Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
This article deals with Jewish blood libel legends and women, as expressed in legends about Adil Kikinish of Drohbycz. As with many Jewish blood libel legends created as a reaction to the Christian blood libel legends, these legends refute blood libel accusations and tell about the deliverance of an individual or community. Alongside these deliverance legends we find also Jewish historical legends that end with the hero's death. The legends about Adil Kikinish belong to this category, and end with the death of the heroine. In this article, I analyze the legends about Adil told in Hebrew and Yiddish in the context of other legends about women in times of persecution. These legends create several key paradigms and, like other Jewish legends set in times of persecution, establish heroines who transcend the bounds of gender behavior.
KEYWORDS: legend, blood libel, women, persecution, gender.
The accounts of blood libels in Jewish folklore are a reaction to the folklore of the Christians among whom the Jews lived, and its tragic results. Christian legends1 tell of ritual murders committed by Jews, who ostensibly kill a Christian (usually a child) and use his blood in their Passover rites. Over the centuries, blood libels led to the torture and killing of many Jews, and, on occasion, to the massacre of entire communities. In a collection of articles on the subject, the editor, Alan Dundes, describes these tales as the "most bizarre and dangerous legend ever created by the human imagination" (Dundes 1993:vii) and declared that the goal of this book is "to hold an evil legend up to the light of reason" (Dundes 1993:viii). Unlike scholars who refrain from value judgments in their research, Dundes takes a clear stand, asserting that there can be a "evil folklore" and that the Christian blood libel is a classic example of this type of folklore. Noting the catastrophic outcome of blood libels, he argues that folklore, which is generally identified with pleasure and aesthetics, can be destructive (cf. Bar-Itzhak 1993:176-177).
Although the present article does not deal with the Christian legend and its origins, we ought to briefly review a number of hypotheses that scholars have advanced about it.
Alan Dundes sees die Christian blood libel as a "projective inversion." The...