Page:Ginzburg - The Legends of the Jews - Volume 5.djvu/11

 == PREFACE ==

The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with the aim and purpose of "The Legends of the Jews" and with the method and system followed by the author will find the necessary information in the Preface to the first volume. I desire, however, to supplement it by a few remarks which I hope will be useful as a guide to the two volumes of Notes.

Volumes one to four, containing the Bible as mirrored by Jewish imagination and phantasy, are intended chiefly for the general reader and not for the scholar. It is true, I flatter myself, that the latter too will welcome the opportunity offered him for the first time of reading hundreds of legends in connected form instead of being forced to hunt for them in the vast literature of the Jews spreading over a period of two thousand years and in Christian writings of many a century. In the arranging and setting of the material in order, however, my main effort was to offer a readable story and narrate an interesting tale.

Volumes five and six, on the other hand, which contain the notes to the previous four volumes, are meant primarily, if not exclusively, for the student. The material dealt with in them is of a nature which, in the opinion of the author, will interest not only students of the legendary lore of the Jews, but also students of many other fields of learning. The student of comparative folk-lore will be attracted not only by the rich material offered him for his studies, but also by the fact of its being Jewish. The Jews may well be described as the great disseminators of folk-lore. Many a legend that originated in Egypt or Babylonia was appropriated by the European peoples and many a European fairy tale found its way to Asia through the medium of the Jews, who on their long wanderings from the East to the West, and back from the West to the East, brought the products of oriental fancies to the occidental nations, and the creations of occidental imagination to the oriental peoples.

The danger of confounding popular beliefs with the belief of a people is great, and I have on more than one occasion strongly protested against the methodological error of a certain school of theologians, who attempt to draw a picture of the Jewish religion by the artificial light of popular fancies. But who will gainsay that the Volksfrömmigkeit