930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 4 of 20.
This brief and harrowing tale comes from the collection known as the Exempla of the Rabbis, assembled by Moses Gaster in 1924 from manuscript sources of medieval Jewish moral stori...
The destruction of Jerusalem did not end when the Temple burned. In the years that followed, the Romans hunted down the children of the sages, enslaving some, executing others, sca...
When the wicked kingdom destroyed the Temple and carried the people into slavery, the son and daughter of Rabbi Ishmael, both famous for their beauty, were seized and sold to diffe...
Zophnat, daughter of the high priest, was torn from everything she had ever known. Sold into slavery, she stood on the auction block while the seller stripped away her garments one...
Her name was Tzafnat, daughter of Peniel, and her father had been high priest of Israel. She had grown up in the holiest household in the land, with the aroma of incense in her clo...
When King Ptolemy of Egypt ordered the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, the sages of Israel did not celebrate. They mourned. The day the Torah was rendered in a foreign tongue, ...
When King Ptolemy of Egypt gathered seventy-two Jewish elders and placed them in separate rooms, commanding each to translate the Torah into Greek, a miracle occurred. The Talmud (...
Twice in the Hellenistic era the Torah crossed the language barrier into Greek, and the Rabbis remembered the two events very differently. Both are recorded in exemplum 61 of Moses...
The Egyptians brought their case before Alexander of Macedon, and they were confident they would win. Their claim was simple: when the Israelites left Egypt during the Exodus, they...
After Alexander the Great conquered the known world, the Egyptians saw an opportunity to settle old scores with the Jews. They came before Alexander's tribunal with a legal claim: ...
When Alexander of Macedon conquered Egypt, a delegation of Egyptian nobles came before him with a centuries-old complaint against the Jews. They pointed to the book of Exodus itsel...
Rabbi Akiva sat in a Roman prison, and his captors gave him a choice: abandon the Torah, or rot in chains. He chose the chains. The Roman authorities pressed him repeatedly. They o...
Rabbi Akiba had been arrested by the Roman authorities during the Hadrianic persecutions and thrown into a cell. They demanded that he abandon the Torah and adopt the empire's gods...
Rabbi Akiva was locked in a Roman prison, cut off from his students and colleagues. But the study of Torah does not stop for prison walls. Rabbi Johanan ben Nuri had an urgent ques...
When the Romans imprisoned Rabbi Akiba for the crime of teaching Torah in public, his colleagues did not abandon him. They found ways to visit, to smuggle messages, and, most impor...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 64, preserves one of the cleverest moments in rabbinic history. Rabbi Akiva was imprisoned, a fate he would eventually die in. And his student Rabbi Jo...
In the dark years of Roman persecution, when teaching Torah was a crime punishable by death, two students of Rabbi Joshua went into hiding. They disguised themselves and moved care...
The Romans were not fools. They knew that the Jewish sages wielded enormous influence over their people, more than any general or governor could match. So when the empire wanted to...
During a season of Roman persecution, two disciples of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananyah disguised themselves in Gentile dress and tried to pass unnoticed through dangerous territory. T...
The students of Rabbi Akiba were traveling on a road between towns when they spotted a band of robbers approaching from the opposite direction. The bandits were armed and dangerous...
The Talmud (Hullin 41b, Avodah Zarah 25b) preserves a cautionary teaching about the vulnerability of scholars traveling on dangerous roads. Students of the sages were sometimes set...
The students of Rabbi Akiva were traveling along a road when a band of robbers fell in with them. The bandits were watching closely to see which way the students were heading so th...
The son of Hananya joined a band of robbers and betrayed them to one of the great men of Rome. They found it out and killed him. In the funeral oration his father delivered, he tri...
The martyrdom of Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon is one of the most searing stories in all of rabbinic literature. The Talmud (Avodah Zarah 18a) records that the Romans found him sittin...
This is one of the cruelest and most luminous stories in the Talmud, preserved both in tractate Avodah Zarah and in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection as exemplum No. 67. Rabbi Chanina...
Rome had issued a decree: no new rabbis could be ordained. The empire understood that as long as the chain of rabbinic authority remained unbroken, the Jewish people could never tr...
When the Romans sought to destroy the chain of Torah transmission, they targeted the sages who ordained new rabbis. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 14a) records that Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava kn...
After the Bar Kokhba revolt the Roman Empire passed a decree that struck at the heart of Jewish continuity: any sage who ordained a student to the rank of rabbi, and any student wh...
When the Roman siege tightened around Jerusalem, starvation became a weapon more terrible than any sword. Doeg ben Josef was a man of means, he offered a full measure of gold for a...
When the Roman legions surrounded Jerusalem and cut off every supply route, the famine inside the walls became unspeakable. People chewed leather. They ate grass from between the s...
When the Roman siege tightened around Jerusalem in 70 CE, wealth stopped meaning anything. Doeg ben Yosef was a rich man, and in the final weeks of the siege he stood in the street...
The story of Kamsa and bar Kam§a and the fall of Jerusalem. A man had company and had invited Bar Kamsa who was his enemy, by mistake. He afterwards turned him out in spite of his ...
Kamsa&Fall of Jerusalem. Git tin, f. 55b, 56b, 57. Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court), f. 104. Pirke de R. Eliezer, ch. 49. Tanh. Numb. Hukkat § 1. and B. ibid. p. 99. Midr. Ha...
Ankelos ben Kalinikos, nephew of the Roman Emperor Titus, was searching for truth. Despite being born into the most powerful family in the world, he felt a spiritual hunger that Ro...
It was the custom to present newly married people with a hen and a cock and once the Roman soldiers passing by caught the birds and ate them; the Jews then attacked them. This was ...
There was once a custom in a Jewish town that newlyweds were greeted with a hen and a rooster, symbols of fruitfulness. One day Roman soldiers marched through the town, saw the bir...
A young man and woman who were betrothed to one another were seized by raiders and sold into slavery. By cruel coincidence. Or perhaps by providence, they were sold to the same mas...
A short, chilling ma'aseh from the rabbinic tradition, preserved as exemplum no. 73 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection The Exempla of the Rabbis, makes its point in a handful of sen...
A man decided to divorce his wife. On paper, this was his right. Jewish law permitted a husband to initiate divorce proceedings under certain circumstances. But this man had a prob...
A man grew tired of his wealthy wife and plotted to divorce her through deceit. He devised a scheme: he would publicly accuse her of unfaithfulness, using his own best friend as th...
A certain man in Jerusalem wanted to divorce his rich wife. The problem was that her marriage contract, her ketubah, stipulated a considerable sum to be paid to her in the event of...
Short note of the destruction of Bet-Tur through the axle of the waggon. They used to plant trees on the birth of a child and afterwards used them at its wedding. These were once c...
Destruction of Bet Tur. Gittin, f. 57 a. Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court), f. 17 b. Rosh Hashana, f. 18 b. Taanit, 26 b, 29 a. Mishnah (the earliest code of rabbinic law) Taa...
The Romans led Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel and Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha to their execution together. Both were among the greatest sages of their generation, and both had been condemne...
When the Romans executed the Ten Martyrs, the greatest sages of Israel, two of the first to die were Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the Nasi (prince) of the Sanhedrin, and Rabbi Ishmae...
Among the Ten Martyrs whose deaths Jewish tradition recalls on Yom Kippur and Tisha B'Av were Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the Patriarch of the Jewish people under Roman occupation, ...
Mesha, the king of Moab, heard the story of the Binding of Isaac and drew exactly the wrong conclusion. He learned that Abraham, the father of the Israelites, had been willing to s...
When the prophet Isaiah prayed for a sign to confirm that King Hezekiah would recover from his illness, God performed one of the most spectacular miracles in all of scripture: the ...
