Galilee has been a crossroads of cultures, religions, and languages for centuries, as illustrated in these fascinating Bedouin folktales, which offer excellent examples of the Arabic narrative tradition of the Middle East.

Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel collects nearly 60 traditional folktales, told mostly by women, that have been carefully translated in the same colloquial style in which they were told. These stories are grouped into themes of love and devotion, ghouls and demons, and animal stories. The work also includes phonetic transcription and linguistic annotation. Accompanying each folktale is a comprehensive ethnographic, folkloristic, and linguistic commentary, placing the tales in context with details on Galilee Bedouin dialects and the tribes themselves.

A rich, multifaceted collection, Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel is an invaluable resource for linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and any reader interested in a tradition of storytelling handed down through the centuries.

About the Author

Yoel Shalom Perez is Retired Lecturer of Folklore at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Director of the Center of Folktales and Folklore. He is author of the preamble in King Solomon and the Golden Fish: Tales from the Sephardic Tradition.

Judith Rosenhouse is Retired Faculty Member and Former Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. She is a linguist specializing in many aspects of Arabic, including phonetics, child language, and sociolinguistics in the dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, modern Hebrew, and Hungarian-Hebrew language contacts. In 2022, she was elected president of the Israeli Linguistics Society in Honor of Haiim Rosen.

Reviews

Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel is a unique and outstanding publication. Actually it includes much more than an anthology of 'folktales.' It provides the reader with almost everything needed to understand life, culture, history, and language of the Bedouin women, men, family, and tribe in Northern Israel of the last century. Folklorists used to emphasize the importance of the context. This book is, ostensibly, an exemplary contextual publication and study of a given body of folktales: the history and geography (including maps), the language - including the original Arabic texts (in transcription), their folkloristic comparative study and interpretation, as well as an array of indexes and bibliography. It puts in our hands a rare and important tool for understanding the importance not only of Bedouin folklore but also of folklore at large. In addition to its scholarly importance, this is also a collection of narratives that will be an exciting read for every person who still loves a good story.

-- Eli Yassif, Emeritus in Department of Literature, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel is an outstanding contribution to the presently scarce fresh folktale collections from the field. Perez and Rosenhouse present a well-crafted balance between tale texts and theories advanced by scholars concerning these international tale-types. Indiana University Press is to be complimented for reviving the authentic field collection tradition.

-- Hasan M. El-Shamy, Professor Emeritus, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

This splendid collection of Bedouin folk tales combines three elements: scientific transcriptions of audio recordings of the colloquial Arabic texts; accurate translations; and an extensive discussion, with rich comparative material, of each tale. These elements fit together in the most natural fashion-all, in fact, are essential to a serious study of the subject-and yet this is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first work on Arab folklore that actually combines them. The authors are to be congratulated on a fine achievement.

-- Frank H. Stewart, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

William Blake's metaphor 'to see the world in a grain of sand' acquires a new meaning in the study of Judith Rosenhouse, a linguist, and Yoel Shalom Perez, a comparative folklorist, who present with meticulous precision the performance of universally traditional tales as told by Galilean Bedouins. As two Israelis, they reveal in them the cultural bonding between Israelite and Arab traditions that go back to antiquity.

-- Dan Ben-Amos, author of Folklore Concepts

When linguistic, dialectological and folkloristic approaches meet: 57 traditional stories recorded from Bedouins in Northern Israel (13 of them translated from Hebrew) provided in linguistic transcription, English translation, and commentaries to place the folktales within their social and historical context. This ideal interdisciplinary approach has hitherto been only rarely applied.

-- Veronika Ritt-Benmimoun, University of Vienna



Book Information
ISBN 9780253063830
Author Yoel Shalom Perez
Format Paperback
Page Count 562
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 1284g