African Folktales at Internet Archive: Sabbath Lion

Today's post ends this week's series on folktales from North Africa! Over the past several days, I've shared books with Arabic and Berber folktales from Libya, Morocco, Sudan, and Egypt, and today it's a folktale from Algeria, but a Jewish folktale this time — The Sabbath Lion: A Jewish Folktale from Algeria retold by Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush, just a click away at the Internet Archive.

As Schwartz explains in the afterword to the book: "The story of the Sabbath Lion is told by Jews in North Africa and in other places such as Iran and Bukhara." If you are curious to learn more about the Jewish communities of North Africa, you can find out more at Wikipedia: Maghrebi Jews, and there are also specific articles country by country, like the History of the Jews in Algeria. 

Schwartz included the story of the Sabbath lion in another book of Jewish folktales, which contains a total of 10 Jewish folktales from North Africa — Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales. This book is also available at the Internet Archive. These are the titles of the North African stories in that book: The Demon Princess, The Sabbath Lion, The Beast,  Elijah's Violin, The Wonder Child, The Groom Who Was Destined to Die on His Wedding Day, The Golden Mountain, The Princess and the Slave, Lilith's Cave, and The Three Tasks of Elijah. 

You can also find other Howard Schwartz books at the Internet Archive, who studies Jewish stories of the global diaspora, including North Africa. 

In addition, the Wayne State University Press has an open access ebook: Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Aliza Shenhar, available for free in HTML, PDF, or epub formats:

That wraps up this week, but I'll be back tomorrow with the weekly round-up of these books with North African stories.