Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam
Marc S. Bernstein
The last century has seen the demise of age-old Jewish communal life in the Arab world, but in past centuries there was a great sharing of creative and scientific knowledge across religious lines. Stories about biblical figures held to be prophets by both Judaism and Islam are one result of this relationship and reflect an environment where not only literary genre and modes of interpretation but also particular motifs could be utilized by both cultures. One such figure that epitomizes the historical interdependence of the Hebraic and Arabic literary traditions is the prophet Joseph.
Stories of Joseph examines the historical interdependence of these two traditions through the prism of Hebraic and Arabic literary treatments of the biblical prophet Joseph. Author Marc S. Bernstein’s analysis focuses on the nineteenth-century Judeo-Arabic manuscript The Story of Our Master Joseph, an intricately woven tale that integrates a multitude of sources from an enormous range of time periods and cultures. A remarkable example of the migration of cultural artifacts, The Story of Our Master Joseph is a Jewish text taking its form from an Islamic prototype (itself largely based on midrashic, Hellenistic, and Near Eastern material), extending back to the earliest human stories of parental favoritism, sibling rivalry, separation from loved ones, sexual mores, and the struggles for continued communal existence outside of the homeland. By investigating a wide range of literary phenomena specific to the Joseph story, Bernstein sheds light on the interpretive process and the relationship between text and metatext, both within the bounded worlds of Judaism and Islam and in general.