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Folklore
Jewish folklore is comprised of oral tradition,
including fairy tales, legends, parables, sayings, riddles,
jokes,
songs and Purim plays (purimshpil), as well as music and
dance.
Within Ashkenazic culture, folklore developed mostly in
the Yiddish
language, though there were some sayings and riddles in
Hebrew. Written
folklore is also typical for Jewish culture; these include
the Torah,
midrashim, apocryphas, and collections of legends and fairy
tales.
Jewish folklore was also subject to outside influences,
from Ancient
Greek to Slavic, and adapted them to Jewish culture. Popular
heroes
included Moses; the prophet Elijah; tzaddikim such as
Elimelech of
Lezajsk; jesters and quick-witted characters, such as
Hershele of
Ostropol or Motke Ganev [Hebrew, "Motke the Thief"]; and the
residents
of the "cities of fools", such as Chelm or Lesko in Poland.
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Particular to Jewish folklore are legends about
the 36 "just ones" (lamed-vovnik); about the Ten Lost
Tribes, living
beyond the mythical Sambation River; numerous legends about
the coming
of the Messiah, and also about the Promised Land. Songs can
be divided
into religious ones that are sung during services and
special rituals
(such as nigun, zmirot), and secular ones for everyday
occasions:
lullabies and songs for children, as well as humorous,
romantic and
historical songs. They were accompanied by music with motifs
from songs
sung in the synagogue, as well as folk tunes, which had
absorbed
elements from the surrounding cultures. In central Poland,
these
included mazurkas and krakowiaki; in the eastern Kresy,
these were
Ukrainian, Moldavian and Turkish melodies, for example.
Dance in Jewish culture preserved many Mediterranean
traits, (hora),
both in terms of dance figures and gesticulation (circle
dances,
typical upraised palms, and small, intertwined steps).
Jewish sayings,
parables and riddles had their sources in religious texts
(the Book of
Proverbs in the Bible and the Talmud tract "The Parables of
the
Fathers", for example), as well as in the later teachings of
rabbis and
tzaddikim that had been written down. This is an important
distinguishing feature of Jewish folklore as compared to
Christian
folklore, which for the most part is based on the oral
tradition.
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Some of these texts were an intermediate form
between a saying and a joke. An example of this would be the
full
meaning of the saying nichnas yayin, yatsa sod [Hebrew, "the
wine went
in, the secret came out"], which is based on the fact that
the words
yayin [Hebrew, "wine"] and sod [Hebrew, "secret"] have the
same
numerical value � seventy (gematria). East European
Jews also discovered
the rebus, which has its origins in the brain teasers and
exercises
used in traditional religious schools.
(A.C./CM)
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