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Jewish-Christian Contact in Fiction of the Shtetl In much of history there has always been the presence of a battle between Christianity and Judaism. Because of this battle and the potential threat of conforming to Christian beliefs, there were people that began to take sides and form opinions based on this matter. Thus there was an arising of fictional stories founded on Jewish-Christian contact. In “Zaidlus the Pope”, and “On Account of a Hat,” Singer and Aleichem take sides and formulate their opinions into these fictional stories. In Zaidlus the Pope, we meet a man named Zeidel Cohen who is led astray by the devil and tricked into becoming a pope. Zeidel was quite an impressing man with an impeccable genealogy that stretched back to King David. “He was also the greatest scholar in the whole province of Lublin. At the age of five he had studied the Gemara and the Commentaries; at seven he memorized the Laws of Marriage and Divorce; at nine, He had preached a sermon, quoting from so many books that even the oldest among the scholars were confounded.” He was a very learned Jew who loved to read volumes of books, “sucking into his lungs the dust from ancient pages.” But in all of Zeidel’s knowledge and