The Man Who Refused to Forget

In 1955, the young State of Israel was in a hurry. David Ben-Gurion’s policy of mizug galuyot — the blending of the exiles — demanded that Jews arriving from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Poland, Romania and a dozen other points on the compass shed the cultural garments of the Diaspora and step into the uniform of the new Israeli. Speak Hebrew. Serve in the army. Become a Sabra. The past was baggage, and the state had no room for it.

That same year, a short, quiet man from Galicia walked into the newly opened Museum of Ethnology and Folklore in Haifa and began doing the opposite. Dov Noy did not want the immigrants to forget. He wanted them to talk.

Noy had earned the right to be heard on what memory was worth. Born in Kolomyia in 1920, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust — every member, save his brother Meir, a composer. He had reached Palestine in 1938, served in the British Army during the war, and afterwards taught Holocaust survivors in the British internment camps on Cyprus. He knew what it meant to have a world erased. And he understood that the stories people carry in their heads are sometimes the last trace of civilisations that no longer exist in any other form.

After completing a doctorate at Indiana University under Stith Thompson — the foremost classifier of world folktales — Noy returned to Israel with an ambitious and, at the time, deeply unfashionable idea. He would send teams of students into the immigrant transit camps, the ma’abarot, the development towns and the old neighbourhoods, not to teach the newcomers how to be Israelis, but to listen to the Israelis they already were.

What he built became the Israel Folktale Archives, now housed at the University of Haifa and inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. The numbers alone command respect: according to the University of Haifa, more than 24,000 tales, told by over 5,000 narrators from 70 ethnic groups, recorded by a thousand fieldworkers, in languages from Yiddish to Arabic and many more. Noy classified them using the Aarne–Thompson international indexing system — the first scholar ever to apply that framework to Jewish folklore. His doctoral dissertation, a motif index of Talmudic–Midrashic literature, was incorporated directly into Thompson’s own six-volume masterwork.

But the numbers do not capture the real achievement. What Noy preserved was the interior life of a nation that was, at the moment of its birth, in danger of amputating its own memory. Many of the communities he recorded — Kurdish, Afghan, Ethiopian — possessed no written literature at all. Their entire civilisational inheritance existed in the voice of whoever happened to remember it. When the JTA’s correspondent visited the archive, the curator Idit Pintel-Ginsberg opened the door to a small windowless room lined with cardboard files and called it “our holy of holies.” Inside were tales of angels and hidden righteous men, fortunes lost and found, talking cats, cloves of garlic that turned to gold — and, woven through the Holocaust narratives, the motif of miraculous rescue at the last possible moment, told again and again by survivors who needed the story to be true even when reality had not obliged.

The collection also reached beyond Jewish communities. Noy and his successors recorded Bedouin, Christian, Muslim and Druze narrators, in an explicit effort to map the folk imagination of all of Israel’s peoples. The IFA is, in this sense, a uniquely generous institution: a Jewish archive that insists the story of the land is polyphonic.

The state eventually came around. Ben-Gurion’s melting pot, as historians now broadly agree, did not work — at least not in the way he imagined. The next generation spoke Hebrew and served in uniform, but they also kept their parents’ recipes, songs, liturgical customs and, yes, stories. The Mizrahi cultural renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s was, in part, a vindication of what Noy had been doing quietly for two decades. In 2002 he received the Bialik Prize. In 2004, the Israel Prize — the nation’s highest honour — for literary research. He died in Jerusalem in 2013 at the age of 92, having written or edited some 60 books.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond folklore studies. On 7 October 2023, when the sirens sounded and the borders were breached, the reservists who mobilised within hours were Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, Ethiopian and Russian-speaking, Druze and Bedouin — the very mosaic that Ben-Gurion once tried to flatten into a single type. What held them together was not uniformity. It was the layered, plural, stubbornly particular sense of belonging that Noy had spent his career insisting was worth preserving. A nation whose people carry different stories can still fight in the same unit; but a nation that has erased its stories has nothing left to defend.

The folktales in the Haifa archive are not museum curiosities. They are the living sediment of a civilisation that stretched from the Atlas Mountains to the Caucasus, from the banks of the Tigris to the mellah of Marrakech, and reassembled itself, improbably, on a thin strip of Mediterranean coastline. That reassembly did not require the immigrants to arrive empty-handed. It required someone to ask them what they had brought.

Dov Noy was that someone. Israel is richer for it.