Bostanai - Legends

Legends

The name "Bostanai" gave rise to the following legend: The last Persian king (Hormuzd), inimical to the Jews, decided to extinguish the royal house of David, no one being left of that house but a young woman whose husband had been killed shortly after his marriage, and who was about to give birth to a child. Then the king dreamed that he was in a beautiful garden ("bostan"), where he uprooted the trees and broke the branches, and, as he was lifting up his ax against a little root, an old man snatched the ax away from him and gave him a blow that almost killed him, saying: "Are you not satisfied with having destroyed the beautiful trees of my garden, that you now try to destroy also the last root? Truly, you deserve that your memory perish from the earth." The king thereupon promised to guard the last plant of the garden carefully. No one but an old Jewish sage was able to interpret the dream, and he said: "The garden represents the Davidic line, all of whose descendants you have destroyed except a woman with her unborn boy. The old man whom you saw was David, to whom you promised that you would take care that his house should be renewed by this boy." The Jewish sage, who was the father of the young woman, brought her to the king, and she was assigned to rooms fitted up with princely splendor, where she gave birth to a boy, who received the name "Bostanai," from the garden ("bostan") which the king had seen in his dream.

The veracity of this account was disputed by Rabbi Sherira Gaon who claimed his own lineage traces to a pre-Bostanaian branch of the Davidic line.