In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the "neighborhood" of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.
Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Head of the Institute of Jewish Studies at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (2000) and coeditor of The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present (1999) and Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes (1996).
"Hasan-Rokem brings exciting new life to the rabbinic texts. She skillfully turns tales into windows where we can see the cultural world in which the narrators of the midrashic world lived. This stimulating work is sure to make rabbinic literature more accesible and relevant to a wider audience."—Charlotte Fonrobert, author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender
"A meaningful contribution to feminist scholarship and studies of women in Jewish society of the Late Antiquities. Hasan-Rokem has succeeded in shifting our attention to women's narratives of Talmudic-Midrashic literature and the significance vested in them."—Dan Ben-Amos, Chair of the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife at University of Pennsylvania
224 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520234536$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Feb 2003