There can be no doubt that the Jews were the most potent factors in the
dissemination of folk-literature in the Middle Ages.[23] Various causes
united to make them the natural carriers of folklore from the East to
the West, and from the West back again to the East. They never became so
completely localized as to break away from the community of their
brethren in distant lands, and to develop distinct national
characteristics. The Jews of Spain stood in direct relations with the
Khazars of Russia, and it was a Jew whom Charlemagne sent as ambassador
to Bagdad. The Jewish merchant did not limit his sphere of action by
geographical lines of demarkation, and the Jewish scholar was as much at
home in Italy and Germany as he was in Russia or Egypt. Again and again,
in reading the biographies of Jewish worthies, we are confronted with
men who have had their temporary homes in three continents. In fact, the
stay-at-homes were the exception rather than the rule in the Middle
Ages. In this manner not only a lively intercourse was kept up among the
Jews of the diaspora, but they unwittingly became also the mediators of
the intellectual life of the most remote lands: they not only enriched
the literatures of the various nations by new kinds of compositions, but
also brought with them the substratum of that intellectual life which
finds its expression in the creations of the popular literature.
The Jews have always possessed an innate love for story telling which
was only sharpened by their travels. The religious and semi-religious
stories were far from sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, and in
spite of the discussions by the Rabbis of the permissibility of reading
foreign books of adventure, they proceeded to create and multiply an
apocryphal and profane folk-literature which baffles the investigator
with its variety. Most addicted to these stories were the women, who
received but little learning in the language of their religious lore,
and who knew just enough of their Hebrew characters to read in the
vernacular books specially prepared for them. Times changed, and the
education of the men varied with the progress of the Hebrew and the
native literatures; but the times hardly made an impression on the
female sex. The same minimum of ethical instruction was given them in
the eighteenth century that they had received in the fourteenth, and
they were left to shift for themselves in the selection of their profane
reading matter. The men who condescended to write stories for them had
no special interest to direct the taste of their public, and preferred
to supply the demand rather than create it; nor did the publishers have
any more urgent reason why they should trouble themselves about the
production of new works as long as the old ones satisfied the women.
Consequently, although now and then a 'new' story book saw daylight, the
old ones were just as eagerly received by the feminine readers. And thus
it happens that what was read with pleasure at its first appearance is
accepted as eagerly to-day, and the books that were issued from the
printing presses of the sixteenth century may be found in almost
unchanged hundredth editions, except as to the language, printed in 1898
in Wilna or Warsaw.
Time and space are entirely annihilated in the folklore of the Russian
Jews. Here one finds side by side the quaint stories of the Talmud of
Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian origin, with the Polyphemus myth of the
Greeks, the English 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' the Arabic 'Thousand and One
Nights.' Stories in which half a dozen motives from various separate
tales have been moulded into one harmonious whole jostle with those that
show unmistakable signs of venerable antiquity. Nowhere else can such a
variety of tales be found as in Judeo-German; nor is there any need, as
in other literatures, to have recourse to collections of the diligent
searcher; one will find hundreds of them, nay thousands, told without
any conscious purpose in the chapbooks that are annually issued at
Wilna, Lemberg, Lublin, and other places. Add to these the many
unwritten tales that involve the superstitions and beliefs of a more
local character, in which the Slavic element has been superadded to the
Germanic base, and the wealth of this long-neglected literature will at
once become apparent to the most superficial observer.[24]
These stories have dominated and still dominate the minds of the women
and children among the Russian, Roumanian, and Galician Jews. For them
there exists a whole fantastic world, with its objects of fear and
admiration. There is not an act they perform that is not followed by
endless superstitious rites, in which the beliefs of Chaldea are
inextricably mixed with French, Germanic, or Slavic ceremonies. To
pierce the dense cloud of superstition that has involved the Mosaic Law,
to disentangle the ancient religion from the rank growth of the ages, to
open the eyes of the Jews to the realities of this world, and to break
down the timeless and spaceless sphere of their imaginings--that has
been the task of the followers of the Mendelssohnian Reform for the last
one hundred years. In the pages of the Judeo-German works that they have
produced to take the place of the story books of long ago, one meets
continually with lists of superstitions that they are laboring to
combat, with the names of books that they would fain put in an index
expurgatorius.
It is not difficult to discern a number of distinct strata in the many
folk-tales that are current now, even though the motives from various
periods may be found hopelessly intertwined in one and the same story.
The oldest of these may be conveniently called the Talmudical
substratum, as in those older writings the prototypes of them can be
found. Of course, these in their turn are of a composite nature
themselves, but that need not disconcert us in our present investigation
as long as the resemblance is greater to the stories in the Talmud than
to the originals from which that collection has itself drawn its
information. There is a large variety of subjects that must be
classified in that category. Here belong a number of animal fables, of
stories of strange beasts, much imaginary geography, but especially a
vast number of apocryphal Bible stories.[25] One of the most
interesting series of that class is the one that comprises tales of the
river Sambation.[26] This river has rarely been discovered by poor
mortals, although it has been the object of their lifelong quest. During
the week it throws large rocks heavenwards, and the noise of the roaring
waters is deafening. On the Sabbath the river rests from its turmoil, to
resume again its activity at its expiration. Behind the Sambation lives
the tribe of the Red Jews.
The best story of that cycle is told by Meisach. An inquisitive tailor
sets out in search of the Sambation River. Of all the Jews that he meets
he inquires the direction that he is to take thitherward; and he makes
public announcements of his urgent business at all the synagogues that
he visits. But all in vain. Three times he has already traversed the
length and the breadth of this earth, but never did he get nearer his
destination. Undaunted, he starts out once more to reach the tribe of
the Red Jews. Suddenly he arrives near that awful river. Overwhelmed by
its din, terrified at its eruptions, he falls down on the ground and
prays to the all-merciful God. It happened to be a few minutes before
the time that the river was to go to rest. The clock strikes, and, as if
by magic, the scene is changed. The tailor finds a ford, passes on the
other side, and, exhausted from his wandering, he lies down to sleep in
the grass. The tribe of men that live there are a race of giants. One of
them, noticing the intruder, takes him to be a new species of a
grasshopper, picks him up, and slips him in his spacious coat pocket. He
proceeds to the bathhouse to take his ablution, and thence to the
synagogue, leaving the tailor all the while in his pocket. The giants
begin to pray. At the end, while a pause ensues, the pious tailor
unconsciously exclaims 'Amen!' Astonished to hear that mysterious voice,
the giant brings the tailor to light and showers many signs of respect
upon him, for even the giants know how to honor a pious man. The tailor
liked it there so much that he never returned to his native home.
Abramowitsch has made a fine use of this story in his Jewish 'Don
Quixote.' The hero of that novel has so long pondered about the
Sambation River and the mysterious race of men that live beyond it, that
he loses his reason, and starts out to find them. But he does not get
beyond Berdichev. Another very fruitful class of stories belonging to
that category is the one in which the prophet Elijah plays an important
part.[27] According to the popular belief, Elijah did not die; he even
now frequently comes to visit men, to help them in some dire necessity.
His presence is surmised only when he has disappeared, generally leaving
behind him a vapory cloud. So rooted is this belief in the visitation of
Elijah, that during the ceremony of the circumcision a chair is left
unoccupied for the good prophet. Elijah is not the only one that may be
seen nowadays. Moses and David occasionally leave their heavenly abodes
to aid their devotees or to exhort those that are about to depart from
the road of righteousness. King David presides over the repast at the
conclusion of the Sabbath, for it is then that a song in which his name
is mentioned is recited. There are some who regard it as a devout act to
celebrate that occasion with unswerving accuracy. To those who have made
the vow of 'Mlawe-Malke,' as the repast is called, King David is wont to
appear when they are particularly unfortunate. Unlike Elijah, he makes
his presence known by his company of courtiers and musicians, and he
himself holds a harp in his hands; and unlike him, he resorts to
supernatural means to aid his _protégés_.
Most of the medieval legends cluster around the Rabbis of Central
Europe, who have in one way or another become famous. The cities of
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Worms, Prague, Cracow, have all their special
circle of wonderful tales about the supernatural powers of the worthies
of long ago. But the king of that cycle of miracle workers is Rambam, as
Maimonides is called.[28] His profound learning and great piety, his
renowned art of medicine, his extensive travels, have naturally lent
themselves to imaginative transformations. He has undergone the same
transmogrification that befell Vergil. Like the latter, he is no longer
the great scholar and physician, but a wizard who knows the hidden
properties of plants and stones, who by will power can transfer himself
in space, and who can read dreams and reveal their future significance.
His whole life was semi-miraculous. When he had arrived at the proper
age to enter an academy of medicine, he applied to a school where only
deaf-mutes were accepted as disciples of Æsculapius. This precaution was
necessary, lest the secrets of the art be disseminated, to the
disadvantage of the craft. Rambam pretended to have neither hearing nor
speech. His progress was remarkable, and in a short time he surpassed
his teachers in the delicate art of surgery. Once there came to the
school a man who asked to be cured of a worm that was gnawing at his
brain. The learned doctors held a consultation, and resolved to trepan
the skull and extract the worm. This was at once executed, and Rambam
was given permission to be present at the operation. With trembling and
fear he perceived the mistake of his teachers and colleagues, for he
knew full well that the man would have to die as soon as the seventh
membrane under the _dura mater_ was cut away. With bated breath, he
stood the pang of anxiety until the sixth covering had been removed.
Already the doctors were applying the lancet to the seventh, when his
patience and caution gave way, and he exclaimed, 'Stop; you are killing
him!' His surprised colleagues promised to forgive his deceit if he
would extract the worm without injury to the membrane. This Rambam
carried out in a very simple manner. He placed a cabbage leaf on the
small opening in the seventh covering, and the worm, attracted by the
odor of the leaf, came out to taste of the fresh food, whereupon it was
ousted.[29]
Of such a character are nearly all of his cures. The supernatural
element of the later period, where everything is fantastic, is still
absent from the Rabbi legends. There is always an attempt made to
combine the wonderful with the real, or rather to transfer the real into
the realm of the miraculous. The later stories of miracle-working pursue
the opposite course: they engraft the most extraordinary impossibilities
on the experiences of everyday life. Rambam's travels have also given
rise to a large number of semi-mythical journeys. One of the legends
tells of his sojourn in Algiers, where he incurred the hatred of the
Mussulmans for having decided that an oil-vat had become impure because
a Mohammedan had touched it, whereas another vat into which a weed had
fallen was pronounced by him to be ritually pure. Knowing that his life
was in danger, he escaped to Egypt, making the voyage in less than half
an hour by means of a miraculous document that he took with him and that
had the power of destroying space. In Cairo he became the chief adviser
of the king, and he later managed to save the country from the
visitation of the Algerian minister, who had come there ostensibly to
pursue the fugitive Rambam, but in reality to lay Egypt waste by his
magical arts.
The most interesting stories that still belong to that cycle are those
that have developed in Slavic countries. Out of the large material that
was furnished them by the German cities, in conjunction with the new
matter with which they became familiar in their new homes, they have
moulded many new stories in endless variety. The number of local legends
is unlimited. There is hardly an inn on the highways and byways of
Western Russia and Galicia that has not its own circle of wonderful
tales. Every town possesses its remarkable Rabbi whose memory lives in
the deeds that he is supposed to have performed. But none, except the
town of Mesiboz, the birthplace of Bal-schem-tow, the founder of the
sect of the Khassidim, can boast of such a complete set of legendary
tales as the cities of Wilna and Cracow. In Wilna they will still tell
the curious stranger many reminiscences of those glorious days when
their Rabbis could arrest the workings of natural laws, and when their
sentence was binding on ghosts as well as men. They will take him to the
synagogue and show him a large dark spot in the cupola, and they will
tell him that during an insurrection a cannon-ball struck the building,
and that it would have proceeded on its murderous journey but for the
command of the Rabbi to be lodged in the wall. They will take him to a
street where the spooks used to contend with humankind for the
possession of the houses in which they lived:--the contention was
finally referred to the Gaon of Wilna. After careful inquiry into the
justice of the contending parties he gave his decision, which is worthy
of the wisdom of Solomon: he adjudicated the upper parts of the houses,
as much of them as there was above ground, to the mortals, while the
cellars and other underground structures were left in perpetuity to the
shadowy inhabitants of the lower regions.[30] One of the Gaons at Wilna
was possessed of the miraculous power to create a Golem, a homunculus.
It was a vivified clay man who had to do the bidding of him who had
given him temporary life. Whenever his mission was fulfilled he was
turned back into an unrecognizable mass of clay.[31]
A special class of legends that have been evolved in Slavic countries
are those that tell of the Lamed-wow-niks. According to an old belief
the world is supported by the piety of thirty-six saints (Lamed-wow is
the numerical representation of that number). If it were not for them,
the sins of men would have long ago worked the destruction of the
universe. Out of this basal belief have sprung up the stories that
relate the deeds of the 'hidden' saints. They are called 'hidden'
because it is the very essence of those worthies not to carry their
sanctity for show: they are humble artisans, generally tailors or
shoemakers, who ply their humble vocations unostentatiously, and to all
intents and purposes are common people, poor and rather mentally
undeveloped. No one even dreams of their hidden powers, and no one ever
sees them studying the Law. When by some accident their identity is made
apparent, they vigorously deny that they belong to the chosen
Thirty-six, and only admit the fact when the evidence is overwhelmingly
against them. Then they are ready to perform some act by which a
calamity can be averted from the Jews collectively, and after their
successful undertaking they return to their humble work in some other
town where there is no chance of their being recognized and importuned.
One of the most perfect stories of that kind is told of a hidden saint
who lived in Cracow in the days of Rabbenu Moses Isserls. The Polish
king had listened to the representations of his minister that as
descendant of the Persian king he was entitled to the sum of money which
Haman had promised to him but which he evidently had not paid, having
been robbed of it by the Jews. He ordered the Jews of Cracow to pay
forthwith the enormous sum upon pain of being subjected to a cruel
persecution. After long fasting Rabbenu Isserls told his congregation to
go to Chaim the tailor who was living in the outskirts of the town and
to ask him to use his supernatural powers in averting the impending
calamity. After the customary denials, Chaim promised to be the
spokesman of the Jews before the king. On the next morning he went to
the palace. He passed unnoticed by the guards into the cabinet of his
majesty and asked him to sign a document revoking his order. In anger,
the king went to the door to chide the guards for having admitted a
ragged Jew to his presence. As he opened it, he stepped into space, and
found himself in a desert. He wandered about for a whole day and only in
the evening he met a poor man who offered him a piece of dry bread and
showed him a place of shelter in a cave. The poor man advised him not to
tell of his being a king to any one that he might meet, lest he be
robbed or killed. He gave him a beggar's garments, and supplied him with
a meal of dry bread every day. At the expiration of a year, the poor man
offered him work as a woodcutter with an improvement in his fare if he
would first sign a document. The king was only too happy to change his
monotonous condition, and without looking at it signed the paper
presented to him. His trials lasted two years more, after which he
became a sailor, was shipwrecked and carried back to Cracow. Just then
he awoke to discover that his three years' experience had only lasted
fifteen minutes by the clock. He abided by his agreement in the document
which he had signed in his dream, and thus the great misfortune was once
more warded off by the piety of a Lamed-wow-nik. The minister, the story
continues, escaped to Italy and hence to Amsterdam, where he became a
convert to Judaism. In his old age he returned to Cracow to make
pilgrimages to the graves of Rabbenu Isserls and Chaim, the saint.
All the previous stories and legends pale into insignificance by the
side of the endless miracles spun out by the Khassidim and ascribed to
the founder of the sect and his disciples.[32] Nothing is too absurd for
them. There seems to be a conscious desire in these stories to outdo all
previous records, in order to throw the largest halo on their
Bal-schem-tow, or Bescht, as he is called by his initials.
Bal-schem-tow was neither the miracle-worker that his adherents would
have him, nor the impostor that his opponents imagine him to have been.
He was a truly pious man who sought a refuge in mysticism against the
verbalism of the Jews of his days, in the middle of the eighteenth
century. His followers, unfortunately mistaking the accidental in his
teachings for the essentials of the new doctrine, have raised the
Cabbalistic lucubrations of his disciples to the dignity of religious
books, and have opened wide the doors for superstitions of all kinds.
The realities of this world hardly exist for them, or are at best the
temporal reflexes of that mystic sphere in which all their thoughts
soar. Their rabbis are all workers of miracles, and Bescht is adored by
them more than Moses and the Biblical saints. His life and acts have
been so surrounded by a legendary atmosphere that it is now, only one
hundred and fifty years after his life, not possible to disentangle
truth from fiction and to reconstruct the real man. A large number of
books relate the various miraculous incidents in his life, but the one
entitled 'Khal Chsidim' surpasses them all in variety, and attempts to
give as it were a chronological sequence of his acts.
In that book his grandfather and father are represented as foreshadowing
the greatness of their descendant. His grandfather is a minister to a
king, and Elijah announces to him that at the age of one hundred years
his wife will bear him a son who will be a shining light. His father is
a wizard and a scholar, and enjoins his son before his death to study
with a hidden saint in the town of Ukop. After his studies were
completed he became a teacher in Brody, and a judge. He marries the
sister of Rabbi Gerschon, who takes him for a simpleton, and in vain
tries to instruct him. No one knows of the sanctity of Bescht. He goes
into the mountains accompanied by his wife, and there meditates a long
while. At one time he was about to step from a mountain into empty
space, when the neighboring mountain inclined its summit and received
the erring foot of Bescht. After seven years of solitary life he returns
to Brody to become a servant in Gerschon's household. Later his career
of miracle-working begins: he heals the sick, exorcises evil spirits,
brings down rain by prayers, breaks spells, conquers wizards, predicts
the future, punishes the unbelievers, rewards the faithful by endowing
them with various powers, and does sundry other not less wonderful
things. When he prays, the earth trembles, and no one can hear his voice
for loudness. He sleeps but two hours at night and prays the rest of the
time, while a nimbus of fire surrounds him.
Not less marvellous are the deeds of his disciples as related in the
'Sseefer Maisse Zadikim' and other similar productions that are issued
in penny sheets in Lemberg to impress the believers with the greatness
of their faith. Many of these have sprung up from the desire to instill
the necessity of observing certain religious rites, and this the authors
think they can accomplish best by connecting a moral with some
miraculous tale. For every imaginable vow there is a special story
telling of the blissfulness that the devotee has reached or the misery
that the lax follower of Khassidism has had occasion to rue. Every good
deed according to them creates its own protecting spirits, while every
crime produces a corresponding monstrous beast that pursues the sinner
and leads him to destruction. Interesting also are those cases when a
man has been as prone to sin as he has been to perform virtuous acts,
for then the struggle between the beings of his creation leads to
amusing results in which all depends on the preponderance of one kind of
deeds over the other. The worst of men is not excluded from the benefits
of mercy if he makes amends for his crimes by an earnest repentance
which is followed by a long penance.
Of the latter class, the following is a typical story. Chaim has brought
many misfortunes to Jewish families by denouncing and blackmailing them
to the Polish magnate, the chief authority of the district. Once while
on his way to the magnate he sees a half-starved beggar in the road, and
he divides with him his bread and carries him to his house and takes
care of him until he is well enough to proceed on his journey. Chaim has
occasion after several years to denounce some one to the magnate. He
goes to the cupboard to fill his wallet for the journey, when he sees a
dead person in it. After he has collected himself from his fright, he
steps up once more to the cupboard. The dead person tells him that he is
the beggar that he saved from starvation some time ago, that he had
heard in heaven that Chaim was to be given his last chance in life, and
that he had come to warn him to repent his misdeeds. Chaim takes his
advice to heart, and for seven years stays uninterruptedly in the
synagogue, perfecting himself in his knowledge of the religious lore. On
the eve of the Passover he allows himself to be tempted by Satan in the
shape of a scholar, to eat leavened bread at a time when the Law
prohibits it. As he steps out to the brook to wash his hands before
tasting of the bread, the dead person once more appears to him and tells
him that Satan has been sent to him to tempt him, because it was
thought that his seven years' penance alone was not sufficient to atone
for his many evil deeds; that all his labors have been in vain, and that
he will have to do penance another seven years. This Chaim is only too
ready to undergo, and he applies himself with even more ardor than
before to get a remission of his sins. At the expiration of the allotted
time Chaim dies and is at once taken to heaven.
The legends and folk-tales so far considered are of a strictly Jewish
character, whatever their origin. They are in one way or another
connected with the inner life of the Jewish community. They deal with
the acts of their worthies and inculcate religious truths. But these are
far from forming the bulk of all the stories that are current to-day
among the German Jews in Slavic countries. Among the printed books of a
popular character there are many that not only are of Gentile origin,
but that have not been transformed in the light of the Mosaic faith;
they have been reprinted without change of contents for the last four
centuries, furnishing an example of long survival unequalled probably in
any other literature.[33] Many of the stories that had been current in
Germany long before the time of printing were among the first to be
issued from Jewish printing presses. Stories of the court of King Arthur
in verse, of Dietrich of Bern, of the 'Constant Love of Floris and
Blanchefleur,' of 'Thousand and One Nights,' had been common in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of them may be found in
editions of this century; but none of them has been so popular as the
'Bovo-maisse,' the latest edition of which is known to me from the year
1895. It is identical with the English 'Bevys of Hamptoun' and was done
into Judeo-German by Elia Levita in Venice in the year 1501. It is, no
doubt, related to some one of the many Italian versions in which Bevys
is turned into Bovo. The popularity of this book has been second only to
the 'Zeena-Ureena' which contains a very large number of folk-tales
interwoven in a popular exposition of the Bible. There are also books
that contain stories of 'Sinbad the Sailor,' or what seem to be versions
of Sir John Maundeville's 'Travels,' and other similar fantastic tales.
These stories, having once been committed to writing and printing, have
remained intact up to our times, except that they have undergone
linguistic modernizations. But there is also an unlimited number of
fairy tales and fables in circulation which have never been written
down, which have therefore been more or less subjected to local
influences; in these Hebrew, German, and Slavic elements meet most
freely, causing the stories to be moulded in new forms.[34] It may be
asserted without fear of contradiction that among the Russian Jews the
investigator will find the best, most complete versions of most, if not
all, the stories contained in Grimm's or Andersen's collections. The
reason for it is to be sought in the inordinate love of story-telling
that the Jews possess. They are fond of staying up late in the night,
particularly in the winter, and whiling away the time with an endless
series of stories. The stranger who is a good raconteur is sure of a
kind reception wherever he may chance to stay; but his nights will be
curtailed by the extent of his fund of stories, for his audience will
not budge as long as they suspect that the stranger has not spent all
the arrows from his quiver. The wandering beggar-students and tailors
have the reputation for story-telling; it was by one of the latter that
a large number of fairy tales were related to me. I choose for
illustration one that is known in a great variety of versions.