Talk:Aesop among the Jews

This is a straight copy of, which is public domain, so that's OK. --John Nagle 04:38, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Suggested merge to Aesop's Fables
I've put a tag suggesting some of the material from here would be better given up to Aesop's Fables, because that article already summarises much of this article's content, with the added benefit of 100 years more scholarship.

It would be good if somebody could seriously go through the article here (which, being a straight import for the 1906 JE, takes no account of Aesop's Fables article also existing), and consider how much of it really ought to stay here, and how much is already better treated there (and also, how much, particularly on the origins, is not really about the Jews, and really only needs to be mentioned in passing here, not treated in depth). At the moment (IMO) this whole article is a very odd read, and feels very "unwiki". It could really do with a sympathetic editor to contextualise and focus the material much better, relate it much closer to here, and generally make it a better-guided read. Jheald (talk) 11:49, 28 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I will make the counter-proposal that this article should be deleted altogether. I have made an attempt at editing and have found it, as Jheald notes, out of date and largely off topic. While there is interesting evidence of Jewish use of Aesopic material over two millennia, this article does nothing but make broad, undocumented assertions. A modern encyclopaedia requires well-sourced facts. If discussion here fails to develop and there is no editing, it will be time to consider acting on my recommendation. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 22:36, 9 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I think we at Wikipedia are unique in having well-sourced facts; most encyclopedias (like the Jewish encyclopedia whose article is being used verbatim here) just have "experts" write articles making broad, undocumented assertions. :-) [I'm not suggesting the article be kept, just reacting to your comment.] Shreevatsa (talk) 02:02, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

More research needed
Once all the off-topic, unsourced and speculative material is removed, the article appears of thin significance. Only two facts emerge, that fables are cited in early commentaries and then that there is a collection of fables written in Hebrew a thousand years later. Jacobs might not have been the right author to write this article in the first place. He was more interested in the origin of and variations within fables than he was in the continuity of their use among Jews. One of the main transmitters of fables during the Middle Ages were Arabs and there appears to be no attempt to discover what Jews living in Muslim areas during their 'golden age' learned from these sources. What the article needs is someone who can look at Judaeo-Arabic and Ladino sources (or else survey the scholarship that deals with them) and fill the topic out. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 21:38, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Good work cleaning up the article. I agree with the assessment that there's not much here that's of sufficient significance to merit a separate article, so we can probably merge whatever is notable into the main Aesop's fables article. Shreevatsa (talk) 00:43, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Namaska, Shreevatsa! There's an additional reason now for deleting the article - it's available online anyway at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=874&letter=A and I don't see why WP should be perpetuating scholarship which is thin on facts and padded out with large amounts of (still) unsupported speculation. You'll notice that the original is titled "Aesop's FABLES among the Jews", which makes much more sense. Further evidence of the botch the original contributor to WP made of things is that s/he left out the most valuable part of the whole article, the list of fables used in the Talmud commentaries, which is available on the JE site.

Let's set up a timetable for deletion. There's a discussion forum for editors somewhere on WP which I'm hoping you know how to get to. We should announce there that we propose deletion by a certain date (let's say the end of Oct 2010), giving reasons. It will only be retained if someone declares their interest in doing the research outlined above (and actually produces some results by the start of 2011). In the meantime I'll add a two-sentence reference (it needs no more) to the Aesop's Fables article about use of some fables in the commentaries with a link to the list of them. I have already added a subsection there on Berechiah. That's all the 'merging' that needs doing. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 06:08, 14 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Good points. No, I don't think even a timetable is necessary. There was a merge tag on the page long enough, so if someone really cared about this article they would have objected earlier. It's ok to do it right now; we just make this page redirect to Aesop's fables. These changes are easily reversible, so nothing is lost for ever, and if someone really wants this page back it will be easy to restore it. Regards, Shreevatsa (talk) 15:04, 14 July 2010 (UTC)