The Moral of the Story

“Morality tales are a genre that gives literature a great deal of power,” Prof. Vered Tohar, Chair of the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University, says as she explains what drew her to research a repertoire of religiously themed early-modern Hebrew stories focused on virtues and vices. “These are works of literature that are meant to inculcate conformity by telling people that they should change their behavior. The readers were actually expected to shun their vanity and avarice. Can you imagine?”

Tohar’s interest in the genre led her to put together a five-part series of lectures for Beit Avi Chai on this early iteration of popular Hebrew literature. “Traditionally, studying these stories was the purview of historians and Jewish philosophers, but I’m looking at them as a literary scholar,” she says. “The questions I’m asking are the following: How are Hebrew stories transmitted and how do they mutate? How is culture constructed, and how does it shape collective memory?”

The beginning of leisure reading

The period covered in the series, between the onset of the printing press in the early XVI century and the emergence of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) in the XVIII, is an exceptionally fruitful one because, as Tohar points out, it is the beginning of leisure reading. “Jews had always been the People of the Book, but the print revolution made books a household commodity, and stories consequently made their way into the heart of the discourse and shaped popular culture,” she says.

Since Jewish culture prizes literacy, she notes, communities across Europe embraced the new technology and saw it as a blessing. The printed artefacts were all in Hebrew, a feature that accounts for their great popularity, as they could migrate and find an audience across Europe and beyond – notwithstanding the great restrictions that were imposed on Jewish ownership of printing plants.

“Jews wrote in European languages, and of course in Yiddish and later in Ladino and other languages, but the lingua franca remained Hebrew,” says Prof. Tohar. “The world of print is a global one. The geographical footprints simply relay where Hebrew printing was not banned: Northern Italy, Constantinople, Safed, also Amsterdam. Once printed, these books were disseminated far and wide by merchants, coming especially from Venice and Turkey. This is why Hebrew prevailed.” The continuous primacy of Hebrew, she adds, somewhat qualifies the conventional story of the revival of Hebrew in the XIX century. “The language that was revived was spoken Hebrew,” she says. “Hebrew never went away; it continued to exist in writing throughout the centuries.”

A virtue or a vice

Thanks to their immense popularity and geographical reach, morality tales offer a rich foray into a print culture that is partially independent from the Scriptures. Not entirely, however: many of these tales were included in anthologies alongside biblical commentary and other religious content. “Often the anthologies were divided into entries, each built around a certain theme – a virtue or a vice, like jealousy, parental respect, vanity or generosity,” Tohar says. “Then there would be a long treatise explaining what generosity means, how it is practiced, what the Sages said about it, what the great philosophers said about it. And then, as a complement, a short story with an overt lesson why generosity is a virtue that should be upheld.”

Written almost exclusively by rabbis and community leaders – they were the only ones who mastered Hebrew to a sufficient degree – some of the stories were signed and others published anonymously. Written, but not necessarily composed: many of them were folk tales passed down orally through the generations, as well as ancient Greek fables by Aesop and Sophocles, digested Talmudic anecdotes, and morality tales translated from Arabic and Latin and adapted for a Jewish reader.

One of the books discussed in the series is Tzemach Tzedek, a treatise by Rabbi Leon of Modena (1571–1648) that is a translation of Fiore di Vertú, a XIV century Christian morality tale. It is only a partial translation, Tohar adds. “More than 50 percent of the original text was left out, because the Christian content clashed with the principles of the Jewish religion,” she says. Another work featured in the series is a Judaized translation of “Medea,” the Greek tragedy.

Is there anything that makes the Jewish stories stand out in the crowded field of early-modern morality tales? Prof. Tohar pauses for a moment, then replies: “Jewish culture simply loves good stories.”

For more, see Prof. Vered Tohar’s online series at BAC, “A Literary Reading of Pre-Modern Ethical Literature” (in Hebrew).

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