Week 10 Jewish Folktale Tradition

In class this week we read numerous Jewish folktales and after discussing them we found that Jewish tale traditions differ from western tales in several distinct ways.  Firstly the Jewish tales, much like the American deaf culture’s tales, poke fun at the majority.  The Jewish culture uses folktales as an instrument of empowerment by making fun of the majority population.  It is commonly known that the Jewish people have been made scapegoats throughout history, so they use stories as a form of release.
This leads us to another distinction between Jewish tales and western tales: humor.  Jewish folktales contain a lot more humor than western tales do.  For example, in “A Dispute in Sign Languages” a wicked priest summons the chief rabbi and gives him an ultimatum: either present a Jew for a dispute in sign language in 30 days or he will have all the Jews killed.  Just when the thirty days are about to run out, a Jew takes up the challenge and has a dispute in sign language with the wicked priest.  The priest goes through a series of signs and the Jewish poultry dealer answers to the priests satisfaction and thus passes the test.  After the dispute, it is revealed that the poultry dealer translated the priests signs using logic and reason and thus mistranslating the priest’s intended meaning.  The poultry dealers signs were still accepted by the priest because the priest mistranslated the Jew’s signs.  The whole dispute was a complete miscommunication that ends up saving all of the Jews.
Another distinction of the Jewish folktale tradition is that the main character is commonly a Rabbi.  This departs from the western tradition of having children or young adults as the main character.  The Rabbi by definition must be an adult.  Having a Rabbi is also different because it involves religion directly in the story.  Western tales mainly use religion in the form of motifs.
Jewish folktales are also more realistic than western tales.  They contain little or no magic or enchantment. Rather, the characters in the tale use intelligence to accomplish what magic does in other tales.  In the Jewish tale “The Rabbi and the Inquisitor”, the town judge tries to falsely persecute a Rabbi for murder by tricking him.  After losing in argument, the judge forces the rabbi to put his fate up to chance.  The judge decrees that the Jew must pick his sentence from a hat, that contains two slips of paper: one with “guilty” written on it and one left blank. However, the judge secretly writes “guilty” on both  so that the rabbi must be found guilty no matter which paper he picks.  The rabbi guesses the judge is going to do this and eats the slip of paper he chooses so that no one can read it.  Since the only slip left in the had says guilty on it, every thinks that the one the rabbi ate must have been blank so they had to release him.  This is a much more realistic story than are seen in western tale traditions, where magic and enchantment are common tools for achieving one’s goals.