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When the state of Israel was founded, many of its citizens spoke Yiddish and Arabic. After Hebrew was named the official language, there was danger that rich traditional folk stories and rabbinic myths passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation for thousands of years could disappear. Luckily, Hebrew University in Jerusalem recorded many of them. Those spoken stories serve as one of many sources for \"Tree of Souls,\" the new reference book on Jewish mythology by [Howard Schwartz], a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. \"God has a tree of flowering souls in Paradise. The angel who sits beneath it is the Guardian of Paradise, and the tree is surrounded by the four winds of the world. From this tree blossom forth all souls. . . . And from the roots of this tree sprout the souls of all the righteous ones whose names are inscribed there. When the souls grow ripe, they descend into the Treasury of Souls, where they are stored until they are called upon to be born. From this we learn that all souls are the fruit of the Holy One, blessed be He.

This month, [Howard Schwartz] offers a vast study called \"Tree of Souls,\" heralded by Oxford University Press as \"the first anthology of Jewish mythology in English.\" He will discuss it at this year's Jewish Book Festival. (A complete listing of this year's St. Louis Jewish Book Festival is on STLtoday.com and will appear in Wednesday's Everyday section.) The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is a concise text, Schwartz says. Rabbis and other Jews have tried to explain the writings, and out of their explanations grew myths. In the Jewish tradition, God dictated the Written Torah to Moses, who wrote it down. But there is also the tradition of an Oral Torah, which explained the Written Torah and was finally recorded as laws and lore in the Talmud. In \"Tree of Souls,\" Schwartz separates the hundreds of myths he retells into 10 primary categories: Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile and Myths of the Messiah.