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the Egyptians. Like Pharoah, the Duke has a vision, which his “Saracen” clerks cannot interpret, and Joseph is called upon to give his interpretation, which the Duke acknowledges as the true one. Then, like Nebuchadnezzar when his dream was read by Daniel, he professes himself ready to worship Joseph’s God instead of his own and is promptly converted to Christianity.
    Another Hebrew symbol appears in the Fisher King, that key figure in all the Joseph-Grain stories, who becomes guardian of the Grail after Joseph dies and survives until Galahad appears. In some versions the Fisher King first appears as King Evalak, a Syrian champion who accompanies Joseph during his wanderings in the East and becomes his first convert. The title Fisher King derives from his having been directed by God to catch a fish, which provides himself and Joseph with sustenance in the wilderness. Like the Leviathan of Jewish tradition that is to provide food for the righteous at the Messiah’s coming, and like Leviathan in the Psalms, which God gave “to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness,” this fish could be partaken of only by the righteous. The Grail itself as a life-giving talisman whose finding restores a waste land to fruitfulness can be found in any number of religious cults. Sometimes it is a dish or cup. Sometimes, as in the
Parzival
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, it is a sacred stone, existing since the Creation. As a stone it has been connected by scholars with Isaiah’s “precious corner stone of pure foundation,” the stone at the center of the world, the stone that was Jacob’s pillow, the cornerstone of the Temple of Solomon. Celtic legend adopts this motif too, for the Stone of Scone, which figures in the crowning of British kings, was believed to have been originally Jacob’s pillow brought to Ireland by some forgotten migration of the tribe of Jacob, and thence to Scotland, from where the English conquerors stole it. This is the same stone that made a dramatic reappearance in 1951 when Scottish nationalists hauled it home by automobile.
    To construct a theory of Celtic-Jewish connections on the treacherous swamps of the Joseph-Grail legend would be foolhardy indeed. No sooner does the venturesome inquirer put one toe into this quicksand than he is sucked into a morass of romance and folklore, comparative religions, troubadours and minnesingers, pagan and Christian mysteries, oriental and Celtic mythologies where rivalscholars struggle hopelessly in a mire of myths and texts. The very subject produces an atmosphere that once to breathe is fatal to clarity, as the deliberate obscurities of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, the
reductio ad absurdum
of the Grail legend, are proof enough.
    But Joseph as apostle to the Britons remained firmly fixed in English tradition for centuries after the Middle Ages. John Leland the sixteenth-century antiquary, assumed the truth of Joseph’s apostleship in Britain. So did Sir William Dugdale, whose
Monasticon Anglicanum
, a further inquiry into England’s past through the study of old monastery records, appeared about a century later in 1655. At this time the episcopal controversy that rocked England during the tyrannical regime of Archbishop Laud inspired a theologian’s plunge into the dim past to clarify the circumstances of English church origins. One of these studies, the
Ecclesiastical Historie of Great Britaine
, by Richard Broughton, has a chapter entitled: “Wherein is proved by all kinds of testimonies and authorities, that for certaine, St. Joseph of Aramathia and divers other holy Associates came to, preached, lyved, dyed and was buryed in Britayne, at the place now called Glastonbury in Summersetshire.”
    If Broughton was credulous, his contemporary, worthy Tom Fuller, the divine who held his own between Royalists and Puritans and wrote some of the most readable prose of the seventeenth century, was a natural skeptic. Yet in his
Church History of Britain
(1635) he