Wandering Jew. The legend of a Jew who cannot die but must wander till the day of judgment, for an insult offered to Christ on the way to the Crucifixion, is not ancient nor wide-spread. There is no trace of it in the early middle ages either in the East or West, and the popularity of the story is mainly confined to some countries of north-western Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and France. The first Wandering Jew, as Schoebel points out, was Cain, whose curse offers a striking analogy. Among the Arabs Samiri, the maker of the Golden Calf, is a similar homeless wanderer. Still there is no direct link between these and the modern story. The early imagination, not content with the Gospel narrative, amplified both the antecedent and the subsequent incidents, and invented many new episodes, which clustered round the names of Judas, Pilate, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus himself. An Italian legend, which M. Paris thinks of great antiquity, tells how a Jew named Malchus gave Jesus a blow with an iron glove, and how ever since he has lived underground, endlessly turning round and round a pillar till the day of judgment. This story, which has given rise to proverbs, and appears in Sicilian folk-song, may be essentially the same legend which first took historical form in the version of Matthew Paris. He tells us in his Historia Major (completed 1259) that an Armenian bishop visited England in 1228, and among other wonders of his country told of one Cartaphilus who had been present at the Passion being then alive and well known to himself. He was a door-keeper in the palace of Pilate, and as Jesus was being led past to His crucifixion he struck Him with the words 'Go, Jesus: go on faster.' To which Jesus answered, 'I go, but thou shalt wait till I return.' Cartaphilus was baptised by Ananias with the name of Joseph, and settled in Armenia, where he had often sat at the archbishop's table. Thirty years old when he insulted Christ, whenever he reaches a hundred he falls into a faint, and on recovery finds himself at the age he was when his doom was pronounced. Some years later we are told that the archbishop's brother visited England, and some of his attendant monks confirmed the story. We next find it repeated in the Chronique by Philippe Mouskets, written at Tournai about 1243. Schoebel suggests that the name Cartaphilus (Gr., 'very dear') must have had its origin in the disciple 'whom Jesus loved,' of whom it will be remembered Jesus said to Peter, 'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?' (John, xxi. 22). An analogous saying of Jesus, which seems to have strongly impressed the early imagination, is that recorded in Matthew, xvi. 28. When facts had belied the natural meaning of this saying, the popular belief sought to justify it notwithstanding, by assuming that certain witnesses of the Passion of Christ had been miraculously saved from death, whether as a reward or as a punishment. The one suspicious fact against the good archbishop on whom this story is fathered is that there is no trace of it in the East, even in the vast compilation of Jean d'Outremeuse.
Three hundred years later we find the next development of the legend in the story that the Wandering Jew was seen at Hamburg in 1547 by Paul von Eitzen, Bishop of Sleswick, listening to the sermon, tall, ragged, gaunt, bare-footed, his long hair falling over his shoulders. He had been a shoemaker at the death of Jesus, his name was Ahasnerus. He spoke the languages of all countries, was never seen to laugh, and relinced blasphemies against the name of Christ with awe-struck severity. This story was widely current about the beginning of the 17th century, and a form of it is extant, with full details, vouched for by a letter signed Chrysostomus Dudulæns Westphalus, and dated Refel [Reval], 1st August 1613. From this time forward we meet with many precise versions and variations. One of the most celebrated appearances was that to two grave citizens together at Brussels in 1640. Here the name given to him is Isaac Laquedom, which Böttcher thought likely to be a corruption by some half-learned man from the Hebrew (la-kûdem = the former world). The German Volksbuch versions had been early translated into French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish; in English at least they inspired a ballad in Percy's Reliques. There is a beautiful French complainte on the subject, apparently of Belgian origin, which gives him again the name of Laquedom. Yet another name given him is Buttadens—the Bedens of the Transylvanian Saxons, the Italian Buttadio, the Bondedeo of the beautiful Breton gwercz translated by M. Luzel.
Further appearances are recorded at Beauvais, Leipzig, Lübeck, Moscow, Madrid, and even Hull—a tract of 1769 ‘authenticated by four ministers of Hull in Yorkshire,’ tells how ‘some time since’ he visited Hull and was locked up, but the prison doors flew open to him whom the Almighty had denied a resting-place. The Turkish Spy, writing from Paris in 1644, gives an account of a conversation with him as Michob Ader in several languages, five or six hours together in Arabic. The ‘Younger Brother of Time’ said there was scarce a true history to be found, and unhappily he could give no satisfactory account of the whereabouts of the lost Ten Tribes.
It is of the essence of popular tradition to confound analogies, and so we find the Wandering Jew confounded with figures of mythology, converted Prometheus-like into an emblem of humanity, a personification of the Jewish race itself. Stories of deathless saints and heroes are to be found in the early history of every people—Enoch, Elijah, Arthur, Charlemagne, Barbarossa. And in such conceptions as Cain fleeing from the face of man with the brand of murder on his brow, the Wild Huntsman on land, and the Flying Dutchman on sea we may see how readily the imagination lends itself to the fundamental horror in the fate of the Wandering Jew.
The theme touched the imagination of Goethe, but he abandoned it for Faust. The greatest man who has treated it artistically is Edgar Quinet (Ahasuerus, 1833). Others are A. W. Schlegel, Chamisso, Lenau, H. C. Andersen, Klingemann, and Ed. Grenier. The introduction of the Wandering Jew in Sue’s romance is the crowning absurdity of that absurd book—his death is an outrage to dramatic consistency which makes his whole history ridiculous. George Croly’s novel, Salathiel, is named only because it is English. See Dr Grasse, Die Sage vom Ewigen Juden (1844), F. Helbig, Die Sage vom ‘Ewigen Juden,’ ihre poetische Wandlung und Fortbildung (1874); C. Schoebel, Le L’égende du Juif-Errant (1877); Professor D’Ancona in Nuova Antologia (Oct. 1880); but especially the admirable brochure by Gaston Paris, Le Juif-Errant (1880). The fullest English account (made fuller by plentiful irrelevances) is in Moncure D. Conway’s Wandering Jew (1881). There is a slight paper in Baring-Gould’s Popular Myths. See also Champfleury, Histoire de l’Imagerie Populaire (1869).