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The
origin of the folktale can be traced back to Rabbi Isaac Luria
of Safed, a 16th century mystic. In the original folktale, "The
Finger," the "corpse bride" in question is not
a deceased woman, but a demon. In the 19th century Russian-Jewish
adaptation, a woman is killed on her wedding day and is buried
in her wedding gown. Later, a man on his way to his own wedding
sees her ring finger poking out of the ground and thinks that
it's a stick. As a joke, he puts his bride's wedding ring on
the finger and dances around it, singing and reciting his marriage
sacrament. The woman's corpse emerges from the ground (with
the man's ring on her finger) and declares herself married to
the man.
The folktale adaptation was born of the anti-Jewish Russian
pogroms of the 19th century, in which young women were ripped
from their carriages and killed on the way to their weddings.
In the Jewish tradition, a body is buried in the clothes in
which it died, and so the brides were buried in their gowns.
The folktale usually ends with the rabbis deciding to annul
the corpse's marriage and the live bride swearing that she
will live her marriage in the corpse's memory, part of the
Jewish tradition of honoring the dead through the lives and
good works of the living.
A similar motif has also been used by Prosper Mérimée
in his story La Vénus d'Ille [1]. Instead of the corpse
bride, the ancient statue of Venus figures in the story.
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