Bøker i Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology-serien

In 1908, Solomon Schechter published his groundbreaking essay on the city of Safed (Tzfat) during the sixteenth century. In The Legend of Safed, Eli Yassif utilizes "new historicism" methodology in order to use the non-canonical materials to better understand the culture of Safed.

Continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada.

A comprehensive study of Jewish magic in late antiquity and the early Islamic period-the phenomenon, the sources, and method for its research, and the history of scholarly investigation into its nature and origin.

A collection of essays exploring the phenomenon of spirit possession among Jews from a multidisciplinary perspective. Questions addressed include: what beliefs have Jews held about possession?; and have their conceptions of possession been similar to those of their Christian and Muslim neighbours?

An interpretation of the historical experience of the Jewish community in Syria and in the other places to which Aleppan Jewry have immigrated. It points to the social, economic and cultural links that the communities have made for the persistence of community throughout the diaspora.

The life story of a Jewish healer who worked in the Western High Atlas Mountain region of Morocco. Based on interviews with Moroccan Jews, this biography recreates the important moments in Wazana's life and evaluates his character from psychological and anthropological perspectives.

While Israel is a small country, it has a diverse and continually changing society. As a result, since the 1960s Israeli anthropology has been a fertile ground for researchers. This collection introduces readers to the diverse field of social anthropology in Israel, pointing to both its rich history and promising future.

Organized by themes of childhood, marriage, motherhood, immigration and old age, this study provides an analysis of how four Tunisian-Israeli women tell the stories of their lives and takes a look at the implications for our own understanding of stories and the behaviour of communication.

Explores the cultural connection between Syrian Jewish life and Arab culture in Brooklyn, New York, through liturgical music. This book investigates the multidimensional interaction of music and text in Sabbath prayers of the Syrian Jews to trace how Arab and Jewish traditions have merged in this particular culture.

Describes and examines the attempts of Gush Emunim, a religious nationalistic social movement, to construct Israeli identity, collective memory, and sense of place. This title argues that by constructing the meaning of contested territories as a national homeland, the ideological settlers attempt to redefine Zionism, Israel, and Judaism.

This work brings together a collection of Yiddish folklore from Poland, between the two world wars. It examines the evolution of Yiddish folklore and its role in creation of Yiddish nationalism, focussing on three important folklore circles, including the Warsaw group.

Continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada.

Examination the legends of origin of the Jews of Poland and discloses how the community is created.

Offers a rich depiction of contemporary life in one marginalized development town in the Israeli Negev. Placing the stories of five women at the centre, author Pnina Motzafi-Haller depicts a range of creative strategies used by each woman to make a meaningful life within a reality of multiple exclusions.

In Israel, anthropologists have customarily worked in their "e;home"e;-in the company of the society that they are studying. In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel by Orit Abuhav details the gradual development of the field, which arrived in Israel in the early twentieth century but did not have an official place in Israeli universities until the 1960s. Through archival research, observations and interviews conducted with active Israeli anthropologists, Abuhav creates a thorough picture of the discipline from its roots in the Mandate period to its current place in the Israeli academy. Abuhav begins by examining anthropology's disciplinary borders and practices, addressing its relationships to neighboring academic fields and ties to the national setting in which it is practiced. Against the background of changes in world anthropology, she traces the development of Israeli anthropology from its pioneering first practitioners-led by Raphael Patai, Erich Brauer, and Arthur Ruppin-to its academic breakthrough in the 1960s with the foreign-funded Bernstein Israel Research Project. She goes on to consider the role and characteristics of the field's professional association, the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA), and also presents biographical sketches of fifty significant Israeli anthropologists. While Israeli anthropology has historically been limited in the numbers of its practitioners, it has been expansive in the scope of its studies. Abuhav brings a firsthand perspective to the crises and the highs, lows, and upheavals of the discipline in Israeli anthropology, which will be of interest to anthropologists, historians of the discipline, and scholars of Israeli studies.

Considers how Egyptian Kariates of the San Francisco Bay Area define themselves, within both California culture and Judaism, in terms of the Bible and its bearing on their bodies. This work is useful for students of women's studies, anthropology, minority cultural production, and scholars of religion and Judaism.

This fascinating case study describes the work of the people responsible for creating festive lore and its system of ceremonies and festivities-an inseparable part of every culture. In the case of the new modern Hebrew culture of Eretz Israel (modern Jewish Palestine)-a society of immigrants that left behind most of their traditional folkways-the creation of festival lore was a conscious and organized process guided by a national ideology and aesthetic values. This creative effort in a secular national society served as an alternative to the traditional religious system, adapted the ceremonies and festivals to a new historical reality, and created a new festival cycle that would give expression and joy to the values and symbols of the new Jewish society.Staging and Stagers in Modern Jewish Palestine claims that the system of ceremonies and festivals, in general, and each separate ceremony and festival were staged according to the staging instructions written by a defined group of cultural activists. The book examines three main stages-the educational network, rural society (particularly the cooperative sector), and urban society (most notably Tel Aviv)-and looks at the stagers themselves, who were schoolteachers, writers, artists, and cultural activists. Though cultural systems of festivals and ceremonies are often researched and described, scholarly literature rarely identifies their creators or studies in detail the manner in which these systems are created. Staging and Stagers in Modern Jewish Palestine sheds important light on the stagers of modern Jewish Palestine and also on the processes and mechanisms that created the performative lore in other cultures, in ancient as well as modern times.

Traces the ways utopian visions of communication have played themselves out in particular contexts of Israeli society through the twentieth century, encapsulating central trends in the evolving Israeli cultural conversation over the years.

Orality has been central to the transmission of Sephardic customs, wisdom, and values for centuries. This is a selection of 54 folktales from Matilda Koen-Sarano's collection of stories recorded in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and translated by Reginetta Haboucha into fluent and idiomatic English that preserves the flavour and oral nuances of each text.

This collection studies the cultural tradition of the ""qassas"", or storyteller, and the Arab folktale. The annotated stories offer an insight into Arab culture and tell of the trials and tribulations of ordinary people but also describe fantastic creatures and encounters with supernatural beings.