The Legends of the Jews, vol 1 | Page 4

time the Synagogue
disavowed the pseudepigraphic literature, which was the favorite
reading matter of the sectaries and the Christians. Nevertheless the
inner relation between them is of the closest kind. The only essential
difference is that the Midrashic form prevails in the Haggadah, and the
parenetic or apocalyptic form in the pseudepigrapha. The common
element must therefore depart from the Midrash on the one hand and
from parenesis on the other.
Folklore, fairy tales, legends, and all forms of story telling akin to these
are comprehended, in the terminology of the post-Biblical literature of
the Jews, under the inclusive description Haggadah, a name that can be
explained by a circumlocution, but cannot be translated. Whatever it is
applied to is thereby characterized first as being derived from the Holy
Scriptures, and then as being of the nature of a story. And, in point of
fact, this dualism sums up the distinguishing features of Jewish Legend.
More than eighteen centuries ago the Jewish historian Josephus
observed that "though we be deprived of our wealth, of our cities, or of
the other advantages we have, our law continues immortal." The word
he meant to use was not law, but Torah, only he could not find an
equivalent for it in Greek. A singer of the Synagogue a thousand years
after Josephus, who expressed his sentiments in Hebrew, uttered the
same thought: "The Holy City and all her daughter cities are violated,
they lie in ruins, despoiled of their ornaments, their splendor darkened
from sight. Naught is left to us save one eternal treasure alone--the
Holy Torah." The sadder the life of the Jewish people, the more it felt
the need of taking refuge in its past. The Scripture, or, to use the Jewish
term, the Torah, was the only remnant of its former national

independence, and the Torah was the magic means of making a sordid
actuality recede before a glorious memory. To the Scripture was
assigned the task of supplying nourishment to the mind as well as the
soul, to the intellect as well as the imagination, and the result is the
Halakah and the Haggadah.
The fancy of the people did not die out in the post-Biblical time, but the
bent of its activity was determined by the past.
Men craved entertainment in later times as well as in the earlier, only
instead of resorting for its subject-matter to what happened under their
eyes, they drew from the fountain-head of the past. The events in the
ancient history of Israel, which was not only studied, but lived over
again daily, stimulated the desire to criticize it. The religious reflections
upon nature laid down in the myths of the people, the fairy tales, which
have the sole object of pleasing, and the legends, which are the people's
verdict upon history--all these were welded into one product. The fancy
of the Jewish people was engaged by the past reflected in the Bible, and
all its creations wear a Biblical hue for this reason. This explains the
peculiar form of the Haggadah.
But what is spontaneously brought forth by the people is often
preserved only in the form impressed upon it by the feeling and the
thought of the poet, or by the speculations of the learned. Also Jewish
legends have rarely been transmitted in their original shape. They have
been perpetuated in the form of Midrash, that is, Scriptural exegesis.
The teachers of the Haggadah, called Rabbanan d'Aggadta in the
Talmud, were no folklorists, from whom a faithful reproduction of
legendary material may be expected. Primarily they were homilists,
who used legends for didactic purposes, and their main object was to
establish a close connection between the Scripture and the creations of
the popular fancy, to give the latter a firm basis and secure a long term
of life for them.
One of the most important tasks of the modern investigation of the
Haggadah is to make a clean separation between the original elements
and the later learned additions. Hardly a beginning has been made in
this direction. But as long as the task of distinguishing them has not
been accomplished, it is impossible to write out the Biblical legends of
the Jews without including the supplemental work of scholars in the
products of the popular fancy.

In the present work, "The Legends of the Jews," I have made the first
attempt to gather from the original sources all Jewish legends, in so far
as they refer to Biblical personages and events, and reproduce them
with the greatest attainable completeness and accuracy. I use the
expression Jewish, rather than Rabbinic, because the sources from
which I have levied contributions are not limited to the Rabbinic
literature. As I expect to take occasion elsewhere to enter into a
description of the sources in detail, the