These are the circumstances to be borne in mind in examining the authenticity of the legend about the king of a night. As early as the beginning of his century, recent historians inform us, three Jews, Abraham, Michael, and Isaac Josefowicz, rose to high positions in Lithuania. Abraham was made chief rabbi of Lithuania, his residence being fixed at Ostrog; Isaac became starost of the cities of Smolensk and Minsk (1506), and four years later, he was invested with the governorship of Lithuania. He always kept up his connection with his brothers, protected his co-religionists, and appointed Michael chief elder of the Lithuanian Jews. On taking the oath of allegiance to Albert of Prussia, he was raised to the rank of a nobleman. A Jew of the sixteenth century a nobleman! Surely, this fact is sufficiently startling to serve as the background of a legend. We have every circumstance necessary: An analogous legend in the early history of Poland, the favored condition of the Jews, the well-attested reality of Saul Juditsch, and an extraordinary event, the ennobling of a Jew. Saul Wahl probably did not reign--not even for a single night--but he certainly was attached to the person of the king, and later, ignorant of grades of officials, the Jews were prone to magnify his position. Indeed, the abject misery of their condition in the seventeenth century seems better calculated to explain the legend than their prosperity in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Bogdan Chmielnicki's campaign against the rebellious Cossacks wrought havoc among the Jews. From the southern part of the Ukraine to Lemberg, the road was strewn with the corpses of a hundred thousand Jews. The sad memory of a happy past is the fertile soil in which legends thrive. It is altogether likely that at this time of degradation the memory of Saul Wahl, redeemer and hero, was first celebrated, and the report of his coat of arms emblazoned with a lion clutching a scroll of the Law, and crowning an eagle, of his golden chain, of his privileges, and all his memorials, spread from house to house.