Instrument of Memory

Front matter

Instrument of Memory

Encounters with the Wandering Jew

Lisa Lampert-Welssig

Introduction

Part I: The Wandering Jew and Christendom 1 The Wandering Jew as Relic in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora

2 The 1602 Kurtze Beschreibung: A Lutheran Recalibration

Part Il: The Wandering Jew in the Age of Emancipation 3 Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant

Part Ill: The Wandering Jew and Jerusalem in an Age of Global War

5 Marc Chagall’s Remembrance and White Crucifixion 6 Uri Zvi Greenberg’s King Ahasver

27 45 gi

121 131 150 viii + Contents

Part IV: Contemporary Encounters with the Wandering Jew 9 Stefan Heym’s Ahasver

10 The Wandering Jew in the Twenty-First Century: Eshkol Nevo, Dara Horn, and Sarah Perry

Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11631482

Dn Rw bd

Illustrations cOn

Image of the Wandering Jew, created by Matthew Paris in the Chronica majora (thirteenth century)

Marc Chagall, Erinnerung (Remembrance) (circa 1915) Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion (1938)

Gustave Doré, La légende du Juif errant (woodcut, 1856) Uri Zvi Greenberg, “Uri Zvi farn tseylem INRP” (1922) Lewis David, illustration for Sholem Asch,

“Christ in the Ghetto” (1943)

Lewis David, illustration for Sholem Asch,

“Christ in the Ghetto” (1943)

123 125 128

Acknowledgments cOn

I have been on the trail of the Wandering Jew for over two decades and owe a great deal to those who have helped me along the way. I first became interested in the Wandering Jew legend during my Alexander von Humboldt- Stiftung Bundeskanzler postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin. There my fellowship advisor, Edith Wenzel, introduced me to Stefan Heym’s novel Ahasver. Reading this reimagining of the legend in a city haunted by memory planted the first seeds of this project. I wouldn't have been in Berlin at all if not for the mentorship of Elaine Tennant.

My thinking about the Wandering Jew, time, and memory continued when I took up a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I also many years later returned to workshop this project’s first chapter. For their insights, I am grateful to Matti Bunzl, Charlie Wright, Renée Trilling, Rob Barrett, Brett Kaplan, Billy Vaughn, and especially Dara E. Goldman, who is so sorely missed by us all.

Stephanie Jed, Todd Kontje, Seth Lerer, Sal Nicolazzo, Ulrike Strasser, Dan Vitkus, and Nina Zhiri, my colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have also generously provided feedback on the work. My UC San Diego Jewish studies colleagues Mira Balberg and Amelia Glaser went above and beyond in sharing their expertise and insights, creating conversations that were not only very helpful, but stimulating and fun. Literature department chair Kazim Ali as well as the dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Cristina Della Coletta, have been extremely supportive. The late Yingjin Zhang was also a tireless supporter and valued mentor. I wish I could have shared this book with him. Literature department staff, especially Nancy Ho-Wu, Danica Chan, Samantha Barlow, Derrick Chin, and Alyssa Simons have provided invaluable assistance that has made my work posxii + Acknowledgments sible, as have Jewish Studies program staff Katherine Levy, Jen Schwarzkopf, and Madisen Martinez. This project likewise could not have been completed without the outstanding support of the librarians at UC San Diego, especially Peter Devine and colleagues in the interlibrary loan department. My research assistants Meaghan Baril, Ann Batson, Sören Frohlich, Kevin Jay, Gregory Loui, Sam Lyons, and especially Hannah Doermann all provided essential support and insights.

I have also been fortunate to have the support of two writing groups. For getting this project started, I owe so much to the advice of Kathy Lavezzo, Hannah Johnson, and Heather Blurton. The inspiring insights of Emily Steiner, Elizabeth Allen, Emma Lipton, and Myra Seaman helped me see the project through. In the home stretch, I benefited immensely from valuable input from my coeditors at New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, Candace Barrington, Katie Little, and Eva von Contzen. Dean Bell, Sally Charnow, Debra Strickland, Michael Weingrad, Melissa Weininger, and Kristin Rebien all generously read and commented on chapter drafts. I owe special thanks to Galit Hasan-Rokem, who wandered to San Diego to share her deep knowledge about the Wandering Jew legend. Her work continues to inspire me.

Many other colleagues have supported this work, through inviting me to share my work, by sharing their own expertise, editing, and translation skills, or by supporting this project in other ways. Some I have had the pleasure of getting to know in person through conferences and visits, and others generously responded to my email queries even though we had never met. I wish to thank Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Anthony Bale, Tim DeBold, Jeremy Cohen, Irina Dumitrescu, John Ganim, Daniel Kennedy, Steven Kruger, Giacomo Loi, Tara Mendola, Richard I. Cohen, Philipp Nothaft, Sharon Rivo, Maurice Samuels, David Shyovitz, Bob Stacey, Neta Stahl, Ken Stow, and Lei Yu. I am so grateful for all of this assistance. All errors are, of course, my own.

Early work on this book was supported by a University of California Presidential Fellowship. The project’s most important financial support has come through the generosity of Jerome and Miriam Katzin, who endowed the UC San Diego Katzin Chair in Jewish Civilization, which I currently hold. While I never had the opportunity to meet Miriam Katzin, I did have the great pleasure of conversing at length with Jerry Katzin on several occasions. When I tried to imagine the ideal reader for this book, I often thought of him. At the University of Michigan Press, Ellen Bauerle has served as a wise and knowledgeable editor. I’m grateful to her for sticking with this

Acknowledgments + xiii project even as it changed during the pandemic into something quite different than what I had originally described. Kevin Rennells and Jessica Hinds- Bond also provided extremely valuable expertise and guidance.

My friends Camille Forbes, Heather Fowler, Zsuzsanna Lipták and the Lagrange family, Sue, Fred, Celeste, and Simon have provided essential moral and intellectual support. Alex Cerna and the good folks at G3 Physical Therapy have kept me going strong in the final stretch. To my sister, Lynn Lampert, I owe thanks and a confession: yes, I did steal your copy of George Anderson's The Legend of the Wandering Jew. Helge Weissig has been there to solve dilemmas that have ranged from parsing an odd verb in a Heine poem to disassembling a laptop that was about to explode. He and “the kids”’—Eva, Julian, Bryn, and Sasha—schlepped innumerable books and always provided generous helpings of encouragement. My aunt Sylvia Tapper has likewise been a tireless supporter and a great listener. My mother, Frances Lampert, has also always been there to listen and to cheer me on. This book is for her.

Introduction SOO

I saw by looking in his eyes

‘That they remembered everything; And this was how I came to know ‘That he was here, still wandering.

For though the figure and the scene Were never to be reconciled,

I knew the man as I had known His image when I was a child.

What would it be like to meet an immortal being? In this opening stanza to Edwin Arlington Robinsons 1920 poem “The Wandering Jew,” the speaker depicts an encounter with the legendary figure, said to be cursed by Jesus with a supernaturally long life (Robinson 1928, 456; see also Stanford 1978). According to legend, as Jesus bore the cross along the Via Dolorosa, he paused before a man’s home and asked to rest. The man refused, heartlessly urging him to hurry to his death. Jesus turned to him and said, “I will go, but you will tarry until I return.” Since that moment, the Wandering Jew has been unable to die; he must await Jesus's return at the Second Coming. Converted to Christianity by his experience, the Wandering Jew shares his story with all he meets. This legend has been circulating since at least the sixth century, and during this time the cursed man has been known by many names, including Cartaphilus, Buttadeus, Ahasver, Isaac Laquedem.' Two of the figure’s names reference the temporal and spatial nature of his curse. His wandering homelessness is emphasized in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and other tongues (/e Juif errant, l'ebreo errante, el judío errante). In German, he is der ewige Jude (the Eternal Jew), a name that underscores his paradoxical curse of immortality (see Băleanú 1991, 27). These two ways of naming the figure— the Wandering Jew and the Eternal Jew—reveal how extremes of time and space shape the legend. The time of the Wandering Jew reaches back to the Passion and stretches forward toward the end of days. On his many journeys, the Wandering Jew has roamed from the Bering Strait to the Indian Ocean, from Armenia to Finland (Hasan-Rokem 1986a). He is always, though, tied in some way to the place where his story began, the Jerusalem of memory. And it is the Wandering Jew’s memories, especially his memory of his misdeed, that transform his immortality into a curse, as Robinson shows through his image of remembering eyes.

The Wandering Jew is also himself transformed: he becomes a living witness. He is, indeed, the only living witness to the Passion. The Wandering Jew’s sharing of his personal memories with those he encounters brings that past alive for them. In many of the greatest imaginings of the legend, as in Robinson’s poem, an encounter with the Wandering Jew is the spark that lights a creative flame. As Robinson conveys, it is the encounter with the Wandering Jew, that moment that cannot be “reconciled,” that contains imaginative power. The power of the encounter is not only something represented as happening to the imagined figures in the works we examine. It extends to the encounters between the legend and the artists themselves, as they also often represent their own engagement with this legend about memory.

In this book, we will seek out significant artistic encounters with the Wandering Jew as well as another related kind of encounter, the centuries of encounters between Christians and Jews.” The Wandering Jew’s original treatment of Jesus mirrors negative Jewish-Christian confrontation, and this tension endures throughout the centuries of the Wandering Jew tradition. But there is another way that Jewish-Christian relations shape the Wandering Jew legend. Existing alongside, and interacting with, the well-known Christian version of the legend are Jewish narratives concerning an apocalyptic messiah who also wanders. In pathbreaking scholarship, Galit Hasan- Rokem (2016, 159) has established the Wandering Jew legend as an important Jewish-Christian “coproduction” (see also Hasan-Rokem 1999 and Hasan- Rokem 2015). Hasan-Rokem’s work expands and enriches the focus on the tradition’s Christian elements that has predominated scholarship since the early nineteenth century and that also guides the most well-known study of the legend, George K. Anderson’s encyclopedic The Legend of the Wandering Jew (1965).? Recognizing and acknowledging the “two-headed” nature of the Wandering Jew tradition reveals not only its complexity as transmitted over time, but also the rich intersections and interchanges between Jewish and Christian traditions, especially traditions around memory (Pedaya 2013; see also Massenzio 2010).*

Wanderer figures from the Jewish tradition include, of course, Cain, whose cursed state influences treatments of the Wandering Jew legend from Matthew Paris’s thirteenth-century Chronica majora through Matthew Lewis’s 1796 gothic novel The Monk, to the modernist poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) (see Mellinkoff 1981).° Jewish tradition also figures Elijah the prophet as a wanderer. Harold Fisch (1980, 132) has noted connections between Elijah and the Wandering Jew but argues that while the Wandering Jew “is viewed as the bearer of ancestral records and memories,” his wandering has no goal. Elijah, in contrast, wanders with messianic purpose.° Most interesting for us is the story of a wanderer searching for Messias Menachem, who was born on the day of the Second Temple’s destruction (Hasan-Rokem 1986b, 193). This last narrative shares with the Christian Wandering Jew tradition an anchoring in the memory of a profound event. Memory of the Passion and memory of the Second Temple’s destruction, or Hurban, endow the legend with emotional power (see, respectively, Kupfer 2008; Mintz 1996). Jan Assmann (1988, 12) speaks of such foundational moments as temporal “fixed points,” and we will see that Jewish and Christian variations of the legend resemble each other in that both are rooted in such fixed points.’ The varying contours of the legend of the wanderer reflect what Eviatar Zerubavel (2003, 7) calls the “social shape of the past,” the way that the memories of foundational events both shape and are shaped by the communities that remember them. Robinson's verse captures this important element of the legend as well. The speaker’s encounter with the Wandering Jew reveals the legend’s alchemy of personal and collective memory. Throughout the legend’s long existence artists have deployed this alchemy as a means to represent the interface between an individual life and the greater flow of time that all humans experience.

The Wandering Jew through the Lens of Memory

If we understand the Wandering Jew legend as concerned not only with prodigious life span and displacement, but also with a singularly extraordinary individual memory, its potential value to memory studies becomes clearer. ‘The notion that interactions between an individual and a group shape that individual’s memory derives from the work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ([1925] 1994), who introduced his concept of “collective memory” nearly a century ago. Halbwachs contends that individual memories, which we typically think of as organic and unique, are, in fact, shaped by social frameworks of memory (/es cadres sociaux de la mémoire), such as family, religious community, or political affiliation. These frameworks do more than connect groups of people in the present. The present “needs and interests” of the community create an orientation toward the past (Erll 2or1a, 17). Perceptions of the past—memories—are constructed within and through these social frameworks. Individual and “collective” memory are therefore interdependent. Collective memory can exist over several generations, as in the case of family memory, stretching back to the memory of the oldest member in the group.

What of remembrances of events that are older than any living member of a group? How are these remembered collectively? Halbwachs explored this question by visiting the Wandering Jew’s place of origin. In his Legendary Topography of the Holy Land, Halbwachs (1971) focused on the role of place in the development of collective memory over the /ongue durée, considering some of the same Christian memory practices and beliefs that also, we will see, influenced the development of the Wandering Jew legend. Building on Halbwachs’s work, Aleida Assmann (1995; 2011) and Jan Assmann (1988) developed the concept of “cultural memory” (kulturelles Gedächtnis), which includes “the realm of tradition, transmissions, and transferences” they see left out of the concept of “collective memory” as put forth by Halbwachs (Assmann, 2008, 110). The Assmanns distinguish between two distinct forms of memory: “communicative memory” and “cultural memory.” Communicative memory is memory shared among individuals within a limited time frame, roughly between two generations. Cultural memory is a cultivated form of memory within a group that reaches back into an ancient or mythic past. The development of cultural memory is, in the Assmanns’ conceptualization, essential to group identity and cohesiveness.

The Wandering Jew legend engages both of these distinct memory forms (communicative and cultural memory) as it is typically through personal interaction with the Wandering Jew that individuals learn about a central event of the distant past. The Wandering Jew’s curse—that is, his immortality and his compulsion to tell his story, which is also a narrative of the Passion—represents a bridging of these two different memory forms through the encounter between the Wandering Jew and mortals. The artistic depictions of the encounter with the Wandering Jew that this project analyzes explore that intersection between memories shared between individuals and memories shared among larger groups. They also examine what a Christian legend focused on the memories of a fictional converted Jew can mean for actual diasporic Jews, whose complicated and often fraught status as a minority group can necessitate a complex negotiation of memory and identity.

The concepts of collective and cultural memory are, of course, not meant to evoke some kind of organic hive mind. They are conceptualizations of memory as a process, an interaction between and among individuals, and between individuals and their environments, drawing on sensory, locational, and other cues. These cues emerge during encounters, and the artists whose works we will examine in this book use the Wandering Jew legend to explore such encounters and to represent how the interface between individual and collective memory is negotiated through them. Such encounters can be, as in Robinsons poem, between the Wandering Jew and a mortal, or, as we will see, they can be set in relation to a specific place, such as in Heinrich Heine’s and Edmond Fleg’s depictions of the Wandering Jew in Jerusalem. ‘The artists examined use the Wandering Jew legend as a means to represent how memories are made and to reveal the friction of that interface between an individual and the social structures that support individual memory. The Wandering Jew legend, because of its preoccupation with memory, provides fertile ground for these artistic explorations. And through these explorations, we will see, these creators not only craft artworks but also present their own interventions into the production of cultural memory.

In order to better understand the role of place and its relation to the legend’s engagement with memory, we will also consider the Wandering Jew as what Pierre Nora (1996), building on Halbwachs’s work, calls a Zeu de mémoire or site of memory.’ Lieux de mémoire are loci, often but not always associated with a physical location, that become invested with meaning through their connection to the past. They can be constructed or built, perhaps to serve an intentional memorial function, as in the case of monuments, or they might also be sites of worship. Artworks or other texts, buildings, holidays, historical personages, or figures like King Arthur, Joan of Arc, or the Wandering Jew can also be sites of memory. Our examination of artists’ engagements with the Wandering Jew as sites of memory has the potential, I believe, not only to produce new understandings of the legend, but also to deepen our understanding of the development of such memory sites over time.

Nora (1989, 23) asserts that “there are Jeux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.” As we examine the medieval and early modern treatments of the legend, however, we will see that this formulation of an organic premodern past obscures the fact that /iewx de mémoire were constructed, sometimes very consciously, well before the nineteenth century.’ Furthermore, the concepts of cultural memory and /ieu de mémoire have been deployed in ways that can lead to static, nationally focused uses, what Astrid Erll (2o11b, 7) calls formulations of “container cultures.” In response to this overly fixed conceptualization, Erll argues that cultural memory is actually always in motion; it “travels,” crossing through and over borders and media, a characteristic of many legends, but, again, one that is specifically incorporated into key details of the Wandering Jew legend. The Wandering Jew legend, due to its “two-headed” nature and the fact that the legend itself is about Jewish-Christian relations, is also a prime example of Jewish-Christian entanglement, including entangled forms of memory. This entanglement will become readily apparent as we examine works by Jewish writers and artists in the modern period, but we will also see that the strands of entanglement stretch back further than one might expect (Feidnt et al. 2014; see also Baumgarten et al. 2017; Kim 2014).

Michael Rothberg (2009, 5) notes astutely that “memory’s anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones.” The encounters with the Wandering Jew legend discussed in this book provide compelling examples of artistic creativity that are not limited by periodization boundaries. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), for example, ranges freely in the zodiac of cultural memory. In Heine’s 1851 “Jehuda ben Halevy,” Alexander the Great and Cleopatra appear alongside renowned medieval Sephardic poets and hundreds of generations of the Jewish faithful. Heine’s poem sings of all their memories, intertwined with the memories and longings of the Wandering Jew and with the poet’s own. The power of Heine’s representation derives from the anachronism that Rothberg describes.

From the many hundreds of adaptations of the Wandering Jew legend, I have selected striking instances of the legend used as an instrument of memory, a rendering that entwines past, present, and future, often with the purpose of navigating the complex borders of centuries of Jewish-Christian relations.” I am interested in how artists, particularly literary artists, engage with and reimagine the Wandering Jew legend in order to explore personal and cultural memory and their intersections.

‘The two most influential early written versions of the legend illuminate the Wandering Jew as an instrument of memory: Matthew Paris’s thirteenth-century Chronica majora and the 1602 Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit namen Ahasverus (A Brief Description and Narration Regarding a Jew Named Ahasuerus). In these works, the Wandering Jew serves not only a narrative, but a worldview. Matthew’s world chronicle depicts Christendom as threatened by Muslims, Mongols, and Jews, the latter two of which he even depicts as colluding with each other. The Wandering Jew, as we will see, is a figure very much rooted in Christian temporal figurations of Jews and Judaism. Matthew, following medieval conceptualizations of the Jew that reach back into the patristic period, depicts the Wandering Jew as out of sync with the natural flow of time, as existing in a kind of stasis, endlessly awaiting redemption and release.

In addition to the temporal dynamics of Christian representations of Jews and Judaism, medieval Christians also located Jews within a spatial scheme. According to Christian tradition, Jews are exiled and homeless as punishment for crimes against Christ, as I will discuss in relation to the medieval context of the Wandering Jew in the next chapter. Christian tradition regards the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the Jewish diaspora as punishments for alleged Jewish crimes against Christ. Just as supersession posits Judaism as old and outmoded, its prophecies fulfilled and subsumed by Christianity, so too does Jerusalem, earthly and heavenly, become, within the framework of supersession, rightfully Christian. In the Kurtze Beschreibung, these interreligious tensions, including the complicating element of an Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem, serve as background to the author's reshaping of the Wandering Jew legend to reflect contemporary Jewish-Christian relations, as well as controversy between Lutherans and Catholics over Christian belief and practice. The Wandering Jew’s memory of the Passion renders him an authoritative instrument through which Christian past, present, and future, as well as Christian claims to holy spaces, can be imagined. Even later, in the eighteenth century, as writers expand the Wandering Jew narrative to have him voice his memory of great swathes of world history, the Passion remains the narrative’s fixed point, its memorial core. In these works, the Wandering Jew becomes witness and mouthpiece for cultural memory ever more broadly conceived, but still fundamentally Christian.

The Wandering Jew’s voice itself is another instrument of memory that develops along with the narrative tradition. Early versions do not represent his voice directly, but in the late eighteenth century writers began to present direct encounters between the Wandering Jew and the reader. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s 1783 “Der Ewige Jude: eine lyrische Rhapsodie” (The Eternal Jew: A Lyrical Rhapsody) is notable in this regard because it depicts the Wandering Jew lamenting the loss of his family as he flings his deceased father’s skull down from Mount Carmel. Schubart thus shifts focus from the Passion story to personal loss. The Wandering Jew’s affront to Jesus at the time of the Passion becomes the backdrop for personal expression and even for rebellion.

The development of a voice for the Wandering Jew also extends to expressions of Jewish cultural memories. In Heine’s “Jehuda ben Halevy” this first-person voice is used to convey, in an intimate and personal manner, Jewish cultural memory of a fallen Jerusalem. Heine’s example provides yet another nuance to the idea of the Wandering Jew as an instrument of memory, the sense of an instrument used for delicate or precise work, or to measure, register, and record a phenomenon (OED, s.v. “instrument”). Heine’s recalibration of the Wandering Jew legend with a fixed point in Jewish rather than Christian memory—the fall of Jerusalem—transforms the Wandering Jew into the voice of the Jewish lamentation tradition. In this tradition, of course, the fall of Jerusalem is not vengeance for alleged Jewish actions against Jesus." It is the Hurban, brought on by sins against God. Heine’s recalibration to this fixed point in Jewish cultural memory does not break with Christian cultural memory. Heine portrays the two as entangled and does so in a way that creates a sense of interaction, rather than Christian dominance. Uri Zvi Greenberg’s recalibration of the legend is more radical. In his early work, Greenberg transforms his Wandering Jew from a desperate, tormented figure shambling through a European hellscape into a king who is the sole survivor of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Greenberg’s choice of a completely new and original fixed point by which to center the legend remakes his Ahasver into a Zionist symbol.

Conceiving of these different approaches to the Wandering Jew legend as recalibrations also helps us avoid a problem in Andersons approach to variations in the legend’s form. Anderson’s (1965, 11, 349) search for the “true” legend seems to have led him to overlook variations based in Jewish tradition or to dismiss them as “alien,” a troubling orientation for this magisterial work, which provides an indispensable survey of the tradition.” Rather than measuring conformity to a specific strand in the Wandering Jew tradition, we will consider artistic choices as calibrations and look for meaning in those choices. Artists who calibrate their instrument of memory by the fixed point of the Hurban are setting out a course according to the tradition of their choosing and should be understood as such. These artists’ choices will influence how they portray the Wandering Jew’s past, his memory, and his relation to the future, a future often understood through the lens of Jewish or Christian messianic tradition.

Reimaginings of the legend by artists whose work is informed by both Jewish and Christian cultural memory reveal how the interface between individual and collective memory can be fluid and, to use Rothberg’s (2009, 34) conceptualization, “multidirectional.” The Wandering Jew legend presents a unique case for memory studies because it is, in distinction from other legends such as those of King Arthur or Joan of Arc, centrally concerned with memory itself. It is also deeply implicated in the history of Jewish-Christian relations, including Christian antisemitism, which, like the Wandering Jew legend, developed over centuries. Indeed, the Wandering Jew has figured in some of the most notorious works of antisemitic polemic and propaganda.” Analyzing the Wandering Jew figure as an instrument of memory over the longue durée provides an opportunity to look beyond the typically modern emphasis of memory studies. This may help us better understand how influential premodern cultural forms endure into the present, a line of investigation with implications not only for memory studies, but for the study of antisemitism as well.

The Time of the Wandering Jew

As Mary Carruthers (2009, 238) notes, “Memory is the matrix of all human temporal perception,” and the legend’s representation of memory and of temporalities are, as Carruthers’s work on memory would suggest, generative. The Wandering Jew legend functions on fixed points in the past in order to support visions of messianic, restorative futures. While scholars have often interpreted the Wandering Jew’s unending displacement as symbolic of the Jewish diaspora, less attention has been paid to his uncanny temporality. The temporal dimension of the Wandering Jew’s curse reflects Christian denial of both Jewish coevalness and the tripartite nature of medieval anti-Jewish temporality, which viewed Jews of the past, present, and future in terms of their relation to Christian history. This denial is a core, if less acknowledged, component of antisemitism.

If we consider the thirteenth century, when the first written accounts of the Wandering Jew legend appeared, we can see that at that time medieval Christians honored the so-called Old Testament Jews of the past as Christian precursors, and acknowledged that, in the future, a “remnant” of Jews was needed for the end time. Contemporary Jews were, in contrast, represented as stubborn resistors to the progress of Christian spiritual history, who should be tolerated primarily so as to be preserved for their prophesied eschatological role. Jews, then, played valued roles in the Christian past and future, but not in the Christian present. The Wandering Jew’s endless punishment reflects the uncomfortable spiritual stasis to which medieval Christians typically relegated their Jewish contemporaries. One of several paradoxes of the Wandering Jew legend—that he remains cursed despite conversion—reflects this anti-Jewish temporality. The Wandering Jew embodies the denial of Jewish coevalness, presenting a Jew who is alive in the present, but never truly of it. Spiritually mired in a pre-Christian past, this Jew is preserved in a kind of spiritual stasis awaiting a prophesied Christian future (see Biddick 2003, 22—23; Fabian 1983). As with so many aspects of the Wandering Jew myth, this temporality serves, as Hasan-Rokem (2001, 52) puts it, as a “refraction” of Christian identity.

In recent years, numerous scholars have explored the complexities of the temporal dimensions of interactions between medieval Jews and Christians. Kathleen Biddick (2003), in delineating the “Christian typological imaginary,” examines the workings of supersession, the idea that Christianity is the rightful inheritor of Jewish prophetic tradition, and that the truth of Christianity thus supersedes Judaism. Steven F. Kruger (2006, 1; and see 2013) has illuminated the “Christian reorganization of history” that supersession necessitates and that also undergirds Christian notions of conversion. Mo Pareles also focuses on conversion to explore Christian “repudiations of Jewish time” (Pareles 2019). Anthony Bale (2010, 55) explores another type of reorganization of temporality; showing how the “memory work” of medieval Passion devotion could make Christ’s suffering immediate, collapsing the time between the present and the memorialized event. Anna Wilson (2016, 54) has written of “colliding” Jewish and Christian “temporal regimes” in the making of ritual murder accusation narratives, and Miriamne Ara Krummel (2022, 230-36) has recently analyzed what she calls “the empire of common time,” through which Christian temporality casts itself as normative while marginalizing or even demonizing the Jewish notions of time from which it emerged. Historians Elisheva Carlebach (2011), C. Philipp E. Nothaft (2014), and David Frick (2003) have each explored how Jewish-Christian relations were often mediated through calendars and other means of measuring time. Israel Jacob Yuval’s (2006) work examines what he calls the “dialogism” between Jewish and Christian messianisms. These scholars demonstrate both how medieval Christian theology attempted to subsume Jews and Judaism into a temporal frame that subordinated them to Christian triumphalism and also how actual interactions among medieval Jews and Christians reflect entanglements between Jewish and Christian temporalities that complicate models of Christian dominance.