Mimekor Yisrael [antikvár]

Preface ' ' ,1 Immediately upon its original publication in a six-volume set in German as Der Born Judas, during and shortly after Worid War I, Mimékor Yisrael attained the status of a scholarly and a literary classic. Micha Joseph bin Gorion (Berdyczewski) drew into this collecnon tales from traditional classical sources, medieval and later folk books that served as the basic staple of a narrative tradition that nurtured Jewish communities in Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Since most of these books were no longer accessible to the modern reader, the very anthology of tales that bin Gorion assembled became a classical collection. In that sense this volume of tales is true to its Hebrew title. Mimékor Yisrael means "from the fountain of Israel," and indeed, the tales in that volume had been selected from the fountainheads that fed the broad stream of Jewish tradition, turning Mimékor Yisrael itself into a new source of traditional tales for the modern reader. After the original publication, Emanuel bin Gorion, Micha Joseph's son, prepared an edition that included the Hebrew texts that his mother, Rachel Ramberg, translated into German. The Hebrew version of Mimékor Yisrael appeared in three editions, in 1939, 1952, and 1956. It was the last of these editions that had been translated into English and published in a three-volume set by Indiana University Press in 1976. In preparation for an abridged edition Emanuel bin Gorion selected two hundred and sixty-five tales that are included in a revised abridged and annotated edition of Mimékor Yisrael. He passed away at the age of eighty-four, on June 10, 1987, before he could make the selection for the present edition of the book. Dan Ben-Amos, his collaborator in the preparation of the revised editions, selected the hundred and thirteen tales that constitute the present volume. The commentary in this edition is limited to interpretive remarks; further bibliographical information pertaining to individual tales is available in the headnotes of the abridged and annotated edition. When Micha Joseph bin Gorion made his original selection of tales, from the hundreds of traditional books that he examined, he did not seek any allusive core of Judaism that the folk tradition might contain. Diversity rather than unity was for him the essence of the Jewish spirit. In keeping with his thought, the present selection of a limited number of tales does not necessarily represent any minimal canon of classical tales; rather, it reflects the diversity and variability that he perceived in the broad spectrum of Jewish folk tradition. [ix]