Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel

Galilee has been a crossroads of cultures, religions, and languages for centuries, as illustrated in these fascinating Bedouin folktales, which offer excellent examples of the Arabic narrative tradition of the Middle East.

Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel collects nearly 60 traditional folktales, told mostly by women, that have been carefully translated in the same colloquial style in which they were told. These stories are grouped into themes of love and devotion, ghouls and demons, and animal stories. The work also includes phonetic transcription and linguistic annotation. Accompanying each folktale is a comprehensive ethnographic, folkloristic, and linguistic commentary, placing the tales in context with details on Galilee Bedouin dialects and the tribes themselves.

A rich, multifaceted collection, Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel is an invaluable resource for linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and any reader interested in a tradition of storytelling handed down through the centuries.

Author: Yoel Shalom Perez, Judith Rosenhouse
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 09/06/2022
Pages: 562
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.83lbs
Size: 11.00h x 8.50w x 1.14d
ISBN: 9780253063830

About the Author

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.