Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel

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