The Jew's Garden- Lewis (MO-VA) 1906 Belden C
[From Ballads and Songs from the Missouri Folklore Society; Belden 1940. His extensive notes follow.
R Matteson 2015]
Sir Hugh, or, The Jew's Daughter (Child 155)
It is somewhat surprising, in view of the vogue of the two themes combined in this ballad in medieval story, that Child finds it in traditional balladry only in English. It is also remarkable that it has retained its popularity in America down to the present, as appears from the record of it listed below. The two themes are the miracle of our Lady and the ritual murder of a Christian child by Jews. For the former see especially Professor Carleton Brown's paper in the Chaucer Society publications Series 2 No. 4b (1910).[1] The latter is dealt with at some length in Child's headnote, and exhaustively by H. L. Strack, professor of theology at Berlin.[2] Belief in ritual murder is by no means extinct, as is shown by the excitement over an alleged case at Kief in 1913; nor is it held only in Slavic Europe. A charge of ritual murder was brought against the Jews of Massena, New York, as late as 1928. What has kept the ballad alive in America is probably not, however, racial or religious animosity but the simple pathos of the little schoolboy's death. The miracle of Mary, which is the theme of Chaucer's treatment of the story in the Prioress's tale and which is still viable in some of the older versions of the ballad, Child A for instance, has almost entirely vanished from American versions; Our Lady's drawwell has become simply a well or has disappeared completely, and the mother if she appears at all is merely a sorrowing (or sometimes a threatening) mother. Nor do any of the recent texts of the ballad show any clear idea that the murder has anything to do with religion. The enticer of the little boy is however regularly a Jew's daughter (in the medieval miracle stories the boy is kidnapped or enticed, but never by a woman), and there is frequently a sort of formality about the killing--she lays him on a board and stabs him like a sheep: she carefully saves his blood in a basin; she withdraws to an inner room to do the deed, 'where no one can hear him call'-- which may well be a dim memory of the original motivation. Practically all the texts listed below, if they are not fragments, start with the boys playing ball and throwing their ball into the Jew's garden, and most of them note that it was rainy weather. For conclusion many of them draw upon the formula found in most texts of The Two Brothers. An incongruous detail found in some of the Virginia texts-- that when he is brought inside the Jew's house he finds there his nurse (or mother, or sister) picking a chicken-- is not an American invention, being found also in Child H K S and in one of the versions recorded by Sharp in Somerset.
The ballad has been recorded since Child's time in Hampshire (JFSS I 264), Somerset (JFSS Y 253-5), the Bahamas (JAFL XLI 470), and Nova Scotia (SBNS 16-7); and in the United States in Vermont (BFSSNE V 6-7), Connecticut (JAFL XXIX 166), New York (JAFL XLIV 296-7 ), Pennsylvania (JAFL XXXIX 212-3, XLIV 65-7, FSSH 103-4, SCSM 174-5), Virginia (TBY 400-15, TNFS 53-4, SharpK I 227-8, JAFI: XLVII 358-61, Grapurchat for 25 August, 1932), West Virginia (FSS 720-7 ), Kentucky (SharpK I 225-7, 228-9), Tennessee (SharpK T 222-5), North Carolina (SharpK I, 222, BMFSB 22-3, SCSM 123-4), South Carolina (SCB 148-50), Georgia (JAFL XLIV 64-5, FSSH 104-5), Alabama (ABS 15) , Mississippi FSM 116-7), Ohio (JAFL XXXV 344-5), Indiana (JAFL XXIX 164, XLVIII 297-8), and Missouri B. Mrs. Jones (KNIR 301) mentions it as known in Michigan but does not give a text.
1. Woodburn Ross MLN L 307-10
2. Jews and Human Sacrifice, London 1909
C. 'The Jew's Garden.' Secured by Miss Charlotte F. Corder in 1906 from Mrs. Mollie Lewis of Lafayette County, who learned it from her mother, a native of Virginia.
It rained all day, it rained all day,
It rained all over the town,
Till all the boys within our town
Went out to toss their ball, their ball,
Went out to toss their ball.
(Repeat thus the last line of each stanza)
At first they tossed their ball too high
And then again too low,
Till over into the Jew's garden it went
'Where no one dared to go.
Out came the Jew's daughter all dressed, all dressed,
All dressed in riches gay:
'Come in, come in, my little man,
You shall have your ball again.'
'I won't come in, I shan't come in,
Unless my playmates do;
F or I've often heard those who go in
Never come out again.'
She gave to him a cherry red.,
And then a gay gold ring;
She gave to him a gay gold ring
To entice this little boy in.
She took him by his lily-white hand
And through a dark passage went,
Down into a cellar so dark and deep
Where no one could hear him lament.
'Pray lay my Bible at my head,
My prayerbook at my feet;
If any of my playmates call for me,
Pray tell them I'm asleep.
'Pray lay my Bible at my feet,
My prayerbook at my head;
If any of my playmates call for me,
Pray tell them I am dead.