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For over 2000 years, one people despite the lack of a homeland for most of that time? The answer, in the words of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, is "tradition." At least until the beginning of modern times, Jews shared a common devotion to the Torah. Torah meant both a set of books (the Five Books of Moses) and a common set of religious norms, laws, and practices that they could carry with them wherever they went. The Torah and its tradition taught Jews that they were descendants of the same ancestors, had been slaves in Egypt, had entered the Holy Land, and then had been expelled because of their sins. Studyof the Torah and the other sacred texts, as well as prayers, were conducted in Hebrew, the shared ancestral language of the Israelites.

The Great Tradition and the Little Tradition
Even though Jews felt such strong ties to a common book, a common tradition, and a common ancestry, they differed from each other tremendously. This wasn't only evidence of the truth of the proverb "two Jews, three opinions," it was a result of the fact that the same tradition that held the Jews of the world together also separated them.

Actually 'it wasn't the same tradition. Jewish culture, like all other major traditions, really consists of two parts: the official culture and the folk culture, or, as anthropologists like to put it, the "great tradition" and the "little tradition." The great tradition, written in books and enshrined in the laws of the Jewish religion, was the uniting factor. It stretched back to ancient times and described the very beginning of the Jewish people. It spoke of their heroic common ancestorsAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. The great tradition had an advantage that was particularly important for the Jews-it was portable. Wherever Jews went, they could take their books with them. Because all Jewish scholars and many Jewish laymen (but not most Jewish women) were literate in the common HebrewrAramaic language, they could read what Jews in other lands wrote with little difficulty. If scholars wrote new works, the manuscripts could make their way to other countries to be copied or printed there. Jews of Yemen studied the Bible and Talmud commentaries of Rashi born in eleventh century France, just as Jews in Poland could study the works of Maimonides, born in twelfth century Spain. Neither time nor place made much difference. Once something was written down and codified, it was made permanent.

But Jewish communities never enshrined all of their culture in books. No book, even the most holy or the most comprehensive, could include every detail of life. There was always room for filling in the details not codified in the great tradition through the creation and practice of Jewish folk tradition (the little tradition). Folk traditions, which were intended to make the pages of the written tradition come to life, had completely different- characteristics from the great tradition. Since they were not written down, they could not, be passed down at a distance. They depended on example, word of mouth, and local conditions. They could be learned only from people with whom one came into personal contact.

The little tradition learned through the family and the community did not have the ancient pedigree of the Bible and the Talmud. It did not require formal education to acquire the little tradition, as it did to learn the texts of the great tradition. But for the unlearned, probably always the majority, it was the little tradition to which they had the greatest emotional attachment. The melodies of family and synagogue rituals, holiday foods, spoken language, proverbs, and lifestyle were what gave flavor to Judaism. The holy texts might be venerated, respected, and even obeyed,lut they seemed more distant from daily life. The common people knew the great tradition of Jewish religion mainly via the little tradition of the life of their own communities.

When you look at the great and little traditions from the outside, the tremendous gap between the two becomes apparent. The world of the Bible and of ancient Judaism seems very distant from the world of the Eastern European small town (shteto or North African ghetto (mellah). Whatever Moses looked like, he certainly did not look like a nineteenth century Polish Hasid. Whatever Jews of the biblical and talmudic period ate, it was not gefilte fish or falafel. The little tradition seems much more recent, more folksy, less exalted, more down to earth. You can see the difference even in language-between Hebrew, the language of text, and the various spoken languages of the Jews. This is expressed in Yiddish by the way in which both languages are labeled. Hebrew is loshn kaydesh, or the Holy Language, but Yiddish is mame loshn, or the mother tongue.

Sometimes it is hard to see the connection between the two types of tradition. How does the religion and ethos of the Bible turn into the religion and the ethos of the nineteenth century Diaspora? In this book I will trace some of the historic stages that led from the earliest periods o*f Jewish history to the very different recent patterns. I will look at how Jews moved from their homeland to the various lands in which they settled. I will compare the various local traditions and look at how they fit together in similar structures despite their differences. But in the end, there will be many aspects of the folk tradition whose relationship to ancient Jewish roots cannot be documented. A telling example of the tenuous connection between modern Jewishness and the Jewishness of the Bible is furnished by genealogy. It is a firm part of the faith of most Jews that they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the blessings for Chanukah, for instance, all recite the words "who has done miracles for our ancestors in those days at this season." Yet, it is virtually impossible for any Jew researching a family tree to go back further than a few hundred years. Almost all Jews except recent converts can connect themselves directly to a specific little tradition, whether Yemenite, Eastern European, or Persian, but almost no one can prove that their ancestors really were biblical Israelites. Their descent has to be taken on faith.

But it is not origin alone that makes a person or a cultural trait Jewish. Even a cultural practice whose origin is demonstrably not Jewish can be Jewish to the core because it performs a Jewish function. When one culture borrows an element from another culture, it can do so in one of two ways: It can assimilate to the outside culture by taking on chararteristics of the other culture in order to become a part of its society; alternatively, it can incorporate a feature of an outside culture into its own culture and make it its own. Traditional Judaism was highly adept at the second process-borrowing and "Judaizing" traits belonging to the people among whom the Jews lived. Considering only their origins, Yiddish is primarily a Germanic language, borsht is a Russian food, some Hasidic tunes are Ukrainian shepherds' songs, and the hora is a Romanian dance. But when a culture adopts a practice from another culture, it gives the practice a function within its own culture that changes its meaning. If Jews take a Polish or Moroccan Berber food and associate it with a particular Jewish holiday observance, the food becomes a Jewish food. When a Hasid today wears a fur hat that may be the same as hats worn by Polish noblemen of the seventeenth century, he is not wearing a Polish hat; he is wearing a Hasidic costume. In adopting foreign traits, Jews have changed the meaning (a shepherd's melody becomes a religious tune), the form (a German, Polish, or Arab food has its recipe changed to make it kosher; an Arabic amulet acquires a Hebrew inscription) , or the function (a Mardi Gras food becomes a Purim food). Very often a practice that the Jews originally borrowed from their neighbors " becomes Jewish because non-Jews stop practicing it, or Jews migrate to a new country where no one but Jews practice it.

Often cultural traits that have different origins and different appearances are tied together by a common function. A good example is the Jewish Sabbath lunch food in various parts of the world. The names differ, the basic ingredients differ, and therefore the tastes differ greatly. But these dishes share the common characteristic that they can simmer slowly for many hours overnight. They therefore fulfill the common function of obeying the Jewish tradition requiring warm food on the Sabbath but forbidding cooking (except where the process began before sundown on Friday). Accordingly, these foods are functionally the same, even though their outward characteristics are different. Something similar can be said about the rel.Ationship between the Ashkenazic Jewish name Katz and the Italian Jewish name Sacerdote, which don't sound alike but both mean Cohen or Jewish priest. The'le examples can be multiplied by the hundreds. It could be predicted that any local Jewish culture will have certain items-a Sabbath food, a way of covering the Torah, a method of Torah cantillation, a melody or chant for Kol Nidre-but how that item will taste, look, or sound, remains unpredictable.

Because the little tradition was not written down but had to be learned by word of mouth, it varied from place to place. Members of Jewish communities only knew the folk traditions that they themselves had seen. They incorrectly assumed that the way things were done in their town was the way things were done throughout the Jewish world. But in other parts of the world with which they had no personal contact, different local traditions developed from the same written great tradition. As long as the bearers of local traditions did not encounter each other in person, they could not influence each other.

The more stationary a population, the more isolated its local traditions. But the Jews as a group were less sedentary than their neighbors, who were mostly far ers. Many of them were merchants who traveled large distances on business and came into contact with people from other regions. Therefore Jewish local traditions never developed in total isolation; although each community had its own nuances, local traditions generally resembled those of communities in nearby towns. Jewish little traditions often stretched over large areas. This was especially true because the Jewish population also migrated, sometimes over large distances, taking traditions born in one region to new areas where conditions were totally different.

The result of Jewish migrations and Jewish business travel was neither total unifor ity of Jewish customs around the world nor extreme local variation. Instead Jewish little traditions were regional, often covering large areas but still remaining markedly different from one cultural region to another. In later chapters, about a dozen Jewish cultural regions, will be described, each of which can be broken down into subregions with more subtle differences among them.