9. Apocrypha and Postbiblical Studies

The three chapters of this book explore three genres of the oral heritage of the Neo-Aramaicspeaking Jewish community of Zakho on the River Khabur in northern Kurdistan (a community that emigrated to Israel in the first half of the 20th century), namely proverbs, enriched biblical narratives and folktales. The analysed units of each of these genres progress from the smallest unit, that of the proverb, to the larger unit of the ‘motifeme’ (defined as ‘the smallest functional unit of a narrative’, ‘the element that forms meaningful connections between individual, abstract, meaningless motifs and anchors them in a meaningful narrative sequence’ [p. 190]), and then to the largest unit of a complete folktale. The chapter on proverbs argues that traditional accounts overlook the performative context, and presents a new collection of NENA (North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic) proverbs from the Zacho Jewish community. The chapter on enriched biblical narratives examines the narrative of Ruth, Naomi and King David, as told by Samra Zaqen, and demonstrates an analysis of it using the concept of the transposed motifeme. The folktale featured in the third chapter (‘The King and the Wazir’, as told by Ḥabuba Messusani) is rather unusual, being built around the motif of magical gender transformation. The author comments on the abundance of Neo-Aramaic material presented by recent scholarship and the relative neglect of content-oriented study focused on it. bernArd s. JAckson