"Very well," said the Red Starosta, "you won't tell me, eh? Then I'll find a way of making your Rabbi tell me."
So the Red Starosta flung the Rabbi into a dungeon, and for a whole week he experimented upon him with the latest and most approved instruments of torture. But Rabbi Jitzchak Ben Menachim remained steadfast. Neither fire, nor water, nor the Spanish boot could extract from him the secret of the piece of silver.
Now the Rabbi had a grown-up son, Jaikef by name. On the eighth day he could endure no longer the spectacle of his father tortured there before his eyes, so he went to the Starosta and said to him—
"Let my father go free, and I will tell you the secret of the silver coin."
And thus Jaikef told the story whose preliminaries are well known to us all.
There was once a Jew named Judas Iscariot, who sold to the Priests of Jerusalem "The Son of Man," the "King of Nazareth," above whose head on the cross was nailed the inscription "I.N.R.I." The price paid to him for this was thirty pieces of silver. But when they crucified "the Master" on Golgotha, he repented him of what he had done and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the Priests. They would not accept them. Then he flung down the money in the Temple, and went and hanged himself on a maple-tree. But the Priests resolved with the rejected money to buy a portion of land from the Potters. The Priests entrusted the business of the purchase to Kramoi-Chita Anselm, and this enterprising man beat down the price to nine and twenty pieces of silver, the thirtieth piece he kept for himself. His son Nathan inherited it from him. Solomon, the son of Nathan, inherited it in his turn, till at last, in the period of the exodus of the Jews from Palestine, it fell into the possession of Joisef Zedek, who brought it away with him. This one remaining piece of Judas-money puts power and riches into the hands of the Jews. This is their living hope, their talismanic treasure—and now Jaikef gave the secret away.
"Then it is a very good thing that I have got it," said the Red Starosta, and, as promised, he set free the Rabbi, at the same time telling him that as he now knew the secret of the piece of silver, he would not give it back to the Jews for all the treasures in the world.
The Rabbi Jitzchak Ben Menachim thereupon, first of all, cursed his own son:
"As thou couldst not close thy mouth, henceforth thou shalt open it in vain."
And the curse was accomplished. From that time forth poor Jaikef was expelled from every Jewish threshold, not a single Jew would thenceforth give him meat and drink, whilst the law of the Talmud forbade him to eat food prepared by Christians. So he starved to death.