“The Story of the Vizier and His Son” from The Hundred and One Nights: Parallels in Midrashic Literature and Backgrounds in Early Arabic Sources

One of the many topics that attracted the attention of scholars of The Thousand and One Nights (and scholars of medieval Arabic literature in general) was its correspondence with early Jewish elements in its varied literary materials. Similarly, a reading of its sibling, the smaller medieval collection of The Hundred and One Nights, reveals that its stories hide a number of plot constituents with analogues in early Jewish literature, the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, and so on, as well as parallels in medieval sources in Arabic related in some way to Jewish heritage. The article is an initial inquiry into this matter, focusing on one of the collection’s core corpus stories, “The Story of the Vizier and His Son.”