A Jewish man and a gentile once made a wager about whose religion was true. Satan, disguised as an ordinary man, appeared and ruled in favor of the gentile, who took all the money. The Jew was left with nothing.
That night, broken and desperate, the Jewish man happened to rest near a place where demons gathered after dark. He pressed himself against a wall and listened as the shedim (demons) boasted to one another about the destruction they had caused and the secrets they knew.
One demon bragged that he knew how to cure the Emperor's daughter, who was gravely ill and whom no physician could heal. Another revealed the location of a hidden spring of fresh water beneath a certain field — a discovery that would make any man wealthy. A third spoke of yet another secret that could change a man's fortune.
The Jewish man memorized everything he heard. At dawn, when the demons vanished, he went to the Emperor's court, cured the princess using the method the demon had described, and then revealed the hidden spring. The Emperor rewarded him with enormous wealth.
The gentile who had won the original wager heard about this windfall and went to the same spot at night, hoping to overhear the demons himself. But the shedim discovered him. Unlike the Jewish man, who had stumbled upon them by accident and listened in silence, the gentile had come deliberately — and the demons killed him on the spot. The medieval Exempla of the Rabbis preserves this variant alongside Tale No. 29 as a teaching about providence: the same hidden knowledge that saves one person destroys another, depending on who was meant to receive it.