Modern Compilations & Folklore
19 passages1919 CEHebrew / AramaicPublic Domain
Individual passages from Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends (Landa, 1919), indexed for close reading, source verification, and myth source-checking.
Og did not fit inside the ark. That is the whole problem. The world was drowning, the animals were lining up before Noah, and the giant who would later become king of Bashan stood ...
Rabba bar bar Hana landed on an island that was not an island. That is the old Talmudic terror at the heart of Landa's 1919 retelling. The travelers see dry land in the middle of t...
Rabbi Onias reached the hill above Jerusalem and saw a city of ash. Landa's 1919 public-domain version shifts the famous sleeper tradition into the grief after the First Temple's d...
Hanina spent almost everything he owned on a sealed silver casket because his dying father told him to buy the first thing offered in the marketplace. It was the day before Passove...
Abraham was dangerous before he could speak. That is how Landa's 1919 public-domain retelling frames the old Nimrod legend. On the night Abraham is born, the astrologers see a star...
Moses reached for Pharaoh's crown because he was three years old and did not yet know fear. Landa's 1919 retelling takes a famous midrashic moment and makes the danger immediate. P...
Bostanai survives because a tyrant dreams of roses. In Landa's 1919 public-domain retelling, the Persian king Hormuz decides that Jewish hope can be killed at the root. If no desce...
David thought he had climbed a barren mountain. Then the mountain stood up. Landa's 1919 retelling imagines David before the throne, still a shepherd boy with music in his ears. He...
Sarah was hidden in a box because Abraham knew Egypt would not look away from her. In Gertrude Landa's 1919 public-domain retelling, Abraham reaches the Egyptian border with Sarah ...
Adam once had a peaceful house, and the cat and dog nearly ruined it. Landa's 1919 Jewish folktale begins in the childhood of the world, when Adam had named the animals and still r...
Hiram helped Solomon build the Temple, then decided he might never die. That is the arrogance at the center of Landa's 1919 retelling. Hiram, king of Tyre, remembers David and Solo...
Rabbi Lion needed help tending the Sabbath fire, so he built a servant that could not speak. Landa's Prague tale calls him Rabbi Lion, the learned man later remembered in Jewish le...
Alexander conquered the world and still had to stop at a gate he could not open. Landa's 1919 retelling gathers the Jewish Alexander legends into one restless journey. First, Alexa...
A dying merchant made his son swear one oath: never cross the sea. Bar Shalmon swore it on his father's deathbed, a vow before heaven. Then a strange ship arrived carrying a fortun...
The most learned and pious man in the city was starving, and he told no one. Ibrahim watched his wife and five sons waste away in rags, too proud to take the charity his neighbors ...
Ikkor, the Jewish vizier of Assyria, was the wisest man in the kingdom and the most miserable. He had thirty wives and not a single child, and at night he sat alone in his palace a...
Princess Solima would marry no prince. Not the warrior who bragged of the men, women, and children his soldiers had butchered. Not the hunter who knew the needs of his falcons but ...
King Hagag tore a page out of the holy book because a single verse insulted him. His high priest had been reading the daily portion, and the words landed like an accusation: riches...
Godfrey de Bouillon had sworn an oath that would not let him sleep. He would not rest, he told his men, until he had wiped the children of Israel from the earth. He marched east wi...
