This Book attempt to trace the transformations of the motif of marriage between a mortal man and a she-demon in Jewish folklore, especially in the folk-tradition of Ashkenazi Jewry. Five texts were selected for this research: three in Yiddish, one bilingual (Yiddish and Hebrew) and one in Hebrew. They cover a time-span of almost four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.
The five texts, all published here in full, are:
- "Mayse fun Vorms", MS F.12.45 Trinity College, Cambridge, fols. 24r-31r.
- "Mayse fun der Malke-Shvo", in: Yiftah Yospe ben Naftali ha-Levi, Sefer Ma'ase Nissim, Amsterdam 1696, No. 21.
- "Mayse Pozna", in: Zvi Hirsh Kaidanover, Sefer Qav ha-Yashar, II Frankfurt am Main 1706, Chap. LXIX.
- "Ma'ase ha-Ari", in: Yosef Sambari, Sefer Divrei Yosef, Paris, Alliance Israelite Universelle, H 130 A, Sec. 182, fols. 108v-109v.
- B.W. Segel, "Materaly do etnografii Zydow wschodnio-galieyjskieh", Zbior wiadomosci do antropologii krajowef, XVII(1893), No 22, pp. 289-290 – an East-Galician version of "Mayse fun Vorms" in Polish, translated here into Yiddish.
The starting –point of the discussion is "Mayse fun Vorms", a story written down in North Italy after 1514, though most probably originating in the folklore of the Worms community. It draws on three different sources: the mediaeval Christian narrative tradition, apocryphal and midrashic literature and German folk narrative. All these are combined in a sophisticated and unique way by means of various modifications, dictated by the new structure and cultural context. The result is a highly complex and interesting text, presenting its material with purely artistic narrative intentions. On the basis of a comparison between "Msydr gun Vorms" and the famous Hebrew story "Ma'ase Yerushalmi" we came to the conclusion that the former cannot justifiably be seen as a version of the latter. It should rather be regarded as representing an alternative narrative model, even though both works centre around the same motif of marriage between a man and a she-demon.
The second part of the book deals with the transformations and vicissitudes undergone by "Mayse fun Vorms" in the various genres of Jewish literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in collections of stories in old Yiddish (Sefer Ma'ase Nissim), in ethical
Literature (qav ha-Yashar) and in Lurianic hagiography (Toledot ha-Ari). This section concludes with a comparison between all these sources and an East-Galician version of the story, which was written down from the oral tradition at the end of the nineteenth century. This textual genealogy enables us to illustrate the great variability of the folk narrative tradition concerning the motif of the marriage of a man and a she-demon, as well as the extent of its adaptation to changing contexts and functions. From a text of purely novelistic purpose, the story turns – via the appropriate modifications – into: a text of clearly moralizing intention, containing a pattern of crime and punishment; a text presented as documentary, though used by ethical literature for its own ends; a typically hagiographic text; until in East Europe, at a late stage, it reverts to the status of an artistically oriented text, exactly as it had been when it set out on its journey almost four hundred years earlier.
Thus the Jewish folk narrative of the marriage of a man and a she-demon shows a developmental affinity to the narrative tradition on exorcism, which also varies from test to text, in accordance with the various functions that it implements: documentary, hagiographic, ethical and narrative per se.
