The Jew Who Remembered He Still Owned a Pearl

There was a Jew who had given everything up. He spent his life trying to blend in with the gentile elite, adopting their dress, their manners, their tastes. His parents had been observant. He had left it all behind. He was invited now to dine at the table of the prince, and he thought he had arrived.

An enemy of his knew exactly where to strike. He paid a group of boys to station themselves along the route to the palace. As the Jew passed in his fine clothes, the boys chanted, over and over: "Jew. Jew. Jew."

The man did not flinch. He did not hurry. Instead, without a word, he reached into his purse, pulled out gold coins, and tossed them to the boys.

When he arrived at the palace, the prince asked why he had rewarded his own harassers.

The Jew told a parable.

There was once a man of great wealth, he said, who squandered everything until he had only one pearl left. He had pledged this pearl again and again to a particular moneylender, borrowing against it in smaller and smaller amounts as he grew desperate. Finally the moneylender lost patience. "I will not lend against the pearl any longer," the lender said. "I will buy it from you outright."

The man refused. He would not sell. The moneylender was baffled. "Why? You have nothing else. The money would feed you."

The owner answered, "Because as long as I own the pearl, I am the owner of a pearl. That is still something. I am not yet a man who owns nothing."

The Jew turned to the prince. "My parents left me a great inheritance, and I squandered it — all but one thing. Being a Jew. I had almost forgotten I still owned it. Those boys reminded me. For that service I paid them gold" (Gaster, Exempla No. 429).

That evening he returned to his faith.

The story is about the jolt that sometimes comes from an insult. A slur, shouted by street boys, was the service the man's enemy had paid for — and it turned out to be the most valuable reminder of his life. Identity is not what you wear at the prince's table. It is what is left in your purse after every other coin has been spent.