Corresponding to the diffusion of folklore among the Jews, their store of popular beliefs, superstitions, and medicine is unlimited. Their mysterious world is peopled with the imaginary beings of the Talmud, the creatures of German mythology, and the creations of the Slavic popular mind. These exist for them, however, not as separate entities, but as transfused into an organic whole in which the belief of Babylonia and Assyria has much of the outward form of the superstition of Russia, just as the spirits of Poland and Germany are made to be brothers to those of Chaldea and Egypt. To their minds the transmigrated souls of the _Gilgulim_, the scoffing _Leezim_, the living dead bodies of the _Meessim_, the possessing _Dibukim_, the grewsome _Scheedim_, are as real as the _Riesen_ and _Schraetele_ of Germany and the _Nischtgute_ (niedobry), _Wukodlaki_ (werewolf), _Zlidne_, _Upior_ (vampyre), and _Domowoj_ of Russia. The beast _Reem_ of the Talmud, the _Pipernātter_ (Lindwurm) of Germany are not less known to them than the fabled animals of Russian fairy tales. In case of sickness they consult with equal success the miracle-working Rabbi with his lore derived from Talmud and Cabbala, as the Tartar medicine man (znachar), or get some old woman to recite the ancient German formula for warding off the evil eye. There is not an incident in their lives, from their births unto their deaths, that is not accompanied by its own circle of superstitious rites and practices.[35] Their literature, both oral and printed, is also full of evidences of that popular creative spirit which finds its expression in the form of maxims and proverbs. One can hardly turn the pages of a novel or comedy without finding some interesting specimens of this class. But little has been done to classify them, or even to collect them. The printed collections of Tendlau and Bernstein contain less than three thousand proverbs, while the seven thousand saws on which Schwarzfeld bases his generalizations in a Roumanian periodical (_Anuarul pentru Israeliţi_) have not yet been published by him.[36] Equally rich would prove the harvest of popular anecdotes, either as told of separate individuals, as Herschele Ostropoler, Motke Chabad, Jōssef Loksch, the wise man of Chelm, and the like, or as applied to the inhabitants of certain Abderitic towns.[37] Many such collections are mentioned in the appendix, but they do not by any means exhaust the stories that are current among the people. Though they generally are of the same character as those told of Schildburg and Till Eulenspiegel, and are even borrowings from those German stories, yet they contain so much original matter, and have been welded into such new forms, that they deserve the attention of the student of folklore. They also bear excellent witness to that pungent wit for which the Jews are so justly famous. IV. THE FOLKSONG