Tales from the Mayse Book
1. The Jewish Pope
This is the story of what happened to Rabbi Simeon the Great, who lived in Mayence on the Rhine. Now Rabbi Simeon, he had three big mirrors hanging in his home. And in these mirrors he could see everything that had happened or was to happen. Also, at the head of his bed he had a spring that flowed from his grave at the cemetery…
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.
Related Guide
Early Modern Literature and the Arts
Jewish literary creativity flourished in the early modern period, dominated by Hebrew poetry that blended religious themes with Renaissance forms.
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