Vered Tohar - Böcker

This pioneering exploration shows that in the early modern world, printed works on morality and ethics served as an important conveyor of classic Jewish folktales and as an important channel of leisure reading in premodern Jewish culture. Utilizing a corpus of over 400 Musar tales, author Vered Tohar carefully opens a path to understand the thematic and poetic features of those tales. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and emphasizes the continuity of Hebrew literature from medieval to modern era. Tohar classifies these stories, which she calls "the Musar folktales," into four genres adapted from classic poetic studies: tragedy, comedy, parable or social exemplum, and theological allegory. As parables of vice and virtue, the works featured here were originally printed and circulated in early modern Jewish communities, and each contained themes of love and hate, good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, or life and death. Beyond their traditional function of ethical and moral edification, Tohar advances the Musar texts as an archive of Hebrew tales and their ideological traditions. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and a new way to read those texts.

This pioneering exploration shows that in the early modern world, printed works on morality and ethics served as an important conveyor of classic Jewish folktales and as an important channel of leisure reading in premodern Jewish culture. Utilizing a corpus of over 400 Musar tales, author Vered Tohar carefully opens a path to understand the thematic and poetic features of those tales. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and emphasizes the continuity of Hebrew literature from medieval to modern era. Tohar classifies these stories, which she calls "the Musar folktales," into four genres adapted from classic poetic studies: tragedy, comedy, parable or social exemplum, and theological allegory. As parables of vice and virtue, the works featured here were originally printed and circulated in early modern Jewish communities, and each contained themes of love and hate, good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, or life and death. Beyond their traditional function of ethical and moral edification, Tohar advances the Musar texts as an archive of Hebrew tales and their ideological traditions. This innovative reframing of early modern Musar texts reveals a new history of Jewish folklore and a new way to read those texts.

An annotated edition of Leon Modena’s Hebrew Musar book Tsemaḥ Tsaddik (‘Pious Plant’), originally published in Venice in 1600. Tsemaḥ Tsaddik follows the format of a medieval Physiologus, where each chapter corresponds to a specific animal and addresses various human behaviors, traits, vices or virtues. Additionally, each chapter features an explanation of its theme, evidenced by quotes from the Old Testament, Greek and Roman philosophers, Rabbinic Sages and fathers of the Church – along with at least one folktale. The translation is accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive introduction to describe the world of Musar pre-modern books, and offers insights into Modena’s cultural context.

This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies.The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.