ABSTRACT
The earliest published version of the Jewish pope myth in Yiddish literature appears in the seventeenth-century 'Book of Stories', the Mayse-bukh. This anonymous collection of stories, folk tales, jokes and legends originated from a variety of medieval Jewish oral and written traditions, and included material both from Talmudic aggadah and Midrash, as well as Judaized material from non-Jewish traditions after the manner of such medieval Christian collections of moral exempla as the Gesta Romanorum, originally printed about 1473. By the end of the sixteenth century, when the Mayse-bakh first appeared, the Protestant Reformation had diminished the international dominance of the Catholic Church, but the lot of Jews in Christian Europe had scarcely improved. The Mayse-bukh's narrative voice is also fully aware that Christian claims to have superseded the Jews as possessors of the Covenant demand the elimination of Jews qua Jews.
