Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel

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 Rosén.

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

• ForewordTranscription and AbbreviationsPart I—Stories of love, loyalty, and devotion 1. Between the Sun and the Moon 2. The Princess on the Island 3. The Girl who Fell into a Well 4. The ā's Daughter and the Orator 5. A Woman's Loyalty 6. The King's Wife and the Poor Man 7. uā and the Queen 8. The Doe 9. The Woman from the Sea 10. The Raindrop Bubbles Will Testify a. The Man and his Neighbor b. āeq Anāf (Tasting Justice) 11. The Coffee Server 12. The Old Man and the Girl, the Old Woman and the Young Man 13. The Girl and her Brother who Became a Deer 14. Do Good and Throw it to the Sea 15. The Transposed Heads 16. The Son Who Obeyed his Mother 17. The Silent Princess and Smart Muammad 18. The Two Notes (Smart Hassan) 19. The Kidnapped Bride 20. The Prince and his Two Wives 21. In the Familya. Between a Brother and his Sister b. Between a Bride and her Mother-in-law 22. The Replaced Bride23. The Dangerous Night-Watch a. Šāer asan and his Nine Brothers b. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 24. My Mother Slew Me; My Father Ate Mea. The Green Birdb. The Yellow Cow25. The Boy, the Uncle and the Lover 26. The Inheritance CasePart II—Stories about Ġouls and Demons27. The Giant 28. Frē Rummān (Snow White) 29. The Man Who Delivered a Daughter30. The Girl and her Seven Brothers 31. The Sickle Hand32. Bells Sound a. bēna and the Jujube Treeb. The inn and the Girl in Dog Clothes33. The Golden Palm Tree34. The Children and the Ogrea. The Girls and the Ġūlab. Grē'a, mēda and daydūnc. Nu-Nē35. The Emīr's Daughter who Flew to Switzerland 36. The Golden Children a. The Three Siblings and the Talking Birdsb. The Wicked Old Womanc. The Emīr and the Slave37. The Ġūla, the Mallow Gatherer and his daughter 38. The Two Brothers and the Ġūla39. Personal Narratives about Meetings with Ġūls a. The Young Man and the Ġūlab. The Ġūla Who Posed as a Tribe Member c. The Groom and the Ġūla d. The Ġūla in the Waterhole e. Abu Xier and the Ġūla 40. The Old Woman and the ūt Part III—Animal stories41. The Man and the Wounded Snake a. The Snake Storyb. The Shepherd and the Snake 42. The Goat, the Kid and the Ġūla 43. The Lion Who Wanted to Know Man's Nature44. The Two HuntersEpilogueBedouin Dialects in the North of Israel / Judith Rosenhouse Bedouin Tribes in the Galilee—Historical and Settlement Background / Arnon MedziniMapsIndex of Tale Types Index of Motifs Narrators ListSubject IndexBibliography