Dov Noy’s “Motif-Index of Talmudic-Midrashic Literature” and the Epistemic Strategies Implemented in the Field of Slavonic Folklore and Anthropology

The article focuses on the formative role played by the Jewish scholar of Polish descent Dov Noy (1920–2013) in the development of innovative research methodologies implemented in folklore studies in the USA and elsewhere in the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. The focal point of discussion is the impact of his doctoral dissertation, Motif-Index of Talmudic-Midrashic Literature (the results of which were incorporated into the final edition of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature produced by Stith Thompson), upon contemporary scholarship in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Apart from successfully completing the mammoth task of selecting and extracting empirical data from the vast corpus of Talmudic-Midrashic literature, Dov Noy created innovative classification models in cataloguing motifs attested in them. This has triggered a significant advancement in epistemic strategies employed in the comparative and contrastive assessment of the vernacular patrimonies of Slavia Judaica, Slavia Christiana and Slavia Islamica, and in theory of folk narratology in general. Furthermore, it has augmented new investigative perspectives in research on Ashkenazic and Sephardic folklore heritage in Slavonic ethnoconfessional landscapes. It also has amplified new methodological horizons in studying Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) in multilingual environments of Central and Eastern Europe, within the general linguistic methodological framework of languages in contact, further outlining the borders between their contact zones. Future research, based on ongoing explorations in the field, will contribute to a fuller appreciation of the folklore heritage of Pax Slavia Judaica alongside that of Pax Slavia Christiana and Pax Slavia Islamica. This, in turn, will benefit the epistemic strategies of philological anthropology as an innovative discipline on the threshold between humanities and social sciences, focusing on the study of societies and cultures through the prism of a philological lens.