This entry gathers a cluster of tales about three clever Jewish slaves who were sold into captivity after the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem. Carried off into the Roman world, they had lost everything except their minds, and it was by their minds alone that they overcame their captors. Each of the three was handed an impossible assignment by his master, a riddle or a task meant to break or shame him, and each one turned the trap back upon the man who had set it, answering the challenge so deftly that the master was left outwitted by his own slave.
The Talmud records their exchanges in tractate Sanhedrin 104b and in Lamentations Rabbah 1:4, placing them within the long lament over the exile. There they serve a pointed purpose. The destruction had stripped the people of land, sovereignty, and the sacred house, and the conquerors might imagine that Israel was finished. These stories answer that the sharpness of Jewish wisdom could not be sold, chained, or conquered. The same motif of the captive who triumphs by wit traveled widely and surfaces in many later collections, but in its rabbinic setting it carries a particular consolation: a defeated nation kept the one possession that no army could seize, the keenness of a learned and disciplined intelligence.