A great scholar who spent all his days teaching Torah had a son late in life. He cherished the boy and kept him inside the study house, afraid that the world would distract him. His pupils, jealous, took the boy out one day and showed him everything the father had hidden — markets, streets, strangers, the roar of ordinary life. When the boy came home, he reproached his father. From then on the scholar walked the world with his son.
The pupils traveled each year to a distant country to trade. They persuaded the young man to join them on the annual journey. His father sent him with 1,000 gold dinars. On arrival the pupils abandoned him in the foreign city. A local merchant took him in. The next day he saw a commotion in the market: a great rabbi had died, and the sultan was refusing burial unless the Jewish community paid a 1,000-dinar debt. The young man went to the sultan, paid the debt from his own pocket, and secured the rabbi's burial with honor.
The next year he went again with 10,000 dinars. Again the pupils abandoned him. This time he used the money to buy, at auction, a captured Spanish ship the sultan's navy was selling as-is. When he opened the hold, he found it empty — until a hidden panel revealed a young woman. She was the daughter of the king of Spain. War had broken out; fearing for her life, she had stocked a ship with provisions and jewels hidden in wine bottles, and had been captured. They married quietly. She made exquisite tapestries that no one in the country had seen.
A merchant bought her tapestries and carried them to Spain. The king recognized his daughter's work and came in disguise. He won the young man's trust, invited himself to the house, waited until the husband was out, and forced his daughter to flee with him and their two children back to Spain.
The young man, desperate, found two boatmen at the harbor who offered to take him to Spain — on condition that afterward they would divide all his spoils equally. Outside the king's palace was a vast mound of refuse. The boatmen told him to buy it. He did, to the city's laughter. Overnight a magnificent palace with gardens rose on the spot. His wife heard of the wonder, obtained permission to visit it, recognized her husband, and fled with him and their children. The palace vanished; the refuse heap returned.
Back in their ship the boatmen demanded their share. They offered the young man a choice: take the treasure, the wife, or the children — the other two belonged to them. He gave up the treasure and refused to surrender wife or children. Seeing his despair, the boatmen revealed themselves. One was the dead rabbi whose burial he had paid for. The other was Elijah the prophet. God had sent them to reward him for his acts of tzedakah, and now the treasure, wife, and children were all his to keep.
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924, No. 440) preserves this folkloric saga — a story traveling between Eastern Jewish communities for centuries — as a parable of how charity returns to the giver multiplied beyond measure. Every dinar the young man spent on others returned as a palace, a wife, a kingdom, and a prophet at his side.