THE DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

     Barlaam and Joshaphat.—­The Fables of Bidpai.—­Abraham Ibn
     Chisdai.—­Berachya ha-Nakdan.—­Joseph Zabara.

The folk-tales of India were communicated to Europe in two ways.  First, there was an oral diffusion.  In friendly conversation round the family hearth, in the convivial intercourse of the tavern and divan, the wit and wisdom of the East found a home in the West.  Having few opportunities of coming into close relations with Christian society, the Jews had only a small share in the oral diffusion of folk-tales.  But there was another means of diffusion, namely, by books.  By their writings the Jews were able to leave some impress on the popular literature of Europe.

This they did by their translations.  Sometimes the Jews translated fables and folk-tales solely for their own use, and in such cases the translations did not leave the Hebrew form into which they were cast.  A good example of this was Abraham Ibn Chisdai’s “Prince and Nazirite,” compiled in the beginning of the thirteenth century.  It was a Hebrew version of the legend of Buddha, known as “Barlaam and Joshaphat.”  In this the story is told of a prince’s conversion to the ascetic life.  His father had vainly sought to hold him firm to a life of pleasure by isolating him in a beautiful palace, far from the haunts of man, so that he might never know that such things as evil, misery, and death existed.  Of course the plan failed, the prince discovered the things hidden from him, and he became converted to the life of self-denial and renunciation associated with the saintly teaching of Buddha.  This story is the frame into which a number of charming tales are set, which have found their way into the popular literature of all the world.  But in this spread of the Indian stories, the book of Abraham Ibn Chisdai had no part.

Far other it was with the Hebrew translation of the famous Fables of Bidpai, known in Hebrew as Kalila ve-Dimna.  These fables, like those contained in the “Prince and Nazirite,” were Indian, and were in fact birth-stories of Buddha.  They were connected by means of a frame, or central plot.  A large part of the popular tales of the Middle Ages can be traced to the Fables of Bidpai, and here the Jews exerted important influence.  Some authorities even hold that these Fables of Bidpai were brought to Spain directly from India by Jews.  This is doubtful, but it is certain that the spread of the Fables was due to Jewish activity.  A Jew translated them into Hebrew, and this Hebrew was turned into Latin by the Italian John of Capua, a Jew by birth, in the year 1270.  Moreover, the Old Spanish version which was made in 1251 probably was also the work of the Jewish school of translators established in Toledo by Alfonso.  The Greek version, which was earlier still, and dates from 1080, was equally the work of a Jew.  Thus, as Mr. Joseph Jacobs has shown, this curious collection of fables, which influenced Europe more perhaps than any book except the Bible, started as a Buddhistic work, and passed over to the Mohammedans and Christians chiefly through the mediation of Jews.