Tales in Context: Sefer ha-ma'asim in Medieval Northern France by Rella Kushelevsky (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tales in Context: Sefer ha-ma'asim in Medieval Northern France by Rella Kushelevsky Susan L. Einbinder Rella Kushelevsky. Tales in Context: Sefer ha-ma'asim in Medieval Northern France. With a historical epilogue by Elisheva Baumgarten. Translations by Ruchie Avital and Chaya Naor. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. 816 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000215 This welcome edition of the Sefer ha-ma'asim, an anthology of sixty-nine Hebrew tales adapted, arranged, and composed in thirteenth-century France, offers readers a literary feast. Credit goes to a team of scholars under Rella [End Page 429] Kushelevsky's direction: Tovi Bibring for translations of Old French sources; Nurit Shoval for identifying and translating Latin parallels; three research assistants (Orit Kandel, Udi Sat, and Galit Brin) for the Hebrew notes, bibliography, and appendices; Itamar Drori for the manuscript transcription; Ruchie Avital for translating the tales; and Chaya Naor for translating the introductory chapters and tale analyses. Elisheva Baumgarten's "historical epilogue" concludes the work. The authors can take pride in their achievement. They have produced a solid edition of a major Hebrew literary work, which Kushelevsky locates in late thirteenth-century Champagne, a period and a region rich in Jewish literary activity that have received more attention for exegetical, polemical, and legal writings than for belles lettres. They have also bravely confronted the protean nature of their text, basing their edition on one manuscript (Oxford Bodleian 135). The copyist, like later copyists, treated the collection as an "open book" (28), adding, subtracting, and emending tales as he saw fit. This attention to the copyist as a figure whose imagination and agency played a determinative role in what we call "authorship" (4) is overdue. The tales blend didactic instruction and aesthetic pleasure; the Hebrew style suggests a "broad yet educated audience" (15) and includes performative elements (21). Sefer ha-ma'asim is a hybrid work, drawing on Jewish antecedents (midrash, exegesis, rabbinic literature, and Tosafist commentary) as well as on contemporary Old French romance, exempla, and folktales and motifs. Kushelevsky and her team have made this extraordinary compilation, annotated copiously, available not just to Hebrew readers but to a general audience of medievalists who will find interest in unfamiliar tales as well as more familiar but reworked ones. A striking example of the latter is tale 55 ("The Poor Bachelor"), with its reworked scene from Béroul's Tristan depicting two lovers separated chastely by a sword. Where Béroul memorably described Tristan and Yseult, uncovered in their forest hideout by Yseult's husband, King Mark, the Sefer ha-ma'asim describes a terrified student beside his wealthy cousin, discovered at home by her father, who advocates for their marriage against a mother with more materialist concerns. As Kushelevsky and Baumgarten observe, the Hebrew tales emphasize family, and their plots often turn on questions of family loyalty and honor. As Baumgarten also notes, the stories do not elevate scholars or rabbis for emulation; their pious heroes are characterized less by learning than by prayer and charity exercised outside Jewish study halls and synagogues (695–98). The women of Sefer ha-ma'asim are worthy of their "high status" historical counterparts; they speak frequently and consequentially, they manage money and affairs, they are pious and beautiful but equally energetic (699–700). Here, too, there is much room for comparison with vernacular conventions and historical conditions. All this is good. Other, less positive, aspects of this book range from merely annoying to cause for higher-order frustration. The translations can be clunky, and a combination of grammatical errors and infelicitous phrasings should have been caught by Wayne State's editors. The book's opening sentences are incomprehensible, and strange tangles of language appear throughout. [End Page 430] There is no reason to invent words like "hybridism" or "hybridic" when the English "hybridity" and "hybrid" are perfectly serviceable (17, 18, 25, 26, 33, etc.). "Internal loan library" should be "interlibrary loan" (xvi). "Predestinated" should be "predestined" (581). More problematically, what is a "historical horizon" (18) or a "narrating community" (8, 12, and elsewhere)? To describe a "synchronic sequence" as "loose" (40) manages to combine an oxymoron and mixed metaphor in one sad...