Archival Recollections: Rabbinic Figures as Folk Heroes

Out of twenty-four thousand tales documented in the Israel Folktale Archives named after Dov Noy (IFA), only two hundred center on rabbinic figures of late antiquity. This small corpus presents a clear, and curious, profile: while half of it addresses two figures who are venerated saints in contemporary Israel, and are thus the focus of mainly hagiographic narratives in which the figures are active agents in the present, the remainder of the tales, in which Rabbi Akiva is the prominent character, tend to characterize the rabbis as tricksters or to embed them in trickster-like narratives. Implementing semiotic and folkloristic tools, this article suggests that the underlying selection that informs the subgroup of rabbinic tales in IFA should be construed in the context of the IFA project itself, as an arena of conflicting motivations and discourses. Within the intricate and conflicted web of hegemonic and marginal forces, the stories and their tellers stage hidden transcripts, including one of trickster-like oppositions to the institutional hospitality offered by the IFA.