Knowledge, Power, and Control in Modern Jewish Folktales of Alexander the Great

This chapter offers a comparative study of modern Jewish folk tales about Alexander the Great, aiming to explain their reception and popularity in two different corpora: the various anthologies that gathered Jewish narrative traditions at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the materials collected by the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), established in 1955 to document oral folk narratives passed down by recent immigrants as well as resident Israelis from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The main questions of this chapter are: Who did Alexander the Great represent for Jewish audiences and how was he depicted? What are the popular perceptions that these stories embody, particularly their attitudes towards the origins of power, knowledge, territory, and gender? The chapter attempts to explain the significant differences between these two distinct repositories.