day." Again, once a wicked woman pursued a heroic man. He met some devils.
"What are you running from?" asked they. "From a wicked woman," he
answered. The devils turned and ran away with him.

One rather longer story may be summarized thus: Satan, disguised in human
shape, met a fugitive husband, who had left his wicked wife. Satan told him
that he was in similar case, and proposed a compact. Satan would enter into
the bodies of men, and the other, pretending to be a skilful physician,
would exorcise Satan. They would share the profits. Satan begins on the
king, and the queen engages the confederate to cure the king within three
days, for a large fee, but in case of failure the doctor is to die. Satan
refuses to come out: his real plan is to get the doctor killed in this way.
The doctor obtains a respite, and collects a large body of musicians, who
make a tremendous din. Satan trembles. "What is that noise?" he asks. "Your
wife is coming," says the doctor. Out sprang Satan and fled to the end of
the earth.

These tales and quips, it is true, are directed against "wicked" women, but
if Zabara really wrote them, it would be difficult to acquit him of
woman-hatred, unless the stories have been misplaced, and should appear, as
part of the "Book of Delight," within the Leopard section, which rounds off
a series of unfriendly tales with a moral friendly to woman. In general,
Oriental satire directed against women must not be taken too seriously. As
Guedemann has shown, the very Jews that wrote most bitterly of women were
loud in praise of their own wives--the women whom alone they knew
intimately. Woman was the standing butt for men to hurl their darts at, and
one cannot help feeling that a good deal of the fun got its point from the
knowledge that the charges were exaggerated or untrue. You find the Jewish
satirists exhausting all their stores of drollery on the subject of
rollicking drunkenness. They roar till their sides creak over the humor of