The poetic and ideological blurring of boundaries in the Jewish Book of ethics Orhot Saddiqim

This chapter emerges out of dozens of medieval folktales that were included in Jewish pre-modern non-fiction morality essays. The combination of literary folkloristic material and non-fiction moral homilies creates a unique blend of the secular and the sacred. The two may subvert one another, but they also support each other in building a multi-dimensional piece of literature. I suggest a methodological contribution: reading Jewish moral pre-modern literature as a manifestation of four textual dimensions: genre, function, poetic, and rhetoric. Those dimensions enable the literary interpretation and offer an explanation for the acceptance and preservation of those texts through the last 400 years of Jewish culture.