We can tell a lot about a culture from its stories. That’s because every narrative we encounter, whether a best-selling potboiler, a binge-worthy TV show, or even, to a great extent, a news article, functions as a kind of feedback loop, reflecting and influencing the group from which it emerged.
Take Dynasty, that primetime U.S. soap opera from the “greed is good” 1980s, about the lives and loves of fat cat Texas oilmen. Or the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, circa 1939, entertaining audiences with its starry-eyed idealism about truth, democracy, and the American way, as the world headed to war. These commercial products were representative of particular people, times, and places.
The culture that such commercial narratives emerged from and informed was, in turn, shaped, directly or not, by the non-commercial, traditional “folk” stories that comprise the body of folk narrative, also known as the oral narrative tradition. These are stories with the attributes of all folklore, that is, they are (1) at least originally shared by means of the spoken word, (2) transmitted between or within generations, (3) generally have no known source, thus the story itself cannot be copyrighted, only individual versions, or “variants,” and (4) change slightly with each variant.
The Jewish Difference
To a great extent, Jewish commercial and traditional narrative functions in the same way. Overall, the commercial stories, whether by Saul Bellow or Joshua Cohen, pertain to the Jewish condition at the time they were written, even if, as in Jacob wrestling with the angel, they may oppose it. As for traditional oral tales, their retellings may be transmitted online as well as in scores of books, movies, and other media. Much like the Talmudic agadot, they are part of the traditional Jewish oral culture that shapes people to this day, whether or not they are aware of it.
Most variants of the Jewish oral narrative tradition available to researchers in the past seventy years stem from the work of the scholar Dov Noy and his team, who collected 25,000 or so stories for the Israel Folk Archives, the contents of which were condensed into three volumes by folklorist Dan Ben-Amos. The Ben-Amos series is divided among Sephardic, Eastern European, and Arab source material.
This last point is significant. World folk narrative is generally understood to stem from the same impetus, whether from the human collective unconscious, per Jung, or from travelers and conquerors, per Thompson. In other words, there are variants of the story we call “Cinderella” in virtually every corner of the globe, either because of the global human psyche or because those who transmitted them took them wherever they went. Thus, the names and small details of the story may be different—it’s rarely a shoe that seals the protagonist’s fate in Cinderella-type stories, for instance—but the overall theme, or “tale type,” is the same. Every culture has stories like this of rising from a lower position to a higher one. They are simply encapsulated in the names, clothing, and, more to the point, the values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors emblematic of each group.
Here, then, is a distinctive characteristic of Jewish oral narrative.
Unlike Egyptian or Chinese oral traditions, which tend to reflect more singular cultural perspectives, Jewish stories are shaped by both Jewish and surrounding non-Jewish cultures. As Ben-Amos makes clear, Jewish stories—and the Jews who tell them—reflect a blend of influences from the places Jews have lived and contributed to. This dynamic is central to being ‘folk’ in the Diaspora: experience and environment mutually shape both stories and identity.
Source: Caren Schnur Neile, PhD., MFA, taught storytelling studies at Florida Atlantic University for twenty years. A graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, she has published seven books, and her work appears in The Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature, Elie Wiesel and the Art of Storytelling, The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore & Folklife Studies and numerous other publications.
Photo: AI-generated illustration.