“When the end of the tenth year of their marriage was approaching, they both went to the Rabbi, and asked him for his advice. The Rabbi listened with great sympathy, but declared his inability to alter or modify the law in their favour. The only suggestion, he said, that he could make, was, that on the last night before their final separation, they should celebrate a little feast together, and that the wife should take some keepsake from her husband which would be a permanent token of her husband’s unchangeable affection for her.
“Thus, on the last night, the wife prepared a sumptuous meal for the two of them, and, amidst much merriment and laughter, she filled and refilled her husband’s goblet with sparkling wine. Under its influence, he fell into a heavy sleep, and while in this condition, he was carried by his wife’s orders to her father’s abode, where he continued to sleep till the following morning. When he awoke, and was wondering at his strange surroundings, his cunning wife came smilingly into the room, and said: ‘Of, my dear husband, I have actually carried out the Rabbi’s suggestion, inasmuch as I have taken away from home a most precious keepsake. This is your own dear self, without whom it would be impossible for me to live.’
“The husband, moved to tears, embraced her most affectionately, and promised that they should live together to the end. Thereupon they joyfully returned home, and, going again to the Rabbi, they told him what had happened, and asked him for his forgiveness and blessing, which he readily accorded them. And, indeed, the Rabbi’s blessing had an excellent result. For after the lapse of some time, they both enjoyed the happiness of fondling a bright little child of their own.”
Arabian and Turkish thought and speech seem to be tinged with the sense of the bizarre and strange rather than the grotesque. Their earliest folk tales and pleasant stories, from which later grew the Arabian Nights, form a cumulative, though broken chain from ancient to modern times.
Persian humor leans toward the romantic and sentimental, but no ancient fragments are available. From the later writers, as Omar and Sadi, we feel convinced there was an early literature but we can find none to quote.
India shows the oldest and most definite signs of early folk lore and retold tales.
Buddha’s Jatakas produced the stories that later proved the germs of merry tales by Boccaccio and Chaucer. That these later writers put in all the fun is not entirely probable.
Some antiquarians claim to find humor in the hymns of the Rig Vedas, whose date is indefinitely put at between 2,000 and 1,500 B.C. while others of different temperament deny it.
From this example the reader may judge for himself.