On Legends of the Jews and Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage

Abstract

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2018), pp. 280–286. Copyright © 2019 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 B O O K R E V I E W S On Legends of the Jews and Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage Ariel Gratch Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered edited by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Ithamar Gruenwald. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. 182 pp., ISBN 978-0-8143-4047-9. $44.99 Cloth. Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage: Folktales, Legends, and Letters authored and edited by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and Peninnah Schram. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 260 pp., ISBN 978-1-44223898 -5. $36.00 Cloth, $24.00 Paper, $34.00 Electronic. J udaism is a religion and culture that straddles the line between orality and literacy. In addition to the written Torah given to Moses at Sinai, God also deliveredanoralTorah ,passeddownfrompersontopersonuntilitwaseventually codified as the Talmud. Still, through today, the laws of the oral Torah are told as midrash, homiletic interpretations of written and oral scripture, and as aggadah, scripture interpreted through folklore, aphorisms, anecdotes, and rabbinic advice . Although the Talmud was codified over 1,500 years ago, the oral tradition in Judaism continues in every aspect of Jewish life, from the rabbi’s pulpit to the Gratch n 281 child’s playroom. Both of the books reviewed in this essay serve as a testament to the significance of the oral tradition to Jewish religion and culture. The first book I review, Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered, edited by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Ithamar Gruenwald , contains critical essays considering the continued relevance of Louis Ginzberg’s opus, The Legends of the Jews. Legends is one of the most complete collections of aggadah, apocrypha, and pseudepigraphic Jewish texts ever compiled and has contributed greatly to contemporary understandings of the oral Torah. While Hasan-Rokem and Gruenwald’s book looks at the impact of Ginzberg’s massive compilation of midrash and aggadah, the second book I review, Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage: Folktales, Legends, and Letters, authored and edited by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and Peninnah Schram, demonstrates how such texts evolve and/or come into being. Both books are relevant to storytelling scholars and practitioners alike. The authors of the essays in Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered analyze Ginzberg and his work as a folklore scholar. Many of the essays were first presented to celebrate the centennial of the first publication of Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews at the Fifteenth Congress of the World Association of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in August 2009, and in some cases, the essays help me feel like I’m attending the conference, listening to scholarly assessments of Ginzberg’s work, peppered with anecdotes and asides one might hear in a panel discussion. At times this makes the book somewhat inaccessible, not just to people who are not well versed in Jewish studies but to anyone not well versed in the study of Ginzberg’s life and work. At other times, though, it makes the book endearing and, like a good story, draws us in and helps us find meaning in the life and work of Louis Ginzberg. In the introductory chapter, Rebecca Schorsch argues that Ginzberg attempted to reveal Jewish history not as political, but as a “history of culture, of the pen, and one marked by great moments of canonization” (Ginzberg 6). Schorsch explains that “Ginzberg rabbinized the folk” (7) and thereby helped create a sense of nationalism among Jews. This nationalism is not bound by the geographical constraints of a state but instead exists in the fluid telling and interpretations of cultural and religious stories. The importance of storytelling for a nation and the role of Ginzberg as storyteller is highlighted in three of the book’s seven chapters. In “An Unimagined Community: Against The Legends of the Jews,” Daniel Boyarin posits “a cultural relationship between the Greek Christian West and the 282 n On Legends of the Jews and Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage Babylonian Talmud” (49), whereby Jewish oral tradition...