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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the symbolic roles of the mule in pre-modern Jewish folk narratives, showing how this hybrid creature challenges fixed boundaries between nature and culture, purity and impurity, and the human and non-human.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the rich array of symbolic meanings attributed to the mule in Jewish folk narratives from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. The mule—a hybrid creature born of a male donkey and a female horse—served as a common working animal throughout history, but in Jewish narrative traditions, it came to embody a much broader range of cultural meanings.

From Rabbinic literature to medieval commentaries and folktales, mules were portrayed as liminal and paradoxical beings. They were interpreted as unnatural yet divinely permitted, sterile yet powerful, grotesque yet noble. In particular, the mule became a symbol through which classical Jewish texts negotiated fundamental oppositions: between nature and culture, purity and impurity (tahor/tameh), creation and artifice, the monstrous and the domestic.

Through close readings of folk narrative integrated in selected sources, the paper explores how the figure of the mule was used to reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge normative categories in Jewish cosmology and law.

Ultimately, the mule emerges as a powerful folkloric device that complicates rigid binaries and invites a more fluid understanding of what is “natural,” especially in a culture deeply invested in categorization and boundary-making.