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Scholar traces voice of women in history

Folk tales survived because they taught morals, Yassif says

By Lisa Street
Senior Staff Writer

Lessons can be learned from a weasel and a pit -- for example, stay true to your vows or severe punishment will fall upon you.

At least that's the case in "The Weasel and the Pit," a tale derived from ancient folklore passed down orally by Jewish women during the Middle Ages. Such tales appeared as a narrative in the Babylonian Talmud to teach Judeo morals.

Renowned Israeli folklorist Eli Yassif reiterated the tale of "The Weasel and the Pit" in a lecture on Jewish women's contributions to medieval folk tales Tuesday at the A.D. Bruce Religion Center.

The Tel Aviv University professor also gave a brief history of the female role in early Jewish culture and drew inferences about how those women's stories survived in a male-dominated society during the Middle Ages.

"Jewish women did not have access to documents or authority to publication in the medieval society," Yassif said. "The way out of this dilemma could only be through folklore."

In places where women usually gathered, like the kitchen and the market, narrative stories were created to preserve traditional and moral values, Yassif said. Those folkloric messages could only be preserved through the transition from oral messages to text messages, but because most Jewish women were uneducated, only male scribes could produce that transition.

"Men transcribed the stories because the material came to them from ancient traditions, transmitted by women for hundreds of years and should be considered sacred and ancient," Yassif said. "Also, the men could use it for different purposes to teach morals and explain different tasks in Jewish culture, because the stories reflected ancient biblical text."

Most medieval texts portrayed Jewish women as deceitful, treacherous and idiotic, Yassif said, until "The Weasel and the Pit" appeared in the Talmud. The story depicts males and females completely differently than in previous literature, he said, portraying a rabbi as lustful and unable to keep a promise of marriage to a female who fell into a well. This unfaithfulness resulted in the death of his two children, which were born by a woman he wed instead.

"These type of stories were created by women because they felt as if they were only being used for their physical aspects, and they had nothing else," Yassif said. 

Created by women and scribed by men, ancient medieval folk tales survived only because religious connotations resided in the core of the stories, Yassif said.

Yassif was on campus as part of the English Department's Martha Gano Houstoun visiting scholar program.
 

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