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Is there a custom to place a cat, pieces of cake, or something else in the crib before one lays the child in it? Is biting off the protuberance at the end of an etrog considered a protection for a pregnant woman? If two zaddikim quarreled in this world, do they make peace in the next world?

These are questions from the Jewish Ethnographic Program, a vast questionnaire developed by ethnographer S. An-sky between 1912 and 1914 for dissemination throughout the Pale of Settlement, the part of Eastern Europe that was then home to 40 percent of the world\\u2019s Jews. An-sky, best known as the playwright of The Dybbuk, hoped the questionnaire would record waning folk beliefs and practices that he believed were at the core of Jewish life. But World War I interfered, and his ethnographic expedition was called off. An-sky died in 1920, and...

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