"Hey, You've Got No Character": Chizbat Humor and the Boundaries of Israeli Identity

Abstract

ALL SOCIETIES CATEGORIZE the elements of their physical, social, and cultural reality. The materials of folklore, as one province of that reality, present no exception to this rule and are classified in accordance with various schemes, simple or complicated, depending upon the extent to which any given society attributes importance to its oral literature. Jewish culture has never lacked a large number of classificatory categories applicable to oral tradition, possibly because a significant portion of Jewish law, torah shebe'al peh, originally existed only in oral form. Since Biblical times, many literary categories at various levels of analysis have been distinguished, and all are applicable to oral forms: mashal (exemplum, proverb), agada (legend), midrash (homiletic interpretation), sippur (story), ma'aseh (tale), bedikha (joke), khida (riddle), khokhma (wisdom). All these categories bear a Hebrew name and reputable genealogy in the Hebrew lexicon. Since the Jewish resettlement of Palestine, a new oral literary category has crystallized, the chizbat.' It is immediately evident that this category sports an alien title, as [chj is not a Hebrew phoneme. The word itself is the sound feminine plural of the Palestinian Arabic chizba and means lies. This category of oral tradition was delimited at about the time of the formation of the Palmakh and was hence-