Tales from the Mayse Book

The Yiddish collection Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories) includes more than 250 folk tales, drawing on a range of Jewish oral and written sources, in addition to non-Jewish material, and was probably completed in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. In 1602, Jacob ben Abraham Pollak, or Jacob ben Abraham of Mezritch, from Lithuania printed the first extant edition of the Mayse-bukh at the printing house of Konrad Waldkirch in Basel. According to Jacob’s foreword, this was the first printed edition of the story collection, which subsequently achieved immense popularity throughout Europe.