In his Preface to this posthumous volume Professor Scheiber writes that he considers himself a student of Bernard Heller in both Jewish and comparative folklore, and that the focus of his work ‘has always been on the connections between the customs and folklore of different peoples and on the link between the various motifs in their literatures’. Having been, like my late lamented colleague and friend Scheiber, a student of Heller, I find myself in profound sympathy with this approach to folklore research which I, too, utilized in several of my books and studies. I am convinced that the comparative study of folklore is an extremely fruitful one, especially when it comes to working in the field of the folklore of the Jews whose diaspora in East and West brought them in close contact with the folk life, folk custom, and folklore of many peoples in both the Christian and the Muslim worlds.

Professor Scheiber passed away in 1985. He was an unusually prolific writer, but throughout his life his scholarly attention was always focused on details, and, as a result, while he published hundreds of articles on narrowly delimited subject-items, he never got to writing a comprehensive study on Jewish folklore, its history, scope, and relations to the folklore of other peoples. Hence the books he published in his lifetime were mostly collections of his scattered papers. Three such volumes under the general title Folklór es tárgytörte'net ('Folklore and Motif History’), published in Budapest in 197 4, 1977, and 1984, contain hundreds of his papers written in Hungarian. The present volume is a collection of studies he wrote and published in other languages: German, French, English, and Hebrew.

The first part (pp. 17-226) contains papers on biblical legends, medieval motifs, poetic topoi, and the international connections of non-Jewish Hungarian tales and legends, including the Hungarian reappearances of the legends of the Wandering Jew and the Golem.