An instability and ambiguousness of identity – of hovering between Israel and the nations – similar to that which the authors of antiquity and late antiquity attached to Job, has also characterized the evolving figure of the Wandering Jew. This figure is probably the paramount emblematic idiom referring to Jews in European culture. His imaginary fate is rooted in a legend telling that he refused to allow Jesus (exhausted from carrying the cross) to rest against the wall of his house, leading Jesus to curse him to eternal wandering. The first edition, as far as known, of what has since become the most important written source for the European legend of the Wandering Jew was first printed in either northern Germany, not far from Luther’s Wittenberg, or Basel, in 1602.17In this chapbook, which purports to report a meeting with an actual historical figure in Hamburg in 1542, the Wandering Jew is characterized as a Jerusalemite cob-bler with the odd name Ahasver.18His pious behavior in and out of church – almsgiving, prayer, sorrowful penitence – bear the signs of impending fulfill-ment of the Christian messianic expectation of the Second Coming, embodied in the conversion of the Jews heralding it. Historical research into the theme of the Wandering Jew has shown that the figure was not an invention of Refor-mation advocates, although his supposed existence served their theological purposes. Some of its earlier sources, such as the Gospel narratives of the Ro-man soldier Malchus, who slapped Jesus while he was carrying the cross, and the beloved disciple John, who was sent to sleep in Ephesus until the return of his master, harbor a strongly polarized emotional ambivalence between physical violence and great devotion towards the figure of Jesus. This tense ambivalence of the early medieval material contributed to the characterization of the Wandering Jew figure as full of internal contradictions, rendering the figure a highly functional sign for the ambivalent relationship of Christian Eu-ropeans to Jews, and later of the European Jews towards themselves. The major Jewish figure who may have inspired parallel narratives among Jews is the prophet Elijah, whom post-biblical Jewish tradition transformed into an im-mortal, popular and itinerant helper.19Historical, as opposed to mythical,
Jew-17Neubaur, Leonhard,Die Sage vom Ewigen Juden, Hinrichs, Leipzig 1893; Anderson, George K.,The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Brown University Press, Providence 1965.
18Daube, David “Ahasver,” in:Jewish Quarterly Review45.3 (1955): 243–244; Hasan-Rokem, Galit “Ahasver – The Enigma of a Name,” in:Jewish Quarterly Review100.4 (2010): 544–550.
19Harel-Fisch, Harold, “Elijah and the Wandering Jew,” in:Rabbi Joseph Lookstein Memorial Volume, ed. L. Landman, Ktav Publishing, New York 1980, 125–135; Fisch, Harold,A Remem-bered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1984, 44–
45, 61–80. See also Agostino Augustimovic,‘El-khadr’ and the Prophet Elijah, trans. Eugen
ish travelers, especially those – such as Benjamin of Tudela and Petahya of Regensburg – who reported in writing about their travels to the Holy Land also contributed to the construction of the legendary figure.20Many of the charac-teristics of the imaginary cobbler Ahasver, such as his quickly learning the languages of new places, were informed by observing the actual process of Jews moving from place to place, usually, but not only, as a result of expulsions and harassments.
Some of the social and theological perceptions that European Christians held about Jews and that were projected onto the Wandering Jew stemmed directly from revered ancient authorities, perhaps the most influential being Augustine’s – and before him Ambrose’s and Jerome’s – identification of the Jews with the primordial, mythical cursed wanderer, Cain, an association that reinforced the linkage between eternal existence and endless exilic peregrina-tion.21 According to the medievalist Gerhard Ladner, the wanderer, or homo viator in his words, emphatically expresses the tension between the human being’s alienness in a world of constantly widening horizons and between the restrictions and structures of social order.22The period of the consolidation of the Ahasver legend was certainly a time of widening geographical scope, dur-ing which not only “discoverers” but also European merchants and soldiers began to navigate the globe, establishing the great colonial powers that would later define to a large extent European identity in the world.23The Jew as a traveler thus became a personification of a certain aspect of Europeanness.24
Hoade, Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1972; and Aharon Wiener,The Prophet Elijah in the Development of Judaism: a Depth-psychological Study,Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1978.
20 Hasan-Rokem, Galit, “Homo viator et narrans − Medieval Jewish Voices in the European Narrative of the Wandering Jew,” in:Europäische Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext, Festschrift für Leander Petzoldt, ed. Ingo Schneider, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, 93–102.
21 Jerome, On Psalms, Homily 35; Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XII; Ambrose De Cain et Abel 2.9.34–37; cf. Fredriksen, Paula.Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 2008: 320–324.
22 Ladner, Gerhart B., “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” in:Speculum 42.2 (1967): 233–259.
23 Greenblatt, Stephen,Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1992.
24 Hasan-Rokem, Galit, “Ex Oriente Fluxus:The Wandering Jew – Oriental Crossings of the Paths of Europe,” in:L’orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe: L’invention des origins, eds.
Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and John Scheid, EPHE & Brepols, Turnhout 2000, 153–164; Ha-san-Rokem, Galit, “L’Image du juif errant et la construction de l’identité européenne,” in:Le juif errant: un témoin du temps, eds. Laurence Sigal-Klagsblad and Richard I. Cohen, Adam Biro & Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme, Paris 2001, 45–54.
Joban Transformations of the Wandering Jew 153 The tale of the Wandering Jew spread rapidly in central and northern Europe.
Having been an emblem of Christian piety in a Jewish body, the Wandering Jew was from the Romantic period onwards hailed as the personification of the ideals of Enlightenment and secularization, individualism and rebellion and critique of the religious establishment (among other establishments).25At the same time, the psychological and philosophical depth of the figure developed through correlation with spiritual associations of themes of travel which had accrued over centuries. These associations, which included the homelessness of the soul in the material world and shamanic and angelical flights, produced the emphatically symbolical and universal character of the figure in the litera-ture of high modernity. In James Joyce’s masterpieceUlysses(first published in 1922, in Paris; serialized since 1918)26the Wandering Jew is ingeniously cou-pled with Odysseus, the representative of the other major European wandering tradition.27
During the nineteenth century the theme of the Wandering Jew crossed extensively from the popular chapbook genre and from oral tradition and into the more canonical cultural sphere. While it maintained its legendary features in oral traditions and in the persisting popular printed modes, its introduction into canonical literary genres, including the novel, short story and drama, was marked by an enveloping of the figure in the symbolical values accrued from its adoption by the Romantics (both in English and in German).28The articula-tions of the Wandering Jew figure in the cultural milieu of modernity evidence the extreme versatility that the theme had developed, one could say in direct correlation with the capacity of the allegorical reference – European Jews – to adapt to changing times, in addition to their well-known geographic mobility.
25Anderson,The Legend of the Wandering Jew; Hasan-Rokem, Galit “The Wandering Jew and the European Imagination: Self-Image and the Image of the Other in Lion Feuchtwanger’sJud Süss,” in:Icons and History for Richard I. Cohen, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Merkaz Shazar, Jerusa-lem (forthcoming; Hebrew).
26Joyce, James,Ulysses.The 1922 Text. Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008.
27Claudio Magris, a relatively early scholar of Roth’s life and oeuvre, significantly character-ized the author as “an Austrian Odysseus.” See Claudio Magris, “Der ostjüdische Odysseus,”
in:Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. David Bronsen, Agora Verlag, Darmstadt 1975, 181–226;
quoted in: Christoph Parry, “Joseph Roth in den Augen der Nachwelt: Migration, Mythos, Mel-ancholie,” in:Joseph Roth: Ein europäisch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und österreichischer Universa-list, 303–313, 307, n. 9. In contrast, the influential critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki remained half-hearted about Roth’s work, labeling him “ein Snob mit ahasverischen Zügen” (“a snob with ahasveric features”). See Marcel Reich-Ranicki,Nachprüfung: Aufsätze über Deutsche Schrift-steller von Gestern, Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, München 1977, 210.
28Larmore, Charles,The Romantic Legacy, Columbia University Press, New York 1996.
Indeed, whereas the Wandering Jew motif was in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries distributed mainly via Christian discourses and expressive genres, from the nineteenth century onward this figure was frequently adopted by Jewish authors and visual artists.29
The figure of the Wandering Jew appears in various degrees of explicitness in Joseph Roth’s work, including inJuden auf Wanderschaf,his essayistic treat-ment of Jewish mobility, and in several of his novels – especially Die Flucht ohne Ende30 – about the rootless existence experienced by many Europeans after the First World War (in which the author had participated as an Austro-Hungarian soldier).