When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world--one fool per town. But the angel's bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm.

The collected tales of these fools, or "wise men," of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old...