History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture

Abstract

The literary folklorist’s goal is to explore the wide range of literary creativity demonstrated by the memorable—i.e., remembered—stories that are preserved in many literary structures. In some ways, the importance and power of the experience being represented requires a near mythic vehicle for it to be remembered and transmitted effectively. A collective memory is based on a collective forgetting of everything but one considered theme; the spotlight requires a blacked-out stage. Immigration from Italy and France, not a single “event,” “founded” the earliest communities; but the story that remembers such an event incorporates the true memory that Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious played an important part in the early history of Ashkenazic community building. On balance, then, the Ashkenazic story, reported first in Hebrew and modified significantly away from pietist values in Yiddish, makes R. Samuel to be more important than R. Jacob.

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