In
the Middle Ages, it was believed that there was a Jewish man still
alive who had been alive at the time of Jesus Christ; the belief
persisted as late as 1868, which is perhaps the last notice we have
of ‘the
Wandering
Jew’. The tale has
obviously anti-Semitic origins and the central character of the
enduring legend may be seen as a sort of medieval Ancient
Mariner or Flying
Dutchman.
Cartaphilus,
who was about thirty years old then, has remained the same age ever
since (despite Gustave
Doré's representation of him as an old man). Having insulted
Jesus Christ on the day of the crucifixion, he is condemned
to wander the earth until Judgement Day.
Cartaphilus
showed up numerous times, including Hamburg in 1542 (or 1547); Spain
in 1575; the Netherlands in the same year; Vienna
(1599); Lübeck (1601); Prague (1602); Lübeck (1603); Bavaria
(1604); France
(1604); Ypres
(1623); Brussels (1640); Leipsic (1642); Paris (1644); Stamford
(1658); Astrakhan (1672); Frankenstein (1676); Munich (1721);
Altbach (1766); and Brussels
in 1774 where he told his story to the bourgeois,
but said that he had changed his name to Isaac Laquedem. By the
1800s, sightings of the Wandering Jew were generally
attributed to impostors and the mentally ill.
He
appeared again at Newcastle,
England, in 1790. The last appearance mentioned appears to have been
in America in the year 1868, when he was reported to have visited a
Mormon named O'Grady. Other names that have been used for
Cartaphilus include Ahasuerus (or Ahasverus), Buttadaeus and Juan
Espera en Dios.
Biblical
origins
The ancient story went that Jesus, as he
was being dragged about in the court of Pontius
Pilate just before his
crucifixion, was struck on the back by one of Pilate's porters,
Cartaphilus. "Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker! Why do you loiter?" Cartaphilus mocked Christ. Jesus looked at him and said,
"I am going, and you will wait till I return".
Most versions of the tale recount that the
Wandering Jew soon repented of his sins and was actually baptised in
the Catholic Church, by Ananias (who also baptised the Apostle
Paul), and was renamed Joseph. He grows old like the rest of us
until reaching 100 years of age, at which point he sheds his skin
and rejuvenates to the age of thirty.
In
Matthew
16:28, Jesus promised a disciple (traditionally St John):
"There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till
they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom".
A later but more influential parallel to
the story comes from John
21:20 ff, from which a legend arose in the Church that St John would
not die before the second coming of Jesus; yet another legend
declares that the attendant Malchus, whose ear Saint
Peter cut off in the garden of Gethsemane (John 18:10), was
condemned to wander till the Second Coming of Christ.
The
myths somehow merged with several other old tales, for example the
Biblical story of Cain
who killed his brother Abel and was condemned by God to walk the
earth forever, and the
Qu’ran’s
legend of Samari
the Samaritan who was cursed by Moses to wander forever because
he helped make the idol of the golden
calf.
The
legend of the Wandering Jew seems to first appear in the Flores
Historiarum chronicle of Roger
of Wendover in the year 1228.
This tells of an Armenian
archbishop who was then visiting England, who was asked by the monks
of St
Albans about St Joseph
of Arimathea (feast day March
17), the uncle of Jesus
Christ (who legend says took Jesus to the
British Isles while Jesus was a youth, and whose tomb Jesus had been
laid in after the crucifixion)
and who was said to be still alive. The archbishop answered that he
had himself seen St Joseph in Armenia, where he was called
Cartaphilus. On passing Jesus carrying the cross he had said: "Go
on quicker". Jesus answered: "I go; but thou shalt wait till I
come". In 1252, other Armenians appeared at the Abbey of St Albans,
repeating the same story. (For more on Joseph of Arimathea,
see January
5, January
24, March
17, May
19, May
25 and June
20 in the Book of Days.)
A later version dated 1547 tells of a
sighting of the Wandering Jew, now named Ahasverus, who was
originally a shoe-maker. In this version, the Jew "had lived in
Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, whom he had
regarded as a deceiver of the people and a heretic … [On the road
to Calvary, Christ passed by Ahasverus' house and]
bowed under the weight of the heavy cross, He tried to rest a
little, and stood still a moment; but the shoe-maker, in zeal and
rage, and for the sake of obtaining credit among the other Jews,
drove the Lord Christ forward and told him to hasten on His way.
Jesus … looked at him and said, ‘I shall stand and rest, but
thou shalt go till the last day’." (Sabine
Baring-Gould, Myths
of the Middle Ages, pp 14 - 15).
In
1602 the legend of the Wandering Jew appeared in a small pamphlet
entitled Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzählung von einem Juden mit
Namen Ahasverus which professes to have been printed at Leyden
by Christoff Crutzer. The story is related on the authority
of a Lutheran clergyman, Paulus von Eitzen (d. 1598), who claimed to
have met the Jew in person.
The
French long had a popular ballad about ‘le Juif-errant’:
Est-il
rien sur la terre
Qui soit plus surprenat
Que le grande misere
Du pauvre Juif-errant?
Que son sort malheureux
Paraît triste et fâcheux!
The
tale was taken up by Eugène Sue in his novel, Le
Juif Errant
(1844), and the French
artist Gustave
Doré (1832
- 1883)
produced a celebrated series of woodcuts.
""For
a brief historical moment in France, it looked like the image
might change. Between June 1844 and July 1845, Eugène Sue
published "The Wandering Jew" in the French magazine,
Le Constitutionel, in 169 installments. The Wanderer in his
story is long-suffering and wise. He is a hero. In a country where
socialism had taken strong root due to the work of Saint-Simon,
the Fourierists, and P.J. Proudhon, the Wanderer began to resonate
with images of the poor and the doomed. Subscriptions to the
magazine shot up from 3,600 to 20,000. The Wandering Jew became a
socialist icon.
"This positive turn in the Wanderer's
status did not last long. In J.M. Charcot's famous hospital for
mental diseases in Paris, La Salpêtrière (where Freud studied in
1885), Charcot's student Henri Meige writes a book called Le
Juif errant à La Salpêtrière. Etude sur certains nevropathes
voyageurs (The Wandering Jew: A Study of some Neurotic
Roamers; Paris 1893). As the exhibition flyer has it,
"Jews were considered antisocial, people of pathological
instability, incapable of rooting themselves in the societies
which welcomed them." The anti-Dreyfusards produced image
after image of the Wanderer seen again as malevolent traveler, a
man with no affiliation and no loyalty, a danger to society. The
Nazis did the same.
"The most interesting twist in this story, of course, is that
Jews have made the image their own. Indeed it has become one of
our favorites." Source
