930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 16 of 20.
King Solomon, master of seventy languages, including the speech of birds and insects (1 Kings 4:33), was boasting. He had spent an afternoon detailing to his court the strength of ...
In the days of Maimonides. Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1138-1204 CE, evil decrees were issued against the Jews of his city. The laws were designed to humiliate. If a gentile were so mu...
Maimonides & Lime Kiln. cf. Eisenstein, Oser, P- 35i- 247 Behrnauer, 40 Veziere 26th Night, p. 250. Benfey, Pantschat. I, p. 320. Boccaccio, Decameron, II, 2. Brockhaus, Somadeva, ...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 345, preserves a late medieval legend about Maimonides (1135–1204) surviving a plot against his life. Cruel decrees had gone out against the Jews. Maim...
Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, the great twelfth-century Spanish Jewish scholar, once wanted to know who his equal might be in the world. He was told: Maimonides. He set out at once to fi...
There was once a man so wicked that the entire town avoided him. He cheated in business, spoke cruelty to strangers, and mocked the sages when they tried to rebuke him. Everyone ag...
Gaster's exemplum No. 348 preserves a Jewish folk tale about the strangest accounting in the heavenly court. A wicked man died and was brought before the Holy One for judgment. The...
In the house of Rabbi Elazar a strange filly was born. Every attendant who came near it was killed. Rabbi Elazar, unable to tame or destroy the beast, presented it to the king. At ...
Two brothers lived side by side. One was rich and had a bad wife. The other was poor and had a good one. On the eve of Passover, the poor brother's wife urged him to open his home ...
Solomon and the worthless woman, a tale from the collection of Solomon's legendary encounters with the full range of human character. The sages preserved these stories as illustrat...
King Solomon warned a skilled builder, the man who had constructed his palace, that the builder's wife was unfaithful. The builder refused to believe it. Solomon did not argue. He ...
King Solomon once wrote in Ecclesiastes, “One man out of a thousand I have found, but a woman among all those I have not found” (Ecclesiastes 7:28). It was a line his m...
A young boy discovered that he could understand the language of birds. When sparrows chattered on the rooftops, he heard gossip. When ravens called from the treetops, he heard warn...
A pious couple in the Gaster manuscripts had been childless for many years. The husband, desperate, went to the cemetery and prayed at the tombs of the righteous through a long nig...
A poor man, unable to work, resolved to stay in his house and wait for God to provide. One day, when he had nothing at all to eat, a fat cow wandered through his open door. The man...
Maimonides, the great philosopher, physician, and legal authority, once interpreted a king's dream with such precision that the story entered the canon of Jewish wisdom tales along...
A certain king once woke from a disturbing dream and could not remember what it contained. All he remembered was the terror. He called his wise men and demanded they tell him the d...
The prophet Elijah gave three gifts to a poor man. And the story of those gifts became a parable about the nature of divine assistance. The details of the gifts vary across differe...
There were once three poor men, each with a different longing. The first wanted only to be rich. The second wanted to become a great scholar. The third wanted a good wife. The prop...
Abraham ibn Ezra and Yehuda Halevi were two of the greatest Jewish minds of medieval Spain. But their partnership was as unlikely as it was legendary. Ibn Ezra was a wandering poet...
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi (c. 1075 to 1141), the great Hebrew poet and physician of medieval Spain, author of the philosophical work The Kuzari, was urged by his wife to find a match fo...
An apostate, a Jew who had abandoned his people, invented a blood libel and decided to prove it. He found a bird, slaughtered it, drained its blood into a small bottle, and then sl...
A gentile once lent a sum of money to a Jew. They had no written contract, but they swore their agreement beneath a great tree in the countryside, calling on the Holy One and on th...
The tale of "Half a Friend" is among the most widely circulated stories in medieval Jewish ethical literature. It poses a question that cuts to the heart of human relationships: wh...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), Nos. 360–362, preserves three old parables about what friendship really means. This adaptation focuses on the first, a teaching about the difference betwee...
Two friends loved the same woman. This is the setup for one of the most painful dilemmas in human experience. And the Jewish version of the story resolves it with an act of sacrifi...
A man was accused of a crime he did not commit. He faced execution, disgrace, and the destruction of his family's name. His friend, knowing the truth, knowing the accused man was i...
In one Jewish town, the leaders of the community had developed a custom of carrying a Torah scroll with them when they went to meet the king on ceremonial visits. The Torah in its ...
In the time of King Suleiman, a vizier's wife had borne nine daughters in a row. As her tenth pregnancy advanced, the vizier grew frantic for a son. He warned his wife that if she ...
The meeting, whether real or legendary, between Rabbi Eleazar of Worms and Maimonides represents one of the great contrasts in Jewish intellectual history. Eleazar, the Ashkenazi m...
Gaster's exemplum No. 365 preserves one of the most vivid Kabbalistic legends from medieval Ashkenazi Jewry, a tale about the Chasidei Ashkenaz, the mystics of the Rhine Valley in ...
Two brothers hated each other. Their father, growing old, asked each of them privately why. The elder said he did not know the reason, only that the hatred was so deep he would gla...
A man once made a vow that he would never lose his temper, no matter what his wife did to provoke him. According to a tale preserved in the Exempla of the Rabbis (compiled by Moses...
A merchant left his young wife at the start of a long trading voyage. She was pregnant at his departure, though he did not know it. He was gone many years. So many that the infant ...
A king fell gravely ill, and none of his physicians could cure him. They tried every medicine, every herb, every treatment known to the medical science of the age. Nothing worked. ...
Two brothers lived in the same town, one rich, one poor. After the festival of Sukkot, the poor brother walked through the neighborhood gathering up the etrogim that families had f...
A Jewish sage was challenged to a public contest against a pagan wizard-priest, a battle of spiritual power that would determine, in the eyes of the watching crowd, whose god was s...
A medieval Jewish legend tells of a king of Poland who fell under the influence of a sorcerer — a wizard — and issued a decree: the Jews of his kingdom must convert, be...
A man in the Gaster manuscripts left his wife after many years of marriage. His reason was the oldest reason in the world: she had borne him only daughters. No son. No heir. He ann...
Rabbi Akiba and the pearl, a story about how the greatest treasures are sometimes hidden in the most unlikely places. The tale is preserved in medieval collections including the Ma...
There was a man in a certain town who was always seen in tattered clothes. He sat on the synagogue floor among the poorest of the congregation. He ate what was given him. He accept...
A king once raised a boy in total isolation, keeping him locked away from birth so that he would never see a woman. According to a tale preserved in the Exempla of the Rabbis (comp...
A man once lived in the capital who was recognized as remarkably clever. But he was also desperately poor. He used to walk the streets crying out, "Why has God dealt so harshly wit...
Three brothers set out on a journey. And encountered a witch who tested them with riddles, tricks, and dark magic. The tale, preserved in Jewish and comparative folklore collection...
A poor fisherman cast his net and pulled up a great fish. As he lifted it from the water, the fish spoke. Cut me open, it said. Gather my blood in three bottles. Keep them safely. ...
Two brothers lived in Cou$y in the year 893(1). Moses was a scholar and poor and Haim very rich. The latter asked his brother to act as his adviser and he would provide for his fam...
A miraculous apple from Paradise, a single fruit carrying the fragrance and power of the Garden of Eden, is the subject of this tale, preserved in medieval Jewish and comparative f...
When God gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, the scene was unlike anything the universe had ever witnessed. The entire nation of Israel stood at the base of the mountain, and when the v...
