Aesop's Fables without drawing a moral. For many centuries the main transmission of Aesop's fables across Europe remained in Latin or else orally in various vernaculars, where they mixed with folk tales derived from other sources. This mixing is often apparent in early vernacular collections of fables in mediaeval times. The main impetus behind the translation of large collections of fables attributed to Aesop and translated into European languages came from an early printed publication in Germany. There had been many small selections in various languages during the Middle Ages but the first attempt at an exhaustive edition was made by Heinrich
Zerahiah the Greek Zerahiah the Greek Rabbi Zerachiah the Greek (in Hebrew, Zerachiah ha-Yavani or ha-Yewani; sometimes known by the acronymistic nickname "Ra'Za'H") was a Greek-Jewish ethicist who resided in the Byzantine Empire in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Of his life no details are known, except that he was the author of an ethical work entitled "Sefer ha-Yashar" (not to be confused with the many other Jewish writings of the same name); this work was confused with Jacob Tam's halakhic work of the same name and erroneously attributed to the renowned tosafist. This error was detected by Menahem Lonzano, who, in his