenotypes just as any folktale told is.

In the first three volumes of Bolte and Polívka Jewish folktales only occasionally surface due to lack of appropriate knowledge of both the editors. The fourth volume on the other hand considered folktales historically, relating to folktales from antiquity through the Middle Ages to modernity. This historical overview provided a context for the underlying idea of the migration of folk-narratives. For this endeavor Bolte recruited a number of specialized scholars, among them Bernhard Heller whose authority had been established in his publications in German journals as well as French ones.^[68] In his introductory words to the first section on the Hebrew folktales Heller notes that the Hebrew folktales form a part of the Jewish folktales in total, which include also Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) folktales, Jewish folktales in Persian etc. In other words, he does not formulate a dichotomy between the folktales of the Talmud and East European Hassidic tales published by Martin Buber; rather, he emphasizes a folktale tradition cutting across a long duration and many different regions and languages.

Heller stayed loyal to the over-arching framework of Bolte and Polívka’s project by being extremely far-reaching and comparative to other narrative traditions. His comparative references however portray a less Germano-centric bias than that dominated the project in its entirety. Portraying the development of the Hebrew folktales in rabbinical literature, then in collections from various sources in the Middle Ages (e. g., Sefer Sha’ashu’im and Mishle Shu’alim) and finally in modern collections and translations into Hebrew, Heller pointed at the vast amount of influences on Hebrew folktales. This is especially evident in his treatment of translations, in which he explicitly followed ideas put forth some time before by Steinschneider. He emphasizes that Jews were crucial both in transmitting narratives and inventing new ones. Like Steinschneider, he addressed some of the theses of Theodor Benfey considering the role Jews played in the diffusion of folk-narratives from the East to the West.

Some of these ideas are also present in the second sub-chapter on the Arabic folktale, which again relates to a vast number of sources and influences. Here too, Heller addresses the influence of Persian sources as well as Jewish influences on the Arabic folktales. This is particularly evident in his ample references to the Belgian Orientalist and one of the greatest authorities of that time on the Arabian Nights, Victor Chauvin (1844–1913) who

[…] expounded a theory claiming that the author and editor of the late recension of the Arabian Nights formulated in Egypt, the so-called Egyptian recension, was a Jewish compiler. This theory which today has few adherents, resulted from the extensive search for elements in the Arabian Nights containing parallels in rabbinical literature[…]^[69]

Indeed, in his treatment of the various “layers” underlying the Arabian Nights Heller makes it clear that in addition to Persian and Egyptian influences, there may also be Jewish influences present, tracing the passage of sources to the Arabian Nights through the various influences and phases that these narratives underwent, concluding in works published in the twentieth century (among them, the first three volumes of Bolte and Polívka’s remarks on the Grimm tales).^[70] Although both sub-chapters address the mutual influence of Arabic and Hebrew folk-traditions, in his final words Heller argues that the Arabic tradition should be regarded as the most important transmitter of folktales. Heller argued (in a subtle way) that whereas some folktales may have originated in Europe, much of the narratives that are found in Europe originated elsewhere. In his worldview, folktales originated from many sources as they passed from place to place, in an approach termed polygenesis that overruled the opposite approach, namely a sole origin of each tale type, monogenesis.

The fifth and final volume of Bolte and Polívka’s project addressed modern folktale collections, divided according to continents, countries and regions. Whereas in the fourth volume that addressed the history of the folktale Jews and Arabs were grouped together, in the fifth volume Jewish collections were included in Europe and not in Asia. In fact, not only were Jewish folktale collections located in Europe – in Bolte’s taxonomy they were presented as a sub-chapter in the very first chapter – the one dedicated to German folktale collections. This sub-chapter was the only one that addressed collections of Jewish folktales (mostly Yiddish). It was the only sub-chapter within the chapter dedicated to German collections that was not written by Bolte; instead, it was written by Heller himself.

Including Jewish folktale collection within the chapter on German folktale collections reveals an intriguing editorial choice. One could claim that Bolte had no other editorial choice, but if we investigate his taxonomy closely, we can see that it was guided by a linguistic principle and was not divided according to strict national borders. A good example is found in the chapter on the Basques of France and Spain, and also a chapter devoted to folktale collections of the so-called “Gypsies” (Zigeuner) – the Roma and Sinti. Bolte’s choice to include the Jews of Germany, Poland and Russia under Germany was therefore a reasonable choice, but so was a choice of excluding the Jews into a separate chapter.

There are several possible explanations to Bolte’s decision: ideologically, Bolte’s idea of Volkskunde was not as narrow as some of his contemporaries. Considering that the fifth volume was published a few months before the Nazi rise to power, it is obvious that Bolte tried shaping a very different Volkskunde than the völkisch directions promoted by some German folklorists in the inter-war period and most clearly in Nationalist-Socialist times.^[71] In addition to an ideological context, Bolte and Heller’s relations were based on mutual appreciation. It is also revealed in Heller’s programmatic article he wrote in Hebrew, where he explained the way Jewish folklore and ethnography should be studied in Palestine.^[72] This article (the first in the Hebrew language to follow the historical-geographical comparative method) was supplemented with a very detailed ethnographic questionnaire that Heller thought should be followed, where vernacular furniture, domestic clothes and such mundane everyday issues were addressed. This ethnographic questionnaire did not address marked “Jewish” topics and Heller noted explicitly the source he adapted – an ethnographic questionnaire he received from Bolte, which was utilized as part of the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde.^[73] In fact, this is a reflection of the way scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums were invested in folkloristic trends in Germany: Max Grunwald’s ethnographic questionnaire that appeared in German in 1896, was almost a word-by word copy of the ethnographic questionnaire of the Silesian Society for folklore.^[74]

By adopting a German ethnographic questionnaire and making it available for research of Jews, Heller upset some scholars from Eastern Europe. They resented the inclusion of such “non-Jewish” issues as furniture and clothes, which they saw as peripheral to the construction of Jewish identity.^[75] However, Heller exhibited a central principle common among scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in their folkloristic investigations: viewing German science as a non-situated universal science where Jews participate. It is here that we can see how Heller’s views converged with those of Bolte, for whereas scholars within the Wissenschaft des Judentums emphasized the origins of Jewish folklore in the East, they modeled their own work according to modern German scholarly norms. The inclusion of contemporary Jewish collections in Bolte’s work as part of a chapter devoted to German scholarship demonstrates their success: in this comparative project Hebrew shared ideas with Arabic on the level of the folklore – in Heller’s article that appeared in the fourth volume. Yet in the fifth volume of the project which addresses the level of scholarship (collections are clearly a form of scholarship) Jews appear as part and parcel of German science.

Bolte died in 1937 in Berlin. Heller died in 1943 in Budapest and although Bolte and Polívka’s volumes had a profound resonance among postwar comparative folktales studies, sadly even the language of Wissenschaft was not powerful enough to combat the terrible divide that would separate Jews (scholars or not) from Germany.

6 Wissenschaft des Judentums: Jewish, Arab and World Folklore

Heller’s discussions of Hebrew and Arabic folktales related to some ideas presented by Steinschneider, Goldziher and other scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums who engaged with Islamic studies. This is not incidental. In his discussion of “Converging Cognates” Ismar Schorsch has extensively addressed the important role Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888) played in extending Wissenschaft des Judentums to the study of Islam.^[76] Evidently, Fleischer was involved directly in the scholarly development of both Steinschneider and Goldziher, who in turn taught Heller. In other words, the three cases discussed here relate to scholars from different generations spanning almost a century of the Wissenschaft des Judentums who can be personally traced to Fleischer. However, other than the works of individuals it was the scholarly language of European genres and poetics more broadly, that informed scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in their engagement with folk-narratives. In an attempt to generalize, to trace diffusion and promote comparison (or better, comparability), such scholars cemented Jewish and Islamic (or Hebrew and Arabic) folk-narratives into an overarching theory of World folklore.^[77] It is therefore apt to consider the folkloristic contributions of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as “Studies in Jewish and World Folklore”, as in the title of one of the works published after the War by Haim Schwarzbaum (1911–1983) dedicated to a Yiddish collection.^[78]

Writing in times when – and places where – folklore emerged as a highly regarded form of human creativity, scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums struggled to make Jewish knowledge compatible with emerging poetic trends. They had to bridge between concepts that were conceived as part of a modern European poetic gaze on traditional forms of creativity whose language of genres could not be readily used in a scholarly discussion. As we could see, in each of the cases addressed here, scholars negotiated genres as well as different theoretical folkloristic concerns. This ‘worldly’ concern drove them in their discussion of Jewish traditional narratives. In addressing the continuous contacts and influences of Jews, Moslems and Christians and its impact on the development of folk-narrative traditions, scholars within the Wissenschaft des Judentums gradually elevated Jewish folklore and its study to a universal status. This was part of what can be conceptualized as poetic emancipation, in which the language of Wissenschaft played a crucial role. The integration of Jewish folklore collections within German collections of folklore in Bolte and Polívka’s fifth volume may attest to the overwhelming emancipatory success of a century of folk-narrative scholarship by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Importantly, the cases revisited here related to three key German genres (legends, myths and folktales, following the model of the Grimms), but numerous scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums addressed other folk-genres: fables, parables, ballads, proverbs, folk-songs, jokes, riddles etc. The different scholarly devices theses scholars used in universalizing folk-narratives that appeared in Jewish corpora as they addressed European genres and key questions in the dissemination of narratives, orality and performance, is a vital legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums that was not always acknowledged.

In 1924 the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was inaugurated. Scholars who operated there negotiated the legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums intensively in ways that have had a lasting impact. In historiography, the emergence of the “Jerusalem School” of history has become known and its relation to the Wissenschaft des Judentums was discussed thoroughly.^[79] The poetic legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums merits a separate discussion.

Of the three initial professors of the Institute, Jacob Nahum Epstein was by far the most influential in studies of ancient Jewish texts; his perception of doing proper Wissenschaft was based strictly on a philological approach.^[80] This may have prompted the conception that Epstein’s approach was the sole road to “modern research in Rabbinic Literature.”^[81] Other approaches were marginalized although institutionally the Jerusalem Institute was highly dominated by scholars who attended the rabbinical seminaries – particularly the one in Breslau – as Daniel Schwarz shows,^[82] and would have known of such approaches. It is in this context that the Hebrew University’s departure from the poetic legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums that dominated the rabbinical seminaries of Breslau, Vienna and Budapest, is intriguing.^[83] In fact, the first PhD in the history of the Hebrew University (in any field) was granted in 1936 to Raphael Patai (1910–1996), a former student of Bernhard Heller in Budapest, who followed a research agenda that was inspired by James Frazer and comparative folklore. Patai studied Arabic and Persian with Carl Brockelmann in Breslau built upon this poetic legacy, but he was never hired by the Hebrew University.^[84]

The first to integrate a comparative folkloristic poetics addressing rabbinic literature was Dov Noy, a former (private) student of Avigdor Aptowitzer who had worked in the seminary in Vienna before (1871–1942). After graduating from the University of Indiana, where Noy wrote his dissertation under Stith Thompson in folklore studies – a motif index of the Talmud and the Midrash,^[85] he joined the Hebrew literature department at the Hebrew University where he taught rabbinic literature.^[86]

Noy’s student, Galit Hasan-Rokem, notes that in his studies of folk-narratives in rabbinic literature

Noy continued the work of great scholars from the generations that preceded his: Sigmund Fraenkel, Wilhelm Bacher, Bernhard Heller and especially Louis Ginzberg, composer of The Legends of the Jews, and Micha Josef Berdyczewski, composer of Mimekor Yisrael.^[87]

This is of course not a direct lineage: Noy was a native of Kolomea (Galizia; today in the Ukraine) studied in the US. Nevertheless, he was the first post-war scholar who retrieved this Central European poetic legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Accordingly, Noy took an active part in an international discourse on folk-narratives during the 1950s and 1960s, establishing contacts with German scholars as part of his conviction that Jewish folklore cannot be studied separately from the world.^[88] In doing that he consciously modeled his work on the standards Heller set forth some decades earlier. In parallel, Noy established the Israel Folktale Archives, where he focused on collecting oral narratives, with the goal of linking oral narratives of the ethnographic present to rabbinical literature investigated by Wissenschaft scholars.

In his international folkloristic agenda Noy was somewhat unique among the faculty of the Jerusalem Institute, most of which operated in very different ways. As an example, we may relate to Jonah Fraenkel (1928–2012), one of the foremost scholars of Rabbinic Literature who fervently criticized the work of Noy,^[89] and followed it with an attack on works of Noy’s students, notably that of Eli Yassif and Galit Hasan-Rokem.^[90] This criticism was coupled with downplaying the role of folklore in the works of scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums by practically ignoring such studies and avoiding genre classifications as interpretive tools. In doing that, Fraenkel was not unique among postwar scholars who abandoned the Wissenschaft des Judentums’s trajectory of emancipating rabbinical literature by recourse to folk-narrative explorations and genre taxonomies. Given the marginalization of folkloristic methods in the study of ancient Jewish texts, Noy and his students continuously insisted on emphasizing the legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

In parallel to Noy, one should also mention Haim Schwarzbaum – who operated outside academia.^[91] Schwarzbaum was a vehement dedicated follower of the historical-geographical method who in many of his own works addressed both Hebrew and Arabic folktales and owed a great debt to Heller and other scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. His own independent path outside academic institutions limited his impact on the way Jewish Studies was crafted despite his lasting impact on folk-narrative research and especially scholars of Jewish folklore who highly regarded his work.^[92]

The question then is apparent: why was the poetic legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums abandoned and ignored by most of the scholars in the Jerusalem Institute to the extent that those scholars who operated on the same lines were set in a marginal position? Why was Wissenschaft in the Jerusalem Institute restricted to philology or history?^[93] It is possible to think of a number of explanations on a number of levels: on a personal level, Noy was one of the first scholars of the Jerusalem Institute who studied in the United States (initially as a scholar of comparative literature with René Wellek at Yale University and finally as a scholar of folklore at Indiana University with Stith Thompson); therefore from an early point in his career he had to connect Jewish texts to a wider disciplinary framework. From an institutional point of view at the Hebrew University, the Institute of Jewish Studies was separated from the Institute of Oriental Studies, while at the same time Jewish History, Jewish Philosophy, Hebrew Language and Hebrew Literature were separated from History, Philosophy, Linguistics and other “literatures” respectively.^[94] From a disciplinary perspective, the Nazification of German Volkskunde may have stirred antagonism towards folklore-studies in irreconcilable ways. Simultaneously, folklore studies drew many amateur scholars in ways that antagonized academics.^[95] On a socio-political level, the fate of European Jewry in the Shoah made the emancipatory trajectory irrelevant, a complete failure. In the context of the fulfillment of a Political Zionist ideology, emphasizing the uniqueness of Jewish culture may have been regarded as a more pertinent scholarly undertaking. This was especially so in relation to the study of Arabic cultures whose affinities with Jewish cultures were downplayed under the political circumstances which brought Jews and Arabs one against the other.

Finally and more broadly, we have to consider the changes ‘Jewish folklore’ as a spatio-temporal category underwent: whereas scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums initially emphasized the folklore of German Jews,^[96] one notes a change in foci over the years, especially in Zionist folklore-studies where folklore was attributed mostly to Jews from Eastern Europe and Jews in Asia and Africa.^[97] The outcome of this was that by the end of the 1940s Jewish folklore was rarely associated ethnographically with Jews from Central Europe. This development was lamented by Aaron Fürst: in a letter written in 1947 he tried to grasp the reasons for the lack of interest in Jewish folklore of Central European Jewry.^[98] As a scholar who forty years earlier had published a book on the traditions and customs of the Jews of Eisenstadt, Fürst could not grasp this change of ethnographic change of focus.^[99] This separation of Jewish folklore from Central Europe was crucial in the change in the poetic language of the Jerusalem Institute of Jewish Studies by those scholars who originated in Central Europe. For scholars such as Jonah Fraenkel who attributed ‘Jewish folklore’ to ‘others’ hermeneutics of Rabbinic Literature was constructed on an elitist model, severed from folk-culture.

7 Conclusion

Jewish scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was carried out in many cases within circles of Jewish learning, publication and dissemination. As a result, comparative folk-narrative scholars, are rarely aware of the vast library created by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as a relevant source for the history of the discipline of folklore and for their examination of narratives – East or West. Writing in hindsight as part of a global folkloristics/global Jewish Studies, in an age of cultural flux, it seems that the poetic legacy of Steinschneider, Goldziher, Heller and many other scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums – that of integrating Jewish folk-culture in the world – and likewise in the study of other folk cultures– has never been as acute and relevant as in the present moment.