d. 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.

Parallel cases of legend-construction readily suggest themselves. In
our own time, in the glare of nineteenth century civilization, legends
originate in the same way. Here is a case in point: In 1875, the
Anthropological Society of Western Prussia instituted a series of
investigations, in the course of which the complexion and the color of
the hair and eyes of the children at the public schools were to be
noted, in order to determine the prevalence of certain racial traits.
The most extravagant rumors circulated in the districts of Dantzic,
Thorn, Kulm, all the way to Posen. Parents, seized by unreasoning
terror, sent their children, in great numbers, to Russia. One rumor said
that the king of Prussia had lost one thousand blonde children to the
sultan over a game of cards; another, that the Russian government had
sold sixty thousand pretty girls to an Arab prince, and to save them
from the sad fate conjectured to be in store for them, all the pretty
girls at Dubna were straightway married off.--Similarly, primitive man,
to satisfy his intellectual cravings, explained the phenomena of the
heavens, the earth, and the waters by legends and myths, the germs of
polytheistic nature religions. In our case, the tissue of fa