© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 EJJS 3.1 Also available online – brill.nl/ejjs DOI: 10.1163/102599909X12471170467286 DID RABBINIC CULTURE CONCEIVE OF THE CATEGORY OF FOLK NARRATIVE? 1 Galit Hasan-Rokem Tradition, as an on-going process, can never be completely objectified while at the same time providing the basis for all methodical activity. 2 Abstract The article addresses the question whether the late Antique Rabbinic texts disclose an awareness of the categories of folklore and folktale. Initially, the parallel and varied emergence of these categories in various intellectual traditions of modernity and post-modernity is presented with special reference to a new conceptual framework correlating the categories of magic, miracle and sorcery. Subsequently, the narrative traditions recounting the tales of Hanina ben Dosa and especially the chain of tales from the third chapter of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Ta’anit are presented and analyzed referring to earlier scholarship, manuscript variations and the conceptual framework of folk narratives and folklore. By analytically pointing out formal as well as contextual elements, a meta-folkloric awareness of the rabbis is argued. The study of distant cultures raises the question whether the classificatory categories applied for the study of our own culture are pertinent for that foreign world, too. And the past is, as the saying goes, a foreign country. This question could thus with slight adapta- tion be asked concerning the applicability of the concepts of contem- porary cultural studies for the study of past cultures. Hermeneutics 1 This article has been written inspired and helped by the following persons (in alphabetic order): Tali Artman, Jacob Elbaum, Oded Irshai, Joshua Levinson, David Neuhaus, Ariel Rokem, Dina Stein, Haim Weiss. An earlier Hebrew ver- sion appeared in Higyon L’Yona: New Aspects in the Study of Midrash, Aggadah and Piyut In Honor of Professor Yona Fraenkel , , eds. Joshua Levinson, Jacob Elbaum, Galit Hasan-Rokem ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2007), 199–229. An English version was first read at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the “Ethnography and Literature” conference (May 2006), benefiting from the wisdom of Alan Confino, Hanan Hever, Carola Hilfrich, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Arkady Kovelman, Ilana Pardes and Amy Shuman. 2 Joseph Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London: Routledge, 1980), 155, reflecting on Habermas.