Ed. and with Comment, by D. Ben-Amos. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006. 722 p.

The author of a multi-volume project on Jewish folklore, the compiler and editor of the first volume is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a leading expert in the field of folklore studies, especially African and Jewish folklore, D. Ben-Amos 1. The idea of the project is to translate into modern English and publish the most interesting and representative folklore texts stored in the IFA (Israeli Folktales Archives). IFA was founded in 1955 by Dov Noah, a classic of Jewish folklore studies, and was conceived as a department of the Israeli Ethnological Museum in Haifa. In 1983, the museum and archive moved to the University of Haifa.

At present, IFA is the world's largest collection of Jewish folklore texts of prose genres: oral histories, fairy tales and legends told by informants who came to the United States.

* Jewish Folk Tales, vol. 1. Tales of the Sephardic scattering / Ed. and author's commentary by D. Ben-Amos. Philadelphia: Jewish Publishing Society, 2006. 722 p.

1 He is the author of a number of classical works [Ben-Amos, 1975; Ben-Amos, 1976; Ben-Amos and Weissberg, 1999; Ben-Amos, 2004], as well as a collector, compiler and publisher of numerous collections and anthologies of Jewish folklore [Mimekor, 1999; In praise of..., 1993]. A list of works by D. Ben-Amos can be found on the website http://www.sas.upenn.edu/folklore/faculty/dbamos/

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Israel from 56 countries. In total, the archive contains more than 20 thousand documents representing the oral Jewish tradition of both Israel and the Diaspora countries. Among the collectors of such texts, especially at first, there were many volunteers dedicated to perpetuating the oral folk tradition. Later, as the study of folklore in Israel became an academic discipline, specialists began to collect and record texts. An important feature of the IFA collection is that most of the texts were written by the collectors in Hebrew, and not in the original languages (Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew-Arabic, Hebrew-Persian, and other Jewish languages and dialects). Thus, as D. Ben-Amos notes in his introduction (p. XXV-XXVI), when translating into Hebrew, the narrator's language (s) is accompanied by unavoidable losses.

The reviewed volume - the first of the proposed series (the second volume is currently published) - presents Sephardic folklore 2. If the collection and recording of the folklore of European Ashkenazi Jews3 began rather late (in the second half of the 19th century) in comparison with the recording of the folklore of many European peoples, then researchers turned to Sephardic folklore even later. These were recordings of Jewish-Spanish folklore texts of the Jews of Constantinople and Vienna, made in the late XIX-early XX centuries by M. Wagner, W. Schiller, M. Grunwald. The study of Sephardic oral art in Turkey, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa began even later, due to the lack of an academic school of Sephardic folklore studies, as well as the lack of scientific, public and financial support for such projects.

The collection and study of Sephardic folklore continued in the first two decades of the twentieth century by American specialists who studied the oral tradition of immigrants who came to the United States from Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, and other countries. Shortly after the Second World War, there were few publications of folklore texts of Moroccan Jews. But the extensive study of Sephardic folklore is connected-directly or indirectly-with the IFA, from whose collections experts have drawn and continue to draw their materials. It was thanks to this archive that many monuments of Jewish folk culture, which is rapidly disappearing into the past, were preserved.

The texts presented in the collection (71) are grouped into four sections: legends (27), didactic fairy tales (4), folk stories (24) and humorous fairy tales (13). Each text is provided with extensive comments that contain information about when, where and by whom it was recorded; information about the country of origin of this text and a description of the study of such texts and the historical and cultural realities found in them; information about similar texts stored in the IFA (with the number of the storage unit, name and country). origin). In the commentaries to each fairy tale, the fairy-tale type and folklore motifs are given, according to the Aarne-Thompson index. The notes to each text also contain detailed literature on the issue.

These comments, often many times larger than the text itself, are an independent value. They introduce the reader to the world of Sephardic folklore and - more broadly-Sephardic culture, present the most common folklore plots and characters, tell about the history of studying and scientific discussions on various problems, etc. For example, fairy tales about the popular comic character Juha, accompanied by an essay on the transformation of this image (simpleton, trickster, master of all sorts of tricks, etc. etc.) and its prevalence in different regions, which gives an idea of what stories were popular in Turkey, North Africa, Palestine (Eretz Yisrael), and the Balkans.

One of the advantages of the reviewed collection, in my opinion, is that in addition to oral narratives from places of compact settlement of Sephardim, it contains texts from those regions where Sephardic enclaves were extremely small, for example, from Ukraine. Of course, this may raise questions about the representativeness of the entire collection. However, since this approach

2 Sephardim (from Hebrew. Sfarad-Spain) - descendants of Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries and spoke the Jewish-Spanish language (Ladino, Giudezmo). After the expulsion of the Jews (Spain-1492, Portugal-1499), Sephardim settled in a number of countries in North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkan Peninsula; Sephardic enclaves also existed in Western Europe (Vienna, Bordeaux, London, Naples, etc.), small groups of Sephardim settled in Eastern Europe. In some places they retained their spoken language, and in some countries they switched to the languages of the peoples among whom they lived. Currently, most Sephardim live in Israel.

3 Ashkenazim (from Hebrew. Ashkenazim-Germany) - Jews who lived in Northern France and Germany since the first centuries of the new era. Later, this was the name given to European Jews, including the Eastern Ashkenazim, whose spoken language was Yiddish, and the Western Ashkenazim, who lived in Western Europe.

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it gives the reader a better idea of the prevalence of Sephardic folklore and the transformation of its plots, and it is quite legitimate.

The fairy-tale stories presented in the collection are extremely diverse. Along with biblical, Talmudic, Midrashic, and late Medieval themes, many texts include the realities of life in the Sephardic communities of Palestine (Jerusalem, Haifa, Tiberias, Hebron), Turkey (Istanbul), Morocco (Fez), Greece (Thessaloniki), and others, as well as features of their multicultural environment.

In general, there are few stories in Sephardic folklore that even indirectly date back to the time of their residence in Spain. Accordingly, there are very few such texts in the IFA. The main part of the texts refers to the era of the Ottoman Empire (i.e., before 1922). There are relatively few plots and characters related to the Bible and Talmud. Among them are King Solomon (fairy tale 52 - "The Judgment of King Solomon"), the prophet Eliyahu (Elijah) (for example, legend 20 - "Three hairs from Eliyahu's beard"). If we talk about the Middle Ages, then here the most common texts are those where Maimonides 4 appears (legends 8-10). There are many more texts that deal with the communities of Fez or Tangier (Morocco), Kerouan (Algeria), Hebron, Jerusalem, Rhodes, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, about real or fictional events and miracles, about sages and miracle workers who lived in these communities, etc. the surrounding peoples-Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Berbers, etc.

In my opinion, the main problem of the reviewed volume is not in its "geographical representativeness" (publishing texts from regions where Sephardim were very few, in my opinion, is quite justified) and not in the plot diversity (in the reviewed volume you can see most of the topics presented in the IFA). The main disadvantage of such publications is the "double loss of the language", i.e. the original language. As already mentioned, from the very beginning, the texts were written by collectors in Hebrew; for this publication, their translation was carried out, successfully performed by L. Schram, from Hebrew into the standard English language. For professional folklorists, such double-translated texts (albeit professionally)are texts can hardly serve as a source for their research. Even if the texts in the original languages are completely lost, the specialist will still have to refer to the record of the informant's oral story made in Hebrew and stored in the IFA. However, for the general reader who is interested in Jewish folklore, for folklorists who are engaged in oral creativity of other peoples, such a collection can be very useful. Of course, it is now difficult for researchers to judge the original, but in this case it was, apparently, the only possible way to introduce the oral Jewish tradition to a wide readership.

For specialists in Jewish folklore, however, not only the texts themselves are interesting, but above all the compiler's comments, which are, in fact, an independent study, and a perfectly executed reference device. It includes a list of informants with an indication of the origin of each of them: a list of collectors who recorded oral histories (among them are well-known researchers of folklore, in particular the already mentioned Dova Noah, as well as Tamar Alexander, etc.), an extensive bibliography containing many works on Sephardic folklore, history and culture, as well as on folklore theory and culture. other disciplines; indexes of fairy-tale motifs and fairy-tale types, with which it is easy and convenient to navigate not only in the texts published in this volume, but also in other materials stored in the IFA. The elegant design of the volume is complemented by illustrations by Ira Shander, which do not so much adorn certain texts as depict real or fictional, preserved or destroyed architectural monuments or objects (synagogues, tombstones, mikveh 5, prayer supplies, etc.p.), help the reader to immerse themselves in the vanished world of Sephardic culture. The reviewed volume is a worthy monument to this culture and its departed guardians.

list of literature

Ben-Amos D. Jewish Folk Literature / Translated from English by E. E. Nosenko, Moscow: House of Jewish Books, 2004.

Ben-Amos D. (Ed.). New Theories in Oral Literature: Literary Forms in Social Context. Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1975 (in Hebrew).

4 Maimonides (Moshe Ben Maimon, or Rambam, 1135-1204) was a prominent Jewish religious philosopher, scholar, and physician of the Middle Ages.

Mikveh 5 (mikvah) - a pool for ritual ablutions.

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Ben-Amos D. (Ed.). Folklore Genres. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

Ben-Amos D., Weissberg L. (Ed.). Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Mimekor Yisrael: Classical Jewish Folktales I Col. by M.J.B. Gorion; ed. by E.Bin Gorion; transl. by I.M. Lask; prep, by Dan Ben-Amos. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1990.

In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht): the Eearliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism I Transl. & ed. by Dan Ben-Amos & J.R. Mintz. Northvale (N.J.): Jason Aronson, 1993.

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