Jewish folk tales

The three -volume editions proposed to readers presented fairy tales that existed in the oral tradition of various Jewish ethnic groups. Of the twenty -three thousand fairy tales recorded and stored in the Israeli folklore archive, two two hundred were selected, most vividly reflecting the centuries -old collective memory of the Jewish people. This publication does not only reconstruct the folklore traditions of the Jewish communities of the whole world and represent the cultural heritage of the Jewish people in its diversity and identity, but also describes it from the perspective of science: fairy tales are equipped with comments that allow us to understand cultural, historical, ethnographic realities, to trace the history of the existence and development of plots , those and images both in the context of regional cultural characteristics, and in interaction with world literature.
Volume I "Sephardic Tales"
The first volume included the tales of the Sephardes, whose ancestors were expelled at the end of the 15th century. From the Iberian Peninsula and settled in Italy, in the countries of North Africa, in Turkey and the Balkans. In the countries of scattering, Sephardi formed their own Jewish-Spanish language and their own culture.
Volume II "Tales of Jews of Eastern Europe"
The second volume included fairy tales of the Jews of Eastern Europe who spoke Yiddish. Their rich oral culture is also famous for such a bright phenomenon as Hasidic folklore.
Volume III "Tales of the Jews of the Arab countries"
The third volume includes fairy tales of the Jewish communities of the Arab countries: Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen. The culture of these Jewish communities was formed on various Arab-Jewish dialects in close interaction with the culture of the surrounding Arab majority