Beitzah 14

Remember the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding? How he thinks the Greeks created everything? That’s a popular refrain amongst us Jews as well – that we created everything. I often get emails that show tenuous Jewish connections to things not thought of as having Jewish origins – but according to the email, are Jewish!

Well, today’s daf made turned me into one of those who say everything is originally Jewish. Read the passage below and tell me this does not remind you of “The Princess and the Pea.”

And if you say that the allowance of cloth of diverse kinds is referring to a case where there is something separating between them, i.e., one may place a garment of diverse kinds beneath another object, but didn’t Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi say that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said that Rabbi Yosei ben Shaul said that Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said, in the name of the sacred congregation in Jerusalem: Even in a case of ten mattresses placed one on top of the other and a cloth of diverse kinds underneath them, it is prohibited to sleep on them, as it is stated: “Neither shall there come upon you” (Leviticus 19:19).

The rabbis can sense an unkosher cloth through ten mattresses – just like the princess can feel that pea.

The Princess and the Pea was published in 1846 and written by Hans Christian Anderson. He claimed he heard it as a child, but there is no evidence that the Dane’s had a story anything like this before he wrote it down. Did he perhaps hear it from a Jewish friend or neighbor? Overhear men studying Talmud? Maybe . . . just maybe . . .