Midrashic "Stories of King Solomon," the "Maxims of the Philosophers," the
"Proverbs of the Wise"; but not "Sendabar" in its Hebrew form. His
acquaintance with the language of the Bible was thorough; but he makes one
or two blunders in quoting the substance of Scriptural passages. Though he
disclaimed the title of a Talmudic scholar, he was not ignorant of the
Rabbinic literature. Everyone quotes it: the fox, the woman, Enan, and the
author. He was sufficiently at home in this literature to pun therein. He
also knew the story of Tobit, but, as he introduces it as "a most
marvellous tale," it is clear that this book of the Apocrypha was not
widely current in his day. The story, as Zabara tells it, differs
considerably from the Apocryphal version of it. The incidents are
misplaced, the story of the betrothal is disconnected from that of the
recovery of the money by Tobit, and the detail of the gallows occurs in no
other known text of the story. In one point, Zabara's version strikingly
agrees with the Hebrew and Chaldee texts of Tobit as against the Greek;
Tobit's son is not accompanied by a dog on his journey to recover his
father's long-lost treasure.

One of the tales told by Zabara seems to imply a phenomenon of the
existence of which there is no other evidence. There seems to have been in
Spain a small class of Jews that were secret converts to Christianity. They
passed openly for Jews, but were in truth Christians. The motive for the
concealment is unexplained, and the whole passage may be merely satirical.

It remains for me to describe the texts now extant of the "Book of
Delight." In 1865 the "Book of Delight" appeared, from a fifteenth century
manuscript in Paris, in the second volume of a Hebrew periodical called the
_Lebanon_. In the following year the late Senior Sachs wrote an
introduction to it and to two other publications, which were afterwards
issued together under the title _Yen Lebanon_ (Paris, 1866). The editor was