Great Regulars: When he entered, he saw a lion with

its foot raised in the air; fearlessly, he approached and pulled a thorn out of the lion's foot. In gratitude, the lion protected Shelomoh and even let him ride on his back.

This story may shed some light on the historical animosity between Morocco's Jewish and Arab populations. But it is also, unmistakably, a retelling of a very famous legend from ancient Greece, "Androcles and the Lion." The notes show that a similar story was told about Saint Jerome, the early church father, and also about the 12th-century rabbi Samuel ben Kalonymus of Speyer, who was said to have befriended a leopard. It says something about the strange epistemology of folktales that the man who recorded "Rabbi Shelomoh the Lion," one David Buhbut, claimed that it was a story about his own grandfather and took place just 50 years in the past.

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Telling Tales

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