The document presented here is a broadsheet from 1642 that describes the execution of Frantz Ferdinand Engelberger, a Jew killed after an illustrious history of crime and religious polemic. Engelberger converted to Christianity after he was caught stealing from a synagogue around 1636. He subsequently published two anti-Jewish texts (1640), became known to the emperor Ferdinand III and two years later was caught stealing an expensive vessel from the court’s treasury along with two Jews. All three thieves were sentenced to death. The text reports the events that followed their sentence starting with the original day of execution when Engelsberger denounced Christianity, and focusing on what happened to him four days later after he was convicted as a blasphemer, and sentenced to torture and a very cruel death.
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Modern taxonomies of illnesses and disabilities do not reflect early modern ideas about physical and mental difference. In modern thought, disability or illness is always understood in terms of a norm, deviations from that norm, and medical treatment. In the early modern period, the disabled are their own order of creation, almost another species. Far from being pathologized, disabled people were widely considered miraculous and potentially oracular. The pre-modern view sees a radical discontinuity between disabled and able-bodied people. Illnesses, on the other hand, were already seen as treatable—be it by diet, say, or exorcism. These different ideas about disability are reflected in Old Yiddish literature, which includes stories about monstrous births, demonic possession, miraculous healings, prophetic proclamations, and insights of great wisdom. Revelations on the part of disabled characters are featured in two Old Yiddish stories from the late 16th-early 17th century presented here. Both stories question senses and perceptions of able-bodied people and illustrate the common European proverb “children and fools speak the truth.” The first example is taken from a collection of stories about the jester Ayleshpigel (Dyl Ulenspiegel or Till Eulenspiegel famous in German and ultimately world literature), from a multi-work Yiddish manuscript held in the Bavarian State Library and compiled by the scribe Benjamin b. Joseph Merks of Tannhausen around 1600. It presents a Yiddish translation that follows its German source text very closely. First recorded in the *Pfaffe Amis* (mid-13th century), a collection of satirical tales whose author is known as Der Stricker, this is the story of a painter who produces what he claims is an artwork that people born out of wedlock cannot see, was widely spread in European literature of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The second story is from the Old Yiddish *Mayse-bukh*, a collection of 255 stories first printed in Basel in 1602, with various identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish sources. For this story, however, there is no known source.