Abstract
Jewish Folklore in Palestine.—Miscellaneous notes on the folklore of the Jews in Palestine recorded by the late Mrs. H. Spoer (A. Goodrich-Freer) and published in Folklore, vol. 42, pt. 1, include references to beliefs connected with sin, disease, and the powers of evil. Many of the Jews of Jerusalem travel down to Jaffa at the corning of the New Year in order to be able to shake their skirts into the waters of the little stream of el-Auja, praying and confessing their sins. It is necessary that there should be fish in the water, in order that they may devour the sins as they are shaken out. A variant of former days, possibly owing to the fact that there was then no railway, was to plant palm-leaf baskets with beans, one for each adult in the family. On the eve of New Year, each would swing the basket over his head, saying, “This basket instead of me”, and then drop it in the water, At the present time, the father of the family has to lay his hand on a white cock, confessing his own sins and those of his family, unless they are old enough to perform the ceremony for themselves. During the cholera scare of 1909–10, recently immigrated Russian Jews, who cared nothing for local tradition, averted the danger in their own way by assembling in their own burial-ground on the Mount of Olives and making merry for a day and a night, even celebrating a mock-marriage, to the consternation of the orthodox. In this they were following Russian custom. Russian peasants distract the attention of the spirits of evil by celebrating the marriage of deformed or orphaned persons over the grave of someone who has died of cholera, thus diverting the danger in a direction in which it can do no harm.
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Research Items. Nature 129, 692–694 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129692a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129692a0