Olid 
 
 15 
 til 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 892 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924077186892 
 
THE 
 
 WANDERING JEW 
 
 BY 
 
 MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "DEMOKOLOGY AND DEVIL-LOBE" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1881 
 
COPYHIGHT, l88l, 
 BY 
 
 MONCURE D. CONWAY. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 It might be offered as a sufficient reason for writing this 
 book that no other treatise on the same subject exists in 
 our language. But to this it may be added, that in pam- 
 phlets that have appeared in other languages, the relations of 
 the Legend with Eastern mythology have been little con- 
 sidered, and its connection with Hebrew and Christian 
 mythology almost ignored. Furthermore, those studies of the 
 Legend which I have read consider it mainly as a curiosity. 
 But the subject, as it appears to me, possesses a larger signi- 
 ficance. Even the poems and romances it has suggested 
 fail to render the still sad music of humanity pervading the 
 variations of the folk-tale itself. 
 
 The Legend of the "Wandering Jew" is an example of 
 how the folk-tale may sometimes be a mirror brought by 
 Truth from the bottom of her well — the heart of the child- 
 like world — wherein may be seen by reflection things that 
 few eyes can look upon directly. The splendours now 
 gathered around a triumphant Christ conceal from many 
 the face of the changeling really there. But children, fools, 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 and folk-lore speak the truth. The modem French song 
 says, " Jesus, who is goodness itself, sighing said, Thou shalt 
 march till Judgment Day." There is a touch of sceptical 
 sophistication here. But among the many earlier songs, 
 ballads, stories, there is not one which betrays the faintest 
 suspicion of anything in the curse on the Wanderer not cha- 
 racteristic of Jesus. No one tried to soften the case. Another 
 widespread legend relates that once when Jesus begged bread 
 of a baker, the dough prepared for him was reduced, before 
 being placed in the oven, by the baker's daughter ; where- 
 upon Jesus taught her the beauty of kindness by changing 
 her into a deathless owl. Ophelia murmurs : " They say 
 the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we 
 are, but know not what we may be." These last words 
 would not have been inappropriate for the owl to address to 
 a Christ whose transformation her own reflected. Is 
 this only a fantastic tale ? It is coinage of the creed 
 that a human word or action may find its fair measure in 
 ages of penalty. In it is the fictitious equation of every 
 theology which unites ancient divinities not subject to 
 moral laws with human ideals. The sacerdotal sorcery 
 which for the lover of enemies substituted a curser of 
 enemies is discoverable in the earliest Christian theology ; 
 but the working out of it among the masses is not told in 
 histories. The true record remains to be written, and the 
 materials for it are indestructibly preserved in such legendary 
 lore as this of the Wandering Jew. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 3 
 
 I. THE LEGEND - 
 
 II. THE UNDYING ONES - - - - - 29 
 
 III. SOURCES OF THE MYTH - - - - 38 
 
 IV. THE LEGENDS GENERALISED - - - 52 
 V. TRANSFIGURATION - - 56 
 
 VI. MANTLES OF THE IMMORTALS - - 65 
 
 VII. THE MARK OF CAIN- - - - -71 
 
 VIII. THE JEW IN THEOLOGY . - - - - 80 
 
 IX. THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE - - - - 87 
 
 X. THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER - - "93 
 
 XL "THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION"- - - 104 
 
 XII. THE WANDERING RACE I - - 109 
 
 XIII. THE POUND OF FLESH - - - 118 
 
 XIV. THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE - 150 
 XV. THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY - 166 
 
 XVI. THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE - - - 204 
 
 XVII. THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND - -225 
 
 XVIII. AHASUERUS VINCTUS - 249 
 
 XIX. AHASUERUS DELIVERED - - 269 
 
 XX. THREE WITNESSES - 2S1 
 
THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 THE LEGEND. 
 
 IN the year 1228, an Armenian bishop visited 
 England ; and the purport of his conversation is 
 recorded in the Historia Major, begun by Roger de 
 Wendover and completed (anno 1259) by Matthaeus 
 Parisius. The interviews between the monks and the 
 Armenian took place at St. Albans, through Henri 
 Spigurnelj a French interpreter, a native of Antioch 
 and servant of the bishop ; and if the replies of the 
 Eastern prelate were rightly rendered, his tendency 
 to the marvellous was sufficiently strong. He was 
 asked, for instance, whether he had seen Noah's Ark, 
 said to be still preserved on an Armenian mountain, 
 
4 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 and he replied " Yes." He was also asked whether 
 he knew anything of "the famous Joseph," so much 
 discussed, said to have been preserved from the time 
 of the crucifixion of Christ, as a witness of that 
 event. The interpreter said that the personage in 
 question had dined with his master shortly before 
 they left Armenia, and then gave the story as 
 follows. The name of the wonderful Jew was 
 originally Cartaphilus, and he was Pilate's door- 
 keeper at the time of Christ's trial. When the young 
 men were leading Jesus out from the hall of judg- 
 ment, this doorkeeper struck him on the neck, and 
 said, "Go, Jesus; go on faster: why dost thou linger?'* 
 Jesus turned, and answered, " I will go, but thou shalt 
 remain waiting until I come." (Here is quoted Matt, 
 xxvi. 24 : " The Son of man goeth as it is written of 
 Him ; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of 
 man is betrayed ! it had been good for that man if 
 he had not been born.") Thenceforth Cartaphilus 
 has been waiting. He was thirty years when he 
 insulted Christ, and whenever he reaches the age of 
 one hundred he faints ; on. his recovery he finds 
 himself as young as when his doom was pronounced. 
 (Which, again, reminds the Chronicler of a text, Ps. 
 ciii. 5 : " Thy youth is renewed like the eagle's ;" 
 and no doubt he was coming near a myth to 
 
THE LEGEND. 5 
 
 which this item of the story is related, that of the 
 Phoenix.) It was further related that Cartaphilus 
 had been baptized by Ananias (who baptized Paul) 
 under the name of Joseph. He lives among eminent 
 Christians in Armenia as a holy man ; relates to 
 them and to others who visit him, sometimes from 
 great distances, much concerning the Apostles : he 
 never smiles, but sometimes weeps ; refuses gifts, is 
 frugal, and talks little. He hopes for final forgive- 
 ness, because he knew not what he did. The Chronicle 
 adds that this story was attested by Richardus de 
 Argentomio, who visited the East. 
 
 The same archbishop is quoted for the story told 
 in the Chronique riince of Philippe de Mousket, born 
 1220, Bishop of Tournai in 1682. When the Jews 
 were leading Jesus to execution, " this man" (no name 
 is given) said, " Wait for me : I also am going to see 
 the false prophet fastened to the cross." Jesus turned 
 upon him and said, " They will not wait for thee, but 
 thou shalt wait for me." This man would seem to 
 have been a Jew, whereas Cartaphilus was a Roman. 
 
 These are the earliest written records of the legend 
 of the Wandering Jew. From that time no trace of it 
 appears until the year 1547, when an individual 
 seems to have appeared in Hamburg, pretending to 
 be the Wandering Jew himself. The legend and its 
 
6 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 representative appeared in German annals simul- 
 taneously. The fullest account is in a work published 
 1 613 : Newe Zeitung von einem Juden von Jerusalem, 
 Aliasuerus genannt, welcher die Creutzigung misers 
 Herrn Jliesn Christi gesehen, und nock am leben isl, 
 aus Dantzig an einem guten Freund geschrieben. The 
 name appended to this narrative is " Herr Chrysos- 
 tomus Dudulaus Westphalus," which Grasse believes 
 a pseudonym. The author, however, embodies state- 
 ments made in an earlier work : Strange Report of a 
 Jew, bom at Jerusalem, named Ahasuerus, who pre- 
 tends he was present at tlie crucifixion of Christ. 
 Newly printed at Ley den, Leipzig, 1602. From the 
 same source came, True likeness of the whole form of 
 a Jew, seen by all, from Jerusalem, w/w pretends, etc. 
 First printed at Augspurg, 1619. The narrative of 
 Westphalus is as follows : 
 
 " Paulus von Eizen, Doctor and Bishop of Schles- 
 wig, related to me, some years ago, that at the time 
 he was studying at Wittenberg, while on a visit to 
 his parents at Hamburg, in 1547, he had seen in 
 church, placed near the chancel, a very tall man, with 
 hair falling on his shoulders, barefoot, who listened to 
 the sermon with great attention ; and whenever the 
 name of Jesus was mentioned, bowed humbly, smote 
 his breast, and sighed. His only clothing was a pair 
 
THE LEGEND. 7 
 
 of trousers, ragged at the ends, and a coat tied with 
 a cord which fell to his feet. He appeared to be fifty 
 years of age. There seem to have been many of the 
 nobility and gentry who have seen this man, in Eng- 
 land, France, Italy, Hungary, Persia, Spain, Poland, 
 Moscow, Lieffiand, Sweden, Denmark, and Scotland, 
 and in other regions. Everyone has marvelled much 
 at him. And the aforenamed Doctor, having made 
 inquiries as to where he could converse with this 
 man, and having found him, asked him whence he 
 came, and how long he had been there during that 
 winter. On this the man very humbly told him 
 that he was by birth a Jew of Jerusalem, named 
 Ahasuerus, his occupation that of a shoemaker ; that 
 he had been present at the crucifixion of Christ, since 
 which time he had been alive ; that he had travelled 
 through many countries and cities ; and to prove that 
 he was telling the truth, he had knowledge of various 
 events which had occurred since that time, as well as 
 of all the events which had happened to Christ when 
 he was brought before Pilate and Herod and finally 
 crucified. He told even more than we know through 
 the evangelists and historians ; and he narrated the 
 many changes of government, especially in Eastern 
 countries, which had occurred at one time or another 
 during those many centuries. Then he related most 
 
8 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 minutely the life, sufferings, and death of the holy 
 Apostles. And now, when Dr. Paulus of Eizen, with 
 great interest and astonishment, had heard these 
 things, in order to obtain more thorough knowledge, 
 he asked him to relate exactly all that happened. 
 Thereupon this man answered that, at the time of the 
 crucifixion, he resided in Jerusalem, and like others 
 he regarded Christ as a heretic ; he had not thought 
 of him otherwise than as a misleader of the people ; 
 and that with others he had endeavoured to get one 
 who in his eyes was a rebel out of the world. Soon 
 after the sentence had been pronounced by Pilate, 
 they led Jesus past his house. Knowing that he 
 would be led that way, he (Ahasuerus) had gone 
 home, and told all in his house that they might see 
 Jesus pass by and would know what kind of man he 
 was. Just as Jesus was passing, he took a child in 
 his arms and stood before his own door. .Christ, 
 bearing a very heavy cross on his shoulders, stopped 
 a little before the shoemaker's door and leaned 
 against the wall. Then the shoemaker, full of sudden 
 anger, and also desirous of public applause, told 
 Christ to move on whither he was ordered. Upon 
 this, Christ looked sternly upon him, and said, ' I will 
 stand here and rest, but thou shalt move until the last 
 day !' Upon this, he put the child down quickly on 
 
THE LEGEND. 9 
 
 the floor, and could stay there no longer. He fol- 
 lowed Jesus, saw him miserably crucified, tortured, 
 and slain. After all had been fulfilled, it was impos- 
 sible for him to enter Jerusalem. He never saw his 
 wife and child again, but as a sad pilgrim has wan- 
 dered through foreign countries one after another. 
 When after many years he returned once more to 
 Jerusalem, he found everything sacked and destroyed, 
 so that he could recognise nothing : not one stone 
 was left upon another, nor any trace of the former 
 magnificence visible. What God now intended to do 
 with him, in leaving him in this miserable life wander- 
 ing about in such wretchedness, he could not explain 
 otherwise than that God wished him to remain until 
 the Day of Judgment as a living sign against the 
 Jews, by which the unbelieving and the godless 
 might be reminded of Christ's death and be turned 
 to repentance. For his part he would be very happy if 
 God would take him to heaven out of this vale of tears. 
 " After this report and conversation, Dr. Paulus of 
 Eizen asked, as also did the School-Inspector of 
 Hamburg, who was learned in ancient histories, the 
 right account of all sorts of things which had occurred 
 in Eastern countries after Christ's birth and crucifixion. 
 This man gave a very good and exact report of all 
 these ancient events : so that people were obliged 
 
io THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 to believe in hirn and his story, and went away- 
 astonished, and saying, that with God all things are 
 possible — but with man they are inscrutable. 
 
 " As to this Jew's life it was very quiet and retired. 
 He did not talk much, and only when asked a ques- 
 tion ; and when invited into a house, he did not eat or 
 drink much, being abstemious. He never stayed 
 long in one place. At Hamburg, Dantzig, and else- 
 where, when money was offered, he only accepted 
 two shillings, which soon after he gave to the poor, 
 with the remark that he did not need any money ; 
 that the good God would provide for him because he 
 was penitent for his sin ; and what he had ignorantly 
 done he would submit to God. None ever saw him 
 laugh. In whatever country he entered he knew the 
 language at once. At that time he spoke the Saxon 
 language as one born there. Many people came to 
 Hamburg, from neighbouring and even distant places, 
 to see and listen to this man, and believed that some- 
 thing marvellous was indicated by him, because he 
 was not only attentive to the Word of God but showed 
 great reverence, and sighed whenever the name of 
 God or Christ was pronounced. He could never 
 hear anyone utter a curse. Whenever the name or 
 torture or sufferings of God were connected by any 
 excited person with a curse, he would sigh deeply, 
 
THE LEGEND. 1 i 
 
 and say, ' Miserable man, miserable creature ! wilt 
 thou take lightly the name of thy Lord and God, and 
 of his great suffering and torture ? Hadst thou seen 
 it as I did, hadst thou seen how hard the wound of 
 thy Saviour was for thee and me, thou wouldst rather 
 do a great harm to thyself than pronounce his name 
 lightly/ All these things Dr. Paulus of Eizen told 
 me with truth and sincerity, with many other true 
 circumstances, which, since then, I have heard from 
 several old friends who also saw the same man at 
 Hamburg with their own eyes. Which things, also, 
 Paul of Eizen saw, and has told with truth and 
 earnestness. 
 
 "Anno 1575. The Secretary Christoph Krause 
 and Magistrate Jacobus von Holstein- had been sent 
 as ambassadors to the Royal Court of Spain, and 
 afterwards to the Netherlands, in order to pay the 
 soldiers who served in the royal [army] ; and when 
 they had returned home again, being near Schleswig, 
 they solemnly related that they had seen this wonder- 
 ful man in Spain, with the identical appearance, 
 costume, manners, and mode of life. They had 
 spoken to him personally ; and said that at the same 
 time many besides themselves heard him speak good 
 Spanish. 
 
 "Anno 1599. In Christ's month, a very trust- 
 
12 THE WAhDERING JEW. 
 
 worthy person wrote from Brunswick to Strasburg 
 that this wonderful man was then in Vienna, in 
 Austria, and that he intended to go from thence into 
 Poland and Dantzig, and after that to Moscow. This 
 Ahasuerus has been at Lubeck in 1601. And also at 
 Reffel in Lieffland, and in Cracow, Poland. He was 
 seen and spoken to by many people in Moscow. 
 
 " What now sensible men shall think of all this I 
 leave to themselves. The providences of God are 
 marvellous, inscrutable, inexplicable ; as time goes 
 on they will become more so ; and they will only 
 be revealed to us at the last day. 
 
 " Dated at Reffel, tlie first of August, 1613. — CHRY- 
 SOSTOMUS DUDULAUS WESTPHALUS." 
 
 Other notices of the Wandering Jew are as follows. 
 Nicolas Heldvaler {Sylva Chronol. Circuli Baltici) says: 
 
 " This year (1604) there has appeared a fable of 
 a Jew who is said to have been a shoemaker in 
 Jerusalem in the time of Christ, and having on Good 
 Friday struck Jesus with his shoe-last, cannot die, 
 but must wander about the world till the last day." 
 
 Rodolphe Bouthrays (Botereius), Parliamentary 
 Advocate of Paris (in his Commentarii de Rebus His- 
 toricis in Gallia et toto pene Orbe gestis, Lib. xi., 1604) 
 mentions the report as wide-spread in his time. The 
 following is a translation from his Latin : 
 
THE LEGEND. 13 
 
 " I am afraid that some may charge me with anile 
 trifling, if I insert in this page the story which is told 
 in the whole of Europe, concerning a Jew, a contem- 
 porary of the Saviour Christ. Nothing, however, is 
 more widely-spread, and the vernacular history of our 
 own countrymen has not blushed to declare it. Thus 
 I have, as witnesses, those who formerly wrote our 
 Annals . . . that he, not in one century [only] had 
 been seen and recognised in Spain, Italy and Ger- 
 many, but that this year it was he himself who was 
 seen at Hamburg, anno 1564. Many other things 
 the vulgar imagine about him, as it is prone to ru- 
 mours ; which I relate, lest anything should remain 
 untold." 
 
 The following is a translation from the Latin of 
 Julius Caesar Bulenger {Historiarium siri Temporis 
 Libri, Ley den, 1619) : 
 
 " It was reported at that time that a Jew, a con- 
 temporary of Christ, who for more than a thousand 
 years had been a vagrant and a wanderer over the 
 whole world, was still wandering about without meat 
 and drink, having been condemned to that punish- 
 ment by God, because he was the first of the dregs of 
 the circumcised to cry out that Christ should be fixed 
 to the Cross, and that Barabbas the robber should be 
 released from the hook and the terror of the Cross. 
 
i 4 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Afterwards, when Christ, panting from the weight of 
 the Cross, would have rested at his workshop, for he 
 was a mechanic, he ordered Him off with bitter words. 
 To whom Christ said, Because thou begrudgest me so 
 little rest, I will rest; and thou without rest shalt 
 wander. And it is told that presently, in less time 
 than the telling occupies, the man wandered frantic 
 and aimless throughout the whole city, that thence 
 his wanderings continue over the whole world even to 
 this present day, and that it was the very man who 
 was seen at Hamburg in the year 1 564. ' Credat 
 Judaeus Apella.' I did not see the man at that time, 
 since I was occupied at Paris, nor did I hear about 
 him from sufficiently trustworthy authorities." 
 
 Louvet mentions seeing him in 1604 at Beauvais, 
 surrounded by a crowd of children, speaking of the 
 Passion of Christ. He expresses regret that his con- 
 tempt for the fellow prevented his interrogating. He 
 asked and received alms at a certain house. 
 
 S. H. Bangert {Commentatio de ortu vita et excessu 
 Coleri Jurisconsulti Lubecensis, Lubeck, 1644) men- 
 tions that Coler left a memorandum in his diary to 
 the effect that " that immortal Jew, who asserted that 
 he had been present at the crucifixion of Christ, was 
 at Lubeck on the 14th January, 1603." 
 
 Martin Zeiler (Historici Chronologi et Geogrctphi 
 
THE LEGEND. 15 
 
 Celcbres Collecti, Ulm, 1653) mentions the Wandering 
 Jew. Among his Letters Zeiler cites one by West- 
 phalus, substantially the same as his account (1613) 
 already quoted, as having been written to one of his 
 (Westphalus') friends. 
 
 In the year 1644 the 'Turkish Spy' writes from 
 Paris (Book III. Letter I.) to Ibraham Haly Cheik, a 
 Man of the Law, as follows : 
 
 " There is a man come to this city, if he may be 
 called a man, who pretends, to have lived above these 
 sixteen hundred years. They call him the Wander- 
 ing Jew. But some say he is an impostor. He says 
 of himself that he was Usher of the Divan in 
 Jerusalem (the Jews call it the Court of Judgment), 
 where all criminal causes were tried, at the time 
 when Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Christian's Messias, 
 was condemned by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Presi- 
 dent. That his name was Michob Ader ; and that 
 for thrusting Jesus out of the Hall with these words, 
 ' Go, why tarries t thou ?' the Messias answered him 
 again, ' I go, but tarry thou till I come ;' thereby 
 condemning him to live till the Day of Judgment. 
 He pretends to remember the Apostles that lived in 
 those days, and that he himself was baptized by one 
 of them ; that he has travelled through all the regions 
 of the world, and so must continue to be a vagabond 
 
16 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 till the Messias shall return again. They say that he 
 heals all diseases by touching the part affected. 
 Divers other miracles are ascribed to him by the 
 ignorant and superstitious ; but the learned, the noble, 
 the great, censure him as a pretender or a madman. 
 Yet there are who affirm that 'tis one convincing 
 argument of the reality of his pretence that he has 
 hitherto escaped a prison, especially in those countries 
 where the authors of all innovations are severely 
 punished. He has escaped the Inquisitions at Rome, 
 in Spain, and in Portugal, which the vulgar will have 
 to be an evident miracle. 
 
 " One day I had the curiosity to discourse with him 
 in several languages ; and I found him master of all 
 those that I could speak. I conversed with him five 
 or six hours together in Arabic. He told me there was 
 scarce a true history to be found. I asked him what he 
 thought of Mahomet, the Prophet and Lawgiver of 
 the Mussulmans? He answered that he knew his 
 father very well, and had often been in his company 
 at Ormus in Persia; that Mahomet was a man full 
 of light and a divine spirit, but had his errors as well 
 as other mortals, and that his chiefest was in denying 
 the crucifixion of the Messias ; ' for,' said he, ' I was 
 present, and saw Him hang on the Cross, with these 
 eyes of mine.' He accused the Mussulmans of 
 
THE LEGEND. 17 
 
 ' imposture' in making the world believe that the tomb 
 of their Prophet hangs miraculously between heaven 
 and earth, saying that he himself had seen it, and 
 that it was built after the manner of other sepulchres. 
 Thou who hast been at the Holy Place knowest 
 whether this be true or false. He upbraids the 
 Persian Mahometans with luxury, the Ottomans with 
 tyranny, the Arabians with robbery, the Moors with 
 cruelty, and the Mussulmans of the Indies with 
 atheism. Nor does he spare to reproach the Christian 
 churches : he taxes the Roman and Grecian with the 
 pompous idolatry of the heathens ; he accuses the 
 ^Ethiopian of Judaism, the Armenian of heresy ; and 
 says that the Protestants, if they would live according 
 to their profession, would be the best Christians. 
 
 " He told me he was in Rome when Nero set fire to 
 the city and stood triumphing on the top of a hill to 
 behold the flames. That he saw Saladin's return 
 from his conquests in the East, when he caused his 
 shirt to be carried on the top of a spear, with this 
 proclamation : ' Saladin, lord of many rich countries, 
 Conqueror of the East, ever victorious and happy, 
 when he dies shall have no other memorial left of all 
 his glories, but only this poor shirt.' 
 
 " He relates many remarkable passages of Soliman 
 the Magnificent, whereof our histories are silent, and 
 
 2 
 
1 8 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 says he was in Constantinople when Soliman built 
 that royal mosque which goes by his name. He 
 knew Tamerlane the Scythian, and told me he was so 
 called because he halted on one leg. He pretends 
 also to have been acquainted with Scander-Beg, the 
 valiant and fortunate Prince of Epirus. He seemed 
 to pity the insupportable calamity of Bajazet, whom 
 he had seen carried about in a cage by Tamerlane's 
 order. He accuses the Scythian of too barbarous an 
 insult on the unfortunate Sultan. He remembers 
 the ancient Caliphs of Babylon and Egypt, the 
 empire of the Saracens, and the wars in the Holy 
 Land. He highly extols the valour and conduct of 
 the renowned Godfrey de Bouillon. He gives an 
 accurate account of the rise, progress, establishment 
 and subversion of the Mamelukes in Egypt. He 
 says he has washed himself in the two head-springs 
 of the river Nile, which arise in the southern part of 
 ^Ethiopia. That its increase is occasioned by the 
 great rains in ^Ethiopia, which swell all the rivers 
 that fall into the Nile, and cause that vast inundation 
 to discover whose origin has so much puzzled 
 philosophy. He says that the river Ganges in India 
 is broader and deeper than the Nile ; that the river 
 Niger in Africa is longer by some hundreds of miles ; 
 and that he can remember a time when the river 
 
THE LEGEND. 19 
 
 Nile overflowed not till three months after the usual 
 season. 
 
 " Having professed himself an universal traveller, 
 and that there was no corner of the earth where he 
 had not been present, I began to comfort myself with 
 the hopes of some news from the Ten Tribes of Israel 
 that were carried into captivity by Salmanasar, King 
 of Assyria, and could never be heard of since. I 
 asked him several questions concerning them, but 
 found no satisfactory answer. Only, he told me that 
 in Asia, Africa, and Europe he had taken notice of a 
 sort of people who (though not Jews in profession) 
 yet retained some characteristics whereby one might 
 discover them to be descended of that nation. In 
 Livonia, Russia, and Finland he had met with people 
 of languages distinct from that of the country, having 
 a great mixture of Hebrew words ; that these 
 abstained from swine's flesh, blood, and things 
 strangled ; that in their lamentations for the dead 
 they always used these words : Jeru, Jeru, Masco, 
 Salem. By which, he thought, they called to remem- 
 brance Jerusalem and Damascus, those two famous 
 cities of Palestine and Syria. In the Circassians also 
 he had traced some footsteps of Judaism : their 
 customs, manner of life, feasts, marriages, and sacri- 
 fices beinsr not far removed from the institutions of 
 
20 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Mosaic Law. But, what is most remarkable, he said 
 that he had conversed with professed Jews in the 
 north part of Asia who never so much as heard of 
 Jesus, the son of Mary, or of the revolutions of Judea 
 after his death, the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, 
 or any other matters wherewith all histories abound 
 concerning that nation. He said, moreover, that these 
 Jews had only the Pentateuch, not having heard of 
 the rest of those Books which compose the greatest 
 part of the Old Testament ; and that this Pentateuch 
 was written in a sort of Hebrew far different from that 
 which is now commonly spoken by the rest of the 
 Jews dispersed throughout the world. That the 
 number of these Jews was infinite. And, finally, he 
 thought that these (if any) were the true posterity of 
 those Ten Captive Tribes. 
 
 " Having mentioned the destruction of Jerusalem, 
 I asked him where he was at that time ? He told 
 me, in the Court of Vespasian at Rome ; and that he 
 had heard the emperor -say, when he understood the 
 Temple of Solomon was burnt to ashes, 'he had 
 rather all Rome had been set on fire.' Here the old 
 man fell a-weeping himself, lamenting the ruin of 
 that noble structure, which he described to me as 
 familiarly as if he had seen it but yesterday. He says 
 that Josephus wrote partially of the seditions in the 
 
THE LEGEND. 21 
 
 city, being related to one of the chief ringleaders, 
 whom therefore he spared, being loth to stain the 
 reputation of his own family to all posterity. 
 
 " I tell thee, sage Cheik, if this man's pretences be 
 true, he is so full of choice memoirs, and has been 
 witness to so many grand transactions for the space 
 of sixteen centuries of years, that he may not unfitly 
 be called ' A living Chronology,' the ' Protonotary of 
 the Christians' Hegira,' or principal recorder of that 
 which they esteem the last epoclia of the world's 
 duration. By his looks one would take him for a 
 relic of the Old World, or one of the long-lived fathers 
 before the Flood. To speak modestly, he may pass 
 for the younger brother of Time. 
 
 " It would be endless to tell thee how many other 
 discourses we had of his travels and memoirs ; till, 
 tired with his company, and judging all to be a cheat, 
 I took my leave. I assure thee, he seems to be a man 
 well versed in all histories, a great traveller, and one 
 that affects to be counted an extraordinary 
 person. The common people are ready to adore 
 him ; and the very fear of the multitude restrains the 
 magistrates from offering any violence to this im- 
 postor. 
 
 " Live thou in the exercise of thy reason, which 
 will not permit thee to be seduced into errors by the 
 
22 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 subtle insinuations of men. Continue to love Mahomet, 
 who honours thee without a fiction. 
 
 " Paris, 4th of the 1st Moon of the Year 1644." 
 
 In, or about, the year 1645 there was published in 
 German at Augsburg the Strange Report of a Jew who 
 claims to liave been present at tlie crucifixion, and to have 
 been kept alive from t/iat time. A theological warning 
 to the Christian reader, illustrated and enlarged by 'trust- 
 worthy histories and examples. On this book there is 
 a picture representing a village, with trees ; on the 
 right the sun emerging from clouds ; in the centre 
 Jesus crowned with thorns, his arms stretched out ; in 
 front, the Wandering Jew kneeling with clasped 
 hands, his hat and the Bible lying before him. On 
 both sides, in horizontal line, runs the sentence : 
 From Chrysostomo Dudulceo Westphalo, written to his 
 good friend. On the back are some verses, the first 
 two lines being in Latin : 
 
 " Nubibus in altis crucifixum cernit Jesum 
 Asverus, dignum clamitat ante cruce." 
 
 In 1 68 1 there appeared a publication, written by 
 Pastor J. Georg Hadeck : Nathanieli Christiana. 
 Relation concerning a hermit named Ahasuerus , a Jezv 
 who was present at the crucifixion, etc. 
 
 M. Magnin in an essay prefixed to the Ahasuerus 
 
THE LEGEND. 23 
 
 of Edgar Ouinet (Paris edition of 1843, P- 2 4) sa y s 
 " In 1 64 1 an Austrian baron, and in 1643 a physician 
 returned from Palestine, related that a certain Turk 
 had pointed out ' Joseph ' to a Venetian nobleman 
 named Bianchi. The poor Jew was then under close 
 guard at the bottom of a crypt in Jerusalem ; he was 
 dressed in his ancient Roman costume, exactly that 
 of the time of Christ. He did nothing but walk about 
 the room without saying a word, and strike his hand 
 against the wall, or sometimes his breast, to testify 
 his sorrow for having struck the holy face of the Lord. 
 I find these details in an anonymous German work of 
 the middle of the 17th century, bearing the singular 
 title of Relation, or Brief account of two living wit- 
 nesses of tlie Passion of our Saviour." This was no 
 doubt a version of the work of Droscher, De duobus 
 testibus vivis passionis dominicce, Jena, 1688. M. 
 Gaston Paris believes this to have been a tale sug- 
 gested by the Matthew Paris Chronicle, printed in 
 London in 1571, at Zurich in 1586. 
 
 An importantwork appeared with the following title: 
 Dissertatio historica de Judceo 11011 mortali, etc. Certa- 
 viinis publ. argttm. f. Press. Schultz. Regiom. Pruss. 
 respondens Martin Schmid Slavio. Pomer. A.D. 26 Jan. 
 Ann. 1689. This work contains a curious account of 
 the Twelve Tribes, sent by a Jewish physician to his 
 
24 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 co-religionists in Mantua; also a "trustworthy" copy 
 of the judgment which Pilate pronounced on Christ, 
 stating his motives, subscribed by all members of his 
 council and officers of the Sanhedrim ; with the full 
 Notes of the Prosecutor; these having been " found in 
 a marble rock in the city of Aquila." (This idea was 
 used by A. W. Schlegel, in his romance on the subject.) 
 
 In 1697 a book was published at Wolffenbuttel, 
 entitled Description of a Hermit, a Jew (etc.), who 
 brings near the evidence of Joseph concerning Christ ; 
 the history of the death of Christ ; the Letter of 
 Lentidus to the Roman Council ; the condemnation of 
 Christ; history of the broken stone ; Letter of Pilate 
 to the Emperor Tiberias; of Pilate's punishment said 
 to have been inflicted on tlie Twelve Tribes of Israel for 
 the crucifixion of Christ. With an addition concerning 
 a Jew, a sorcerer, who gave himself out for the Messias. 
 Collected out of respectable old histories and most trust- 
 worthy testimonies. 
 
 In the French language there was published at 
 Bordeaux (1609) the True History of the Wandering 
 Jew taken from his own lips. The legend seems hardly 
 to have been known in Spain, and but little in Italy, 
 at any early date. There was printed at Bruges 
 (where the Chronique rime'e of Philippe de Mousket 
 had prepared the soil for it) early in the seventeenth 
 
THE LEGEND. 25 
 
 century (probably) a folkbook entitled Wonderful 
 History of the Wandering Jeiv, iu/10 since the year 33 
 to this time has only zvandered. 
 
 In the English language the only early story of the 
 Wandering Jew, after that in the Chronicle of 
 Matthew of Paris, is the ballad contained in Percy s 
 Reliques. This ballad is in black-letter in the Pepys' 
 collection ; it follows the Hamburg legend, and was 
 probably written early in the 17th century. That the 
 legend was well known in England in the seventeenth 
 century appears from a satire, in which it is utilised, 
 without being narrated, entitled The Wandering Jew 
 telling Fortunes to Englishmen. A Jew's Lottery. 
 London : printed by John Raworth, for Nathaniel 
 Butter, 1640. 
 
 It should also be stated that there were a number 
 of treatises written against the story, such as — 1. De 
 duobus testibus vivis passionis Christ i. Jena, 1668 
 (written by S. Niemann) ; 2. Meletea historiade Judceo 
 immortali, 1668 (written by J. Freutzel) ; 3. Diss, 
 hist, de Judao 11011 mortali, 1689- (written by Martin 
 Schmid). In the following century (1723) an anony- 
 mous pamphlet was printed, in Frankfort and Leipzig, 
 ' concerning the Immortal Jew, in which it is shown 
 throughout that in the nature of things he never 
 existed." In 1756 was published C. Anton's Diss. 
 
26 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 in qua lepidam fabulam de Judceo immortali examwet ; 
 followed by An A/ezvi/e's letter to Anton, that time 
 is a Wandering Jezb. (Halle, 1756.) 
 
 This earlier bibliography of the Wandering Jew is 
 mainly condensed from the most important work on 
 the antiquarian features of the legend :— Die Sagevom 
 Ewigen Juden, historisch entwecklt mit verwandter 
 Mythen verglichen nnd beleuchtet. Von Dr. J. G. Th. 
 Grasse. Dresden u. Leipzig, 1844. 
 
 In following Grasse, M. Schcebel {La legende du 
 Juif Errant, Paris, 1877), and M. Gaston Paris {Le 
 Jnif Errant, Faris, 1880) have added important points 
 and criticisms. 
 
 From the various books mentioned are gathered 
 the following notes : 
 
 S. Grosse (in his " History of Leipzig ") says that the 
 Wandering Jew appeared there as a beggar in 1642, 
 and accepted gifts, some of high value. Other 
 traditions report that he refused presents. 
 
 It is a tradition of Matterberge, under the 
 Matterhorn, that formerly a great city stood there; 
 and it is said that when the Wandering Jew first came 
 there he said : " When I come again I shall find a forest 
 where now are houses ; and when I come the third time 
 all will be snow and ice : and this has been fulfilled."' 
 
 It is said that at Naumburg (Thuringia) he could 
 
THE LEGEND. 27 
 
 neither sit nor stand still. Even when listening to a 
 sermon he was always moving. He said he had " no 
 rest by day or night, and was kept alive without food 
 or drink, sleep or rest, for many years in a miraculous 
 manner." It is said that, in 1640, two citizens of 
 Brussels, walking in a wood, met a grey old man, in 
 shabby and antique garb. They invited him to an inn, 
 where he drank with them, standing. Before leaving, 
 he told them of things that happened centuries 
 before. They gathered that he was Isaac Laquedem, 
 the Jew who forbade his Lord to rest at his door, 
 and left him in terror.' 
 
 The presence in England of a man pretending to 
 be the Wandering Jew is stated in a letter of Madame 
 de Mazarin to Madame de Bouillon (Calmet, Diet, de 
 la Bible, ii. 472). In England he assumed the character 
 of one who had been an official of high rank in Jerusa- 
 lem. His statements to the English noblemen and 
 University professors who conversed with him (many of 
 whom believed his story) were so precisely those which 
 were given to the Turkish Spy in Paris that there is 
 no need to reproduce them here. It is probable that 
 the same man had journeyed from Paris to England, 
 as it is difficult to believe that two such clever and 
 learned impostors could appear at the same time. 
 
 It is notable that an account of the first appearance 
 
28 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 of a personal representative of the legend should 
 only have been published more than fifty years (cer- 
 tainly) after his visit to Hamburg ; and then just after 
 the death of the witness said to have conversed with 
 him, Paul of Eizen. This prelate was born at Ham- 
 burg, 1522, and died in 1598. His alleged testimonies 
 to the Wandering Jew were reported subsequently by 
 the pseudonymous Dudulaus. It is further remark- 
 able that in the story as told by Dudulaus, already 
 given, nothing is said of a blow dealt Jesus by 
 Ahasuerus. He evidently desires to soften the story 
 for the Wandering Jew, and adduce him as a witness 
 to the Christian legend. He tries in one of his pam- 
 phlets to recommend the story to sceptics by relating 
 another of three pious miners of Bohemia, who fell 
 into a pit at Kuttenberg. They remained there for 
 seven years, their provisions and lamp holding out 
 miraculously. One prayed that he might again see 
 the light of day ; another, that he might once more 
 eat with his family ; the third, that he might live one 
 more year with his wife and children. The prayers 
 were answered, but each died suddenly immediately 
 after his wish was fulfilled. 
 
 The#/zz'//z«.yofthe revival of the legend isshown by in- 
 stances in which the Jews' quarters were invaded under 
 rumours that they were concealing the Wanderer. 
 
II. 
 
 THE UNDYING ONES. 
 
 THE myth of the Wandering Jew belongs, essentially, 
 to a class which has great antiquity, and is found in 
 every part of the world. 
 
 At a period before Animism had been embodied 
 in clear conceptions of a life beyond the grave, the 
 human heart and mind had to adapt themselves as 
 well as they could to the King of Terrors, which 
 destroyed the greatest as well as the humblest. The 
 first that were ideally wrested from Death were 
 saints and heroes ; and it was necessary to find for 
 these an earthly immortality. Many myths and 
 legends of the undying ones are no doubt variants of 
 each other ; but they are found among races so sepa- 
 rate in origin and history, that we may be content to 
 find their common root in human nature. Men 
 cannot bear to think that their leaders, heroes, 
 saviours are really dead. They resolutely repel the 
 
3o THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 unwelcome fact as long as they can. They easily 
 credit any rumour that the reported death is some 
 fiction of the enemy, or possibly a stratagem of their 
 own party-leaders. It is said that after the death of 
 General Jackson, a President of the United States, 
 many democrats still voted for him at the following 
 election, denouncing the report of his death as 
 "another Whig lie." The story if not true is ben 
 trovato ; and there are facts enough like it even in 
 modern history. Sceptics were found in France who 
 but slowly credited the tidings of the death of Napo- 
 leon III. : their transient suspicions were echoes of 
 Beranger's cry when he heard of the first Napoleon's 
 death : " God, I can scarce believe Thee without 
 him !"* 
 
 It is recorded in the Heimskringla that, after the 
 death of King Odin, " the Swedes believed that he 
 often showed himself to them before any great battle. 
 To some he gave victory, others he invited to him- 
 self ; and they reckoned both of these to be well off 
 in their fate." Thus, the Wild Huntsman began his 
 career. This tendency in the popular mind was 
 utilised by courtiers of the next popular monarch. 
 
 * Some excellent remarks on this subject, and historical 
 illustrations, are contained in an article in the late Theological 
 Review (July, 1871) on the " Nero Saga," by W. M. W. Call. 
 
THE UNDYING ONES. 31 
 
 This was Freyr, second monarch after Odin, who 
 probably lived in the first century of our era, and 
 built the great temple at Upsal. It is recorded : 
 " Then began, in his days, the Frode-peace ; and then 
 there were good seasons in all the land, which the 
 Swedes ascribed to Freyr, so that he was more 
 worshipped than the other gods, as the people became 
 much richer in his days by reason of the peace and 
 
 good seasons Freyr fell into a sickness ; and 
 
 as his illness took the upper hand, his men took the 
 plan of letting few approach him. In the meantime 
 they raised a great mound, in which they placed a 
 door with three holes in it. Now when Freyr died 
 they bore him secretly into the mound, but told the 
 Swedes he was alive ; and they kept watch over him 
 for three years. They brought all the taxes into the 
 mound ; and through the one hole they put in the 
 gold, through the other the silver, and through the 
 third the copper money that was paid. Peace and 
 
 good seasons prevailed When it became known 
 
 to the Swedes that Freyr was dead, and yet peace 
 and good seasons continued, they believed that it 
 must be so as long as Freyr remained in Sweden ; 
 and therefore they would not burn his remains, but 
 called him the god of this world, and afterwards 
 offered continually blood sacrifices to him, principally 
 
32 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 for peace and good seasons."* Here we have one 
 chapter in the genesis of these immortals. Men have 
 been executed in Portugal for professing to be 
 Sebastian returned. In the time of James II., 
 country-people in England believed that Monmouth 
 had not really died on the scaffold, but " would sud- 
 denly appear, would lead them on to victory, and would 
 tread down the King and the Jesuits under his feet."f 
 Some believed him to be the Man in the Iron Mask. 
 
 On the death of King Arthur all hope of find- 
 ing the Holy Graal seemed to vanish. On the 
 " Mo'rte d'Arthur " it is written : " This of King 
 Arthur, I find no more written in my copy of the 
 certainty of his death ; but thus he was led away in 
 a barge, wherein were three Queens ; and one was 
 King Arthur's sister, Queen Morgan le Fay, and 
 there was Nimue, the chief Lady of the Lake. More 
 of the death of King Arthur, could I never find. But 
 that ladies brought such a one unto burials, that he 
 was buried here, that the hermit bare witness that 
 sometime was Bishop of Canterbury and dwelled that 
 time in a chapel beside Glastonbury. But yet the 
 hermit knew not, of a certain, that it was verily the 
 body of King Arthur. Some men yet say in many 
 
 * The Hei)nskri?igla. Translated by Samuel Laing. Long- 
 mans, 1S44. Vol. i., p. 225. 
 
 f Macaulay's " History of England," ch. viii. Fourth ediiion. 
 
THE UNDYING ONES. 
 
 33 
 
 parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but 
 had, by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, into 
 another place. And men say that he will come 
 again, and he shall win the Holy Cross."* That 
 King Arthur is in the Vale of Avalon (of Apples) 
 attended by fairies ; that in some regions he has been 
 found by shepherds slumbering, like Barbarossa, with 
 his knights in a subterranean castle (at Sewingshields 
 especially) ; that in others he has been seen, like 
 Wodan, at the head of a ghostly hunt by night: 
 these are legends found far and wide in British and 
 Breton folklore. Tennyson makes Arthur repose in — 
 
 " The island-valley of Avilion 
 Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies 
 Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns, 
 And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea." 
 
 Germany has many corresponding myths, chief of 
 which is that of Frederick L, or Barbarossa, believed 
 to be sleeping under Raven's Hill at Kaiserlautern, 
 ready to come forth in the last emergency (or glory 
 and unity) of his country. There, in his palace (or 
 
 * " La Morte d' Arthur." Compiled by Sir Thomas Mallory 
 (Conybeare's edition). Moxon, 1868, p. 404. The Cornish 
 legend was that Arthur would return to drive the Saxons from 
 Britain. Similar stories are told of Sir Gawaine, Ogier, and 
 others. 
 
 3 
 
34 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 grotto) underground, a shepherd once found him sur- 
 rounded by his sleeping knights, all in armour ; the 
 horses near by in harness. The red beard, which gave 
 the hero his name, had grown through the stone table 
 before him, and taken root in the floor. As the shep- 
 herd entered, Barbarossa awoke and asked : 
 
 " Are the ravens still flying round the hill ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Then must I sleep another hundred years." 
 
 On the evening when the present Emperor of Ger- 
 many had reviewed his troops, after his late war with 
 France, this legend was represented before him in a 
 series of marvellous tableaux which I witnessed. In 
 the last it was shown that the hour had arrived for 
 Frederick the Red Beard to come forth, and it need 
 hardly be said that he bore a striking resemblance to 
 the Emperor William. In some regions it is said that 
 Frau Holda stands beside the slumbering Barbarossa : 
 this may have helped to give us our familiar variant 
 The Sleeping Beauty. 
 
 It is said that after Pope Paschal III. had made 
 Charlemagne a saint, Otho III. (anno 997) opened 
 that Emperor's tomb and found him seated on his 
 throne, with his crown, imperial robe, and sceptre, 
 and on his knees a copy of the Gospels. Beside 
 him was his sword Joyeuse, and his pilgrim's pouch. 
 
THE UNDYING ONES, 35 
 
 So Charlemagne was added to the list of holy 
 sleepers. 
 
 In another work I have spoken of these Sleepers, 
 and also of the Wanderers* The list of such, too long 
 to be given here, includes Tell, in Switzerland ; Boabdil 
 of Spain ; Sebastian of Portugal ; Olger Dansk ; 
 Thomas of Ercildoune, and many another, down to 
 such praeternatural if not perpetual sleepers as Rip 
 Van Winkle, and the Abbot Cormac of Killarney, 
 who listened two hundred years to the singing of a 
 nightingale. The Abbot had doubted if he would 
 not find the singing of heaven tiresome ; he supposed 
 he had listened to the bird a few moments only in 
 the wood, but returned to find all changed. The 
 legend has inspired one of Allingham's beautiful 
 ballads, " The Abbot of Inisfalen." Herodotus (iv. 94) 
 relates the tale of Zalmoxis, the Thracian, who, dis- 
 gusted with the uncivilised life around him, had a sub- 
 terranean hall built and there resided. Some presently 
 believed that Zalmoxis never died ; others regarded him 
 as a god ; and ultimately it became a custom of the 
 Getans to despatch a messenger, every fifth year, to 
 him, by hurling some man into the air and catching 
 
 * " Demonology and Devil-lore." (Index.) See Sir G. W. 
 Cox, " Mythology of the Aryan Nations." Keightley, " Fairy 
 Mythology," i. 74, sq. Folk-lore Record, ii. 1, sq. 
 
36 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 him on javelins. If the victim dies Zalmoxis is pro- 
 pitious. Plutarch relates a story similar to this (De 
 Defect. Orac), as told by one Cleombrotus, concerning 
 an Oriental personage who appeared among his 
 fellow-men only once a year. The rest of his life was 
 passed among friendly nymphs and demons, and as 
 these are said to have rendered him proof against 
 disease it may be supposed that he was one of the 
 undying. 
 
 Similar legends are indeed found among the 
 aboriginal races of North America. Such heroes as 
 Booin (Nova Scotia) and Hiawatha were supposed 
 never to have died. Booin was carried to a happy 
 land inside a friendly whale, whom he compensated 
 with the tobacco which the Micmacs still see smoking 
 in the spout of that animal ; and Hiawatha " sailed 
 into the purple sunset." To these good Indians 
 migrate when they die. The Incas of Peru also 
 were found believing that the founder of their 
 kingdom never died, but would return to restore its 
 ancient splendours. The Muyscas of Bogota relate 
 that the first lawgiver of Bochica lived among their 
 tribe 2000 years, then " withdrew,'' and he is now 
 known as Idacanzas.* 
 
 It is interesting to compare such primitive forms of 
 * Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 31S 
 
THE UNDYING ONES. 37 
 
 the myth with those assumed by it amid the advanced 
 phases of Animism. Tithonus, for whom Eos ob- 
 tained the gift of immortality but not that of per- 
 petual youth, whom divine pity changed into a grass- 
 hopper, became the proverbial title of a decrepit old 
 man, and represents the nearest approach to an 
 earthly immortal in Greek mythology. The immortals 
 exist indeed, but in changed forms, or even if the 
 human powers be preserved it must be in Hades, as 
 in the case of Teiresias. The Glaucus-myth, running 
 through several variants, shows the evolution of this 
 class of myths. Surviving all ordeals in Crete — 
 the sea, the cask of honey, the serpent's bite — he 
 becomes on the Corinthian coast an evil ghost, and 
 in Bceotia a marine deity. In classic ages every 
 hero has his vulnerable point where he is sure to be 
 touched at last. 
 
III. 
 
 SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 
 
 ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the myths of the 
 undying ones are found among races so widely 
 separate that they must often be of independent 
 origin, many of them are ethnically related. This is 
 the case with a series of such, now to be considered, 
 which bear upon the fable of the Wandering Jew. 
 
 The earliest myth of this character is probably 
 that of the Iranian Yima, King of the Golden Age in 
 Persia. This beautiful myth is found in the Zend- 
 avesta, and in the Vendidad which Haug traces, in 
 its earlier parts, to an antiquity not far short of 
 Zoroaster himself, not less than a thousand years 
 before our era. In the Zendavesta it is declared : 
 " During the happy reign of Yima there was neither 
 cold nor heat, neither decay nor death, nor malice 
 produced by the demons ; father and son walked 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 39 
 
 forth, each fifteen years old in appearance." With 
 Yima was Armaiti, the divine woman, genius of the 
 earth, who by promoting culture, recovering wilder- 
 nesses and converting nomadic tribes to peaceful 
 cultivators, expanded the earth to thrice its original 
 size ; and over this paradise Yima reigned nine 
 hundred years. After the evils of winter had come 
 over his country Yima led a select number of his 
 friends to a secluded spot, where they enjoy perfect 
 happiness.* Armaiti still, in Parsi faith, remained at 
 her work, upholding the earth in her maternal arms, 
 ever working against the powers of evil ; and when 
 she shall have prevailed, Yima is to come back again 
 and lead in the Golden Year. 
 
 It is an instance of the unconscious poetry of 
 humanity that this Iranian Yima is one with Yama, 
 the Vedic King of the Dead ! The idea may have 
 originally been the declining sun ;f but there are 
 other characters than darkness about the sunset ; 
 there are splendours also, and often the western 
 horizon is painted with radiant islets which to 
 primitive man seemed a part of his planet. It may 
 even have been that the westward course of human 
 migration was guided by this permanent pillar of 
 
 * Haug's Essays, etc., p. 277. 
 
 t Max Muller's Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 563. 
 
40 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Fire which every evening lit up the Hesperian 
 Gardens and Isles of the Blest. 
 
 This migration on earth and sea corresponds with 
 a mental and spiritual migration. Exploration of 
 the Edens, Gan-Edens, Avalons, Hesperides, At- 
 lantises, turns them to parts of the prosaic world 
 while it raises the ideals that hovered over them to 
 rosy cloud-lands which cannot yet be explored. 
 No Yima found anywhere on earth ! And so 
 it begins to be sung of him that he has passed 
 to some region not exactly upon earth. Now 
 it is said, this time in the Rigveda (x. 14, I, 2) : 
 "Yama, the king, the gatherer of the people, has 
 descried a path for many, which leads from the 
 depths to the heights ; he first found out a resting- 
 place from which nobody can turn out the occupants ; 
 on the way the forefathers have gone, the sons will 
 follow them." Finally, as Haug remarks : " This 
 happy ruler of the blessed in Paradise has been 
 transformed, in the modern Hindu mythology, into 
 the fearful god of death, the inexorable judge of 
 men's doings, and the punisher of the wicked." 
 
 For a long time after their constitution as a people, 
 the Jews had no definite faith in the immortality of 
 the soul, and there is no text in the Old Testament 
 which clearly teaches that doctrine. It has been 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 41 
 
 thought by some that their adoption of that doctrine 
 was coincident with their decline from greatness as a 
 nation.* Jehovah still walked amid the pleasant 
 shade-trees of Paradise, and there Enoch walked with 
 him. Out of this belief in an earthly immortality 
 grew the earlier form of belief in the life after death, 
 which insisted on corporeal resurrection. As time 
 went on, and the numbers for whom immortality 
 was claimed grew, and as exploration discovered no 
 earthly Eden in which these resided, paradise neces- 
 sarily ascended to an aerial realm. But its earthly 
 characteristics were preserved. Thence angels passed 
 to earth and back on a ladder, and thence came the 
 chariot and horses which appeared when Elias was 
 borne away by a sufficiently strong whirlwind. That 
 he was ' carried to the sky' marks, however, a step 
 away from the earthly abode, in the direction taken 
 by the myth which turned Yima to Yama. 
 
 But the Jews introduced into their belief in certain 
 undying ones an important feature, drawn from their 
 imported dualistic philosophy, which marshalled 
 everything and every being, small or large, on one 
 side or the other of the great war between Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman. Beside the hero, too holy to die, is 
 
 * See the statement by one of the interlocutors in Dr. Kalisch's 
 admirable work Path and Goal, p. 348. (Longmans, 18S0.) 
 
42 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 seen the man of sin, to whom the repose of the grave 
 is forbidden. The books of our Bible were written 
 after ancient traditions, and gathered together when 
 other ideas were predominant ; and it is rather by 
 intimations there found, and by references to rab- 
 binical and Arabian folk-lore, that we can get at these 
 primitive fables. 
 
 In the first epoch we find counterparts in Cain and 
 Seth. Even the Biblical narrative seems to point to 
 a primitive myth, in which these two were good and 
 evil immortals, which had gone to pieces before the 
 book of Genesis was compiled.* At any rate at an 
 early age the pieces had been put together by the 
 Semitic imagination. It is said (Gen. iv. 25) that Eve 
 called this her third son Seth {scion or germ) : " for," 
 she said, " God hath appointed me another seed in 
 place of Abel, whom Cain slew." The Talmudic book, 
 Skene Luchoth, says that the soul of Abel {breath) 
 passed into Seth, and again into Moses. Josephus 
 {Ant. i. 2) shows that Seth was venerated as one 
 possessed of great knowledge, which he engraved on 
 two pillars. Suidas says Seth was the first to hear 
 the name of God. In the fourth century there was a 
 
 * See Ewald's Geschichte des Volkes Israel, i. 353 (Russell 
 Martineau's Translation, p. 264, sq.). For traditions concerning 
 Seth, see also my Demonology and Devil-lore, as per Index. 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 43 
 
 sect of Sethians, who, according to Epiphanius, identi- 
 fied Seth with the Messiah (Adv. Haer. i. 3, 39). In 
 the line of Seth were born the long-lived beings, some 
 of whom lived above nine hundred years, and one of 
 whom was Enoch, who did not die at all. Many of the 
 names resemble those in the line of Cain — and were 
 no doubt taken from it — Cain-an, Mahalaleel, Jared, 
 Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech. It is evident that the 
 Seth legend was introduced to avoid having the 
 human race descend from the first murderer and type 
 of evil — Cain. 
 
 Cain was the first Wandering Jew. His name, 
 signifying a spear, and Tubal-Cain, " son of a spear," 
 first artificer in brass and iron, suggest the possibility 
 that his doom may have been that of a Semitic Pro- 
 metheus. At any rate the curse pronounced upon 
 him (" a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the 
 earth ") ; the mark (token, or perhaps weird) fixed 
 upon him, that none should slay him ; the land to 
 which he wandered, itself meaning flight (Nod) — sup- 
 plied ample materials for the mother-myth of eternal 
 Wanderers. Of Cain, however, more will be said at a 
 further stage of our inquiry. 
 
 Enoch represents the first personage of Biblical 
 record clearly corresponding to Yima. " Enoch 
 walked with Elohim and was no more [seen among 
 
44 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 men], for Elohim took him." With regard to the 
 solar character of the Enoch-myth we cannot concern 
 ourselves here. As his name indicates Enoch is the 
 Beginner, like Yima, of whom Ahuramazda says, "with 
 him I conversed first among men " (Vendidad, ii. 2). 
 It is especially noticeable that Enoch " walks " with 
 Elohim, whom we before find " walking in the garden " 
 (Gen. iii. 8). A heavenly abode is not yet imagined 
 Even the Koran, when it speaks of Enoch (Erdris), 
 hesitates to affirm his translation to heaven, but says, 
 " We exalted him to a high place." 
 
 The evil counterpart of Enoch is Lamech, who, 
 although his death at the age of 7J7 is recorded in the 
 later Sethite line, identifies himself as a deathless 
 wanderer with Cain in the lines which, as Ewald 
 thinks, probably gave rise to the Cain story 
 itselfi 
 
 Adah and Zillah, hear my voice ! 
 
 Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech ! 
 For the man I slew for my own wound, 
 
 The child I struck dead on account of my own hurt ! 
 Was Cain avenged seven times ? 
 
 Lamech will be seven and seventy times ! 
 
 In the third epoch we find Esau a restless evil 
 wanderer, fulfilling the destiny prononnced by his 
 father, gradually personifying Edom, the antagonist 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 45 
 
 of Israel. The corresponding immortal is Judah, 
 from whose hand the sceptre was not to depart till 
 Shiloh come. The death of neither of these is men- 
 tioned ; Edom and Judah remained to carry on their 
 phantasmal war to the last — as Satan and Jahve, as 
 Sammael and Michael. 
 
 The mysterious account, in Deut. xxxiv., of the 
 death of Moses, suggests the existence at some period 
 of a popular belief that he did not die in the ordinary 
 sense. It is said, by one rendering, that he died " on 
 the mouth of Jahve " ; "his eye was not dim nor his 
 natural strength abated " ; Jahve knew him " face to 
 face," and himself buried him in a valley, in a place 
 unknown to this day. According to the Talmud, 
 Enoch, Moses, and Elias, are brought up by Michael 
 to be changed into angels. (Kalisch, Comm. on O. T, 
 II. p. 307.) This association* of Moses with the two 
 who notoriously had not died is significant. In the 
 Book of " The Assumption of Moses " the demon who 
 tried to get the body of Moses, as mentioned in Jude 
 ix., is called Sammael. This had long been the name 
 for Esau-Edom ; and there is also in this coincidence 
 the intimation of an early legend which brought Moses 
 slumbering in his Moabite cave into mythological 
 relation with restless Esau, ever wandering amid the 
 dark mountains. The presence of Moses at the trans- 
 
46 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 figuration of Jesus in company with Elias, who never 
 died, would alone show that belief in his earthly im- 
 mortality had prevailed. In addition, there are intima- 
 tions of such a tradition amongthe Arabs. The Moslems 
 make pilgrimages to Neby Musa, near Jericho, as the 
 sepulchre of Moses, and their legend is as follows : 
 God had promised to leave Moses in this world until 
 he should voluntarily descend into a tomb. After 
 Moses had lived 120 years, he was one day walking 
 and saw four men (angels) excavating a chamber in a 
 rock, as, they said, a hiding-place for their king's most 
 precious treasure. The cavern offered a tempting 
 retreat from the sun's rays, and Moses reclined in it. 
 One of the workmen gave him a delicious apple. No 
 sooner had he inhaled its scent than "he fell 
 asleep."* 
 
 An evil counterpart of Moses may be found in the 
 tradition — very important to the legend of the 
 Wandering Jew, as we shall presently see — that the 
 maker of the Golden Calf was doomed to a fate much 
 like that of Cain. There arose a proverb among the 
 Jews that " no punishment befalleth the Israelites in 
 which there is not an ounce of this calf." Although 
 in the Bible the fashioning of this idol is distinctly 
 
 * Pierotli ; Customs and Traditions of Palestine. 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 47 
 
 ascribed to Aaron, he was not among the three 
 thousand slain on account of it, but was pardoned. 
 Moses says, " The Lord was very angry with Aaron to 
 have destroyed him : and I prayed for Aaron at the 
 same time " (Deut. ix. 20). Semitic Folk-lore has been 
 still more merciful to Aaron's reputation, at cost of 
 the Samaritans, and made it out that the Golden Calf 
 was fashioned by one Samiri, or Al Sameri. " The 
 devil," says Jonathan, " got into the metal and 
 fashioned it into a calf." The Koran says the calf 
 lowed, and in Arabian tradition Al Sameri took some 
 dust from the footsteps of the horse of Gabriel, who 
 rode at the head of Israel, and threw it in the calfs 
 mouth, which began to low. 
 
 Now, many of the Samaritans themselves, about the 
 first century of our era, gathered about one Dositheus 
 as their Messiah (Origen, De Princ. iv. c. 17 ; Epi- 
 phanius, Hceres. xiii.). His pretensions brought upon 
 Dositheus an order for his arrest from the Samaritan 
 high-priest, from which he escaped and hid in a cave. 
 There, according to some, he starved to death ; but 
 his followers continued to believe that he was alive 
 and would reappear. It is possible that Al Sameri 
 means " the Samaritan " — i.e. Dositheus or Dusis — 
 and that he thus became the mythical scapegoat for 
 Aaron's offence. G. Weil (The Bible, the Koran, and 
 
48 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the Talmud) says : " Moses then summoned Samiri, 
 and would have put him to death instantly, but Allah 
 directed that he should be sent into banishment. 
 Ever since that time he roams like a wild beast 
 throughout the world ; everyone shuns him and puri- 
 fies the ground on which his feet have stood ; and he 
 himself, whenever he approaches men, exclaims : 
 " Touch me not !" 
 
 In the Koran (Sale, xx.) it is declared that Moses 
 said to Al Sameri, " Get thee gone ; for thy punish- 
 ment in this life shall be that thou shalt say unto 
 those who shall meet thee, Touch me not!" Al 
 Beidawi is quoted by Sale as interpreting this to mean 
 that infection would follow the touch, but to Al 
 Sameri ; ultimately, however, the fear was on the other 
 side. It was believed that Al Sameri repaired to an 
 island in the Red Sea, where his wretched descendants 
 dwell, and whence issue plagues. Whenever a ship 
 comes near the inhabitants raise the warning cry, 
 " Touch me not !" 
 
 Al Beidawi also says that Al Sameri's real name 
 was Moses, or Musa Ebn Dhafar, which seems to 
 suggest that he was regarded as the counterpart of 
 Moses ; and also as a source of pestilence he would be 
 the opposite of Moses, whose medical skill was 
 famous. 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 49 
 
 Although it may anticipate somewhat the later 
 developments of our myth, it may be well to suggest 
 here the probability that the traditional idea, pre- 
 served in the romance of Eugene Sue and elsewhere, 
 that the Wandering Jew carried the plague from city 
 to city, may have been connected with this legendary 
 Red Sea Island. Its real origin may have been in 
 the actual diseases bred in the wretched quarters in 
 which Jews were crowded by a suicidal inhumanity, and 
 from which every Jewish traveller and trader had to go. 
 
 The next undying one is Elias. The idea of 
 Jahve's earthly abode had grown dim, at least, and 
 Eden had begun to ascend amid the roseate clouds 
 when this legend was formed. The terrestrial chariot 
 and horses are present, but a whirlwind is needed to 
 carry them with the prophet to heaven. The narra- 
 tive seems meant to admit of either theory — a heavenly 
 or an earthly paradise. There Elias remained as a 
 kind of JEolus, literally as on earth a weather-pro- 
 phet ; and to this day in Greece, and many parts of 
 the East, when a severe storm with lightning arises, 
 the peasants say, " Elias goes forth in his chariot !"* 
 
 * When the abyss between biblical and other mythology has 
 ceased to be so convenient, perhaps there may be traced some 
 connection between the ravens that fed Elias and those birds 
 of Odin that circle around Raven's Hill where Barbarossa sleeps ; 
 and also between Elias and our folk-tales of ^Eolus. 
 
50 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 In folk-lore Elias unites in himself characteristics 
 both of the Sleepers and Wanderers. In some regions 
 he is supposed to have employed his leisure in paradise 
 with writing, a book. In Moslem legend he is a 
 Wanderer. A powerful sheikh, they say, wished to 
 utilise the miraculous gifts of Elias, and had him 
 chained. The tyrant led him over his lands because 
 his " footsteps were blessed," but at the prophet's every 
 step the fields withered. The sheikh was about to 
 slay Elias, when the prophet asked permission to 
 quench his thirst at what is now called the " sealed 
 fountain," near Bethlehem. The tyrant held the chain 
 which, however, elongated itself : the bonds fell off, 
 the rock closed behind him, and since then Elias " has 
 continued to travel over the whole world, rendering 
 every place verdant on which he treads." The 
 " sealed fountain " of the rains, which only Elias could 
 unseal in the time of drouth, would appear in this 
 myth to feel its relation with the Sun. One need not 
 wonder that Dr. Schliemann found a Greek church 
 
 consecrated to Elias on the site of a temple of 
 Helios.* 
 
 * It would be an interesting 'question, but one that cannot be 
 discussed here, to consider how far the idea of eternal Wan- 
 derers may have been primarily connected with the ever-return- 
 ing heavenly bodies. Ewald and Goldziher agree that the years 
 of Enoch's visible life, 365, indicate the solar year. Ewald 
 thinks he was probably a god of the New Year. 
 
SOURCES OF THE MYTH. 51 
 
 The Dualism which in the Semitic Mythology di- 
 vided the undying ones into good and evil, is generally 
 found in the corresponding traditions of other regions. 
 We find good and evil counterparts in Barbarossa and 
 Wodan ; in the Wild Huntsman, and faithful Eckhardt 
 who warns of his approach ; in King Arthur wander- 
 ing as a raven, contrasted with Merlin, bound for 
 ever in his prison of air by the spell of Vivien ; in 
 the German Monk Felix (who, like Abbot Cormac, 
 listened for centuries to the singing bird, W. Grimm, 
 Altdeutsche Walder, ii. 70), with King Herla, who 
 was similarly bewitched by the evil dwarf to whose 
 wedding he went ; in Siegfried, with Van der Decken, 
 who swore his ship should round the Cape, " despite 
 God or Devil, if it took till judgment," and is now 
 the Flying Dutchman ; in Tannhauser, with Lohen- 
 grin ; in Ogier among the fairies of Morgana, with 
 the G ros Veneur ; in the Seven Sleepers of Tows, 
 with Hugo wandering beside their grotto. 
 
 4— i 
 
IV. 
 
 THE LEGENDS GENERALISED. 
 
 If we examine well the account in the Zendavesta 
 of the paradise wherein Yima walked with Ahuram- 
 azda, and that in Genesis of Eden where Enoch 
 walked with Elohim, we can hardly fail to recognise 
 in them the germ of the Messianic dream. The 
 visions of the renovated earth described by Philo, 
 and in the Sibylline Oracles, and in the Apocalypse 
 of Baruch, are but realistic expansions of those 
 happy retreats of the holy ones who were not sup- 
 posed to taste corruption.* In this idealised earth 
 were gathered the beauties and joys of many 
 Gulistans. 
 
 And, similarly, he who was to reign over the im- 
 paradised in this perfected earth v/as to be an im- 
 
 * See Professor Drummond's " The Jewish Messiah," etc. 
 In Haug's Essays will be found a full account of Yima and his 
 earthly paradise. 
 
THE LEGENDS GENERALISED. 53 
 
 mortal king returning from his Avalon, invested with 
 the attributes of all the incorruptible. These had 
 been gradually raised into an abstract personality — 
 the "Angel-Messiah," to which Mr. Ernest de Bunsen 
 has given such patient research with many interesting 
 results — who, however, was purely a terrestrial being, 
 a Son of Man. 
 
 The phrase " Ancient of Days," used three times in 
 Daniel vii., and the snow-white hair there ascribed to 
 that being, who gives dominion to the Son of Man 
 brought before him, convey the idea of a being that 
 has lived through all changes, a memory and conscious- 
 ness in which the ages broken up to mortal eyes are 
 knit together, and therefore able to be a providence 
 and a retributive judge. Viceroy of this Ancient of 
 Days is the immortal man in whose unbroken con- 
 sciousness all history is embodied : he is the earthly 
 providence. Before Abraham was, he is. He abides 
 with the Ancient in his earthly dwelling, but goes 
 forth at appointed periods for certain purposes. He 
 is the " Son of Man " as distinguished from the sons 
 of Kings ; reigns not by succession but by election of 
 the Deity manifested in signs and marvels, such as the 
 carrier dove bringing the divine sanction to emperors 
 who break the order of legitimacy. No incarnation 
 was imagined ; the avatars of this Son of Man are the 
 
54 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Apparitions of one always in the earth, but able to 
 render himself invisible, or who assumes an humble dis- 
 guise. This disguise may be thrown off occasionally 
 in some solitary place, for a select few who are charged 
 with secresy. 
 
 This Messiah gathered up in his person the powers 
 and glories of past saints and heroes, and it was expected 
 that these would attend him at the supreme scene of 
 his coronation on earth. Elias was to appear as his 
 herald. In Seder 'Olam Rabbah it is said, " In the 
 second year of the reign of Ahaziah, Elias became 
 hidden, [to be] seen no more until King Messiah shall 
 come, when he will be again seen, and hidden a 
 second time, and not seen again until Gog and Magog 
 come. And now he writes down the work of all the 
 generations." It was asked of John the Baptist " Art 
 thou Elias?" and next "Art thou that prophet?" 
 Who was this prophet popularly thus associated with 
 Messianic expectations ? Professor Drummond sug- 
 gests that it was Jeremiah, and cites the vision of 
 Judas Maccabseus, in which he saw, beside Onias the 
 high-priest, " a man with grey hairs and exceeding 
 glorious," who was declared to be Jeremiah, " who 
 offers many prayers for the people and the holy city." 
 Jeremiah gave Judas a golden sword, and told him to 
 wound the adversaries. 
 
THE LEGENDS GENERALISED. 55 
 
 On the nether side of this Messianic dream we find 
 a pit or underworld — some region which could not 
 mar the fair face of the perfect earth — which is an 
 outcome of the wilderness of Dendain, Cain's Land, 
 every weird desolation. And the king of this region 
 sums up in himself the line of eternal evil wanderers 
 — Cain, Lamech, Esau, Samuel — in a personification 
 of hostility to the Messiah. This generalised Oppo- 
 sition — called Armillus among the Jews, Al Dajjail 
 by the Mussulmans — corresponds exactly with 
 Antichrist among the early Christians. It was said 
 Armillus was to be born out of a marble statue in a 
 church at Rome (the ne plus ultra of earthly in- 
 fernalism to a race detesting graven images and vic- 
 timised by Rome), and that Christendom would 
 worship him until the true Messias (Ben David) 
 should appear, and, as says the Targum (Isa. xi. 4) 
 " By the word of his mouth the wicked Armillus shall 
 die." 
 
V. 
 
 TRANSFIGURATION. 
 
 THOUGH the alleged longevity of the Jewish patri- 
 archs temporarily made up for the absence of the 
 conception of immortality, this idea arrived. The 
 representatives of Seth live above an average of 
 nine centuries each, with one remarkable excep- 
 tion : Enoch, the best of them, lives less than half 
 the years of the least. Whatever may have been 
 the original reason for this exception, the explana- 
 tion was that Enoch really outstripped even the 
 969 years of Methuselah, having never died at 
 all. In paradise he would have access to the Tree 
 of Life. In the farther development of Israel other 
 " beginners " — as Moses representing Law, and Elias 
 Prophecy — might eclipse Enoch, and wear "by 
 authority" his mantle of immortality ; but in popular 
 faith and folk-lore Enoch held his own. He was said 
 to have invented writing, arithmetic, and astronomy ; 
 
TRANSFIGURATION. 57 
 
 to have filled 300 volumes with the knowledge acquired 
 by long residence among the angels ; his first being a 
 book predicting the Deluge, which was preserved by 
 Noah in the Ark. In many respects Enoch resembles 
 Teiresias, to whom Zeus granted a life on earth of 
 seven or nine generations, and who even in Hades 
 was said by Homer to have retained his human 
 perception, while those around him were mere shades 
 (Plato, Meno, 100).* His fame as a soothsayer, both 
 on earth and in Hades, grew out of the belief in his 
 long experience, and no doubt this was the case with 
 Enoch also. Most folk-sayings and predictions were 
 connected with Enoch as forged runes and verses 
 are now attributed to Mother Shipton. (It will be 
 remembered that the first English book on this theme 
 was entitled The Wandering Jew telling fortunes to 
 Englishmen, 1640.) It might have been supposed 
 that Enoch would be present at the Transfiguration 
 of Jesus. Paul had spoken of him with honour ; 
 Jude quoted from him ; and it is probable that he 
 was meant as one of the " two witnesses " alluded 
 
 * The blindness ascribed to Teiresias presents a curious 
 coincidence with that attributed to Lamech in Legendary Art, 
 which leads to his accidentally killing Cain with an arrow. In 
 both cases the significance probably is that of one who is blind 
 to immediate consequences while seeing or carrying out the 
 decrees of Fate. 
 
58 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 to in Rev. xi. 3. In the Gospel of Nicodtfmus the 
 "two witnesses" are Enoch and Elias, who wel- 
 come those arriving in Paradise. 
 
 That Moses was substituted for Elias at the Trans- 
 figuration was probably due to the strong hold which 
 the " Book of Enoch " had taken on the Jewish mind. 
 In this work there are indications that among some 
 Jews Enoch himself had become connected with the 
 Messianic hope. The writer, personating Enoch and 
 speaking in his name, describes his journey through 
 heaven and hell; thus, in the second century B.C. 
 anticipating the journeys and visions of Lucian, 
 Mohammed, Arda Viraf, Dante, and Swedenborg. 
 He is attended by an angel, and he is named and 
 appointed the Son of Man. "That angel came to 
 me, and with his voice greeted me and said, Thou art 
 the Son of Man who is born to righteousness ; and 
 righteousness dwells over thee, and the righteousness 
 of the Head of Days leaves thee not." That a claim 
 for Enoch's Messiaship is intended appears in the 
 event then described. Enoch's body melts away, and 
 his spirit is transformed into a heavenly body. Enoch 
 had described the glory of the renovated earth ; but 
 he himself, assuming him alive, would be some 2000 
 years old. No legend said he had been endowed with 
 perpetual youth ; consequently to reign over a re- 
 
TRANSFIGURATION. 59 
 
 juvenated earth he must be rejuvenated himself. Such 
 a notion could only, at that time, have survived among 
 the ignorant ; but it is to them that new " schools " 
 have to make their appeal, and in the transfigura- 
 tion of Enoch the old idea, though spiritualised, is re- 
 garded. 
 
 The phrase of the Book of Enoch, " Head of Days," 
 is a remarkable modification of Daniel's " Ancient of 
 Days." It almost looks as if, — assuming Ewald's 
 theory that Enoch (Beginner) was a god of the New 
 Year, — this earliest of the immortals were still invested 
 with more than patriarchal sanctity. As a Janus 
 or Ganeca (with whom Ewald compares him) Enoch 
 would himself be the Head of Days, thus as it were 
 the Ancient of Days dialed on time. The idea of co- 
 eternal existence is suggested, but also of an Un- 
 changeable and a Changeable. 
 
 It must be remembered that we are considering 
 ideas which, however poetical, are based on fancies 
 of the world's childhood. The transformation of 
 Enoch under the angel's spell belongs to the same 
 class as the transformations which Yuletide evokes 
 for the delight of the young from our own German 
 Mythology, in which deforming spells are broken, 
 handsome princes step forth from bears or dwarfs, 
 decrepit crones become fair maidens, and Cinderellas 
 
60 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 rise from their ashes and rags in shining raiment and 
 beauty. 
 
 When the Jewish legends were transferred to the 
 Gentile world this incident (of transfiguration) was 
 detached from the patriarch and connected with the 
 generalised type of Israel which represented the 
 popularisation of its faith among other races. 
 Probably the Transfiguration, concerning which 
 secrecy was demanded, was first whispered about 
 in the Jewish quarters of Rome. In the New Testa- 
 ment narrative the Transfiguration comes as a 
 tableau at the end of a conversation immediately 
 bearing upon the subject of the undying ones. 
 After being told, in answer to his question, that 
 some thought he was John the Baptist (in whose 
 death probably his followers refused to believe), 
 others thought him Elias, others Jeremiah, Jesus 
 asked, " But whom say ye that I am ?" Peter said, 
 " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
 This was the Christian equivalent of the address of 
 the Angel to Enoch, quoted above. Jesus then as- 
 sumes the Messiaship ; founds his church, declares 
 his future course and office, and ends by transferring 
 to the patriarchs of the new kingdom the mantle of 
 earthly immortality worn by the Jewish patriarchs. 
 " Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here 
 
TRANSFIGURATION. 61 
 
 which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of 
 Man coming in his kingdom." The next thing related 
 is the Transfiguration. " His face did shine as the 
 sun, and his raiment was white as the light." Luke 
 says, " The fashion of his countenance was altered, 
 and his face was white and glistering." Beside him 
 are Moses and Elias, whose office as surviving witnesses 
 is falling upon their successors — James (here the 
 brother of Jesusj, who was miraculously supported 
 without food from the crucifixion until after the 
 resurrection, and after death rose again for an im- 
 portant legendary career ; and John, who was to 
 "tarry" till Christ should come* Peter could only 
 survive by proxy : it would have been inconvenient to 
 have him often interfering with the arrangements of 
 his successor, as in the one case of his reappearance, 
 when he supplanted a Bishop in consecrating the first 
 Abbot of Westminster, leaving the Deans thereof 
 perilously independent ever since. As Enoch was 
 omitted from the scene because he was a rival Messiah, 
 Peter received no mantle of immortality because he 
 might become an invisible rival Vicar. 
 
 * Mrs. Jameson (Sacred and Legendary Art, i., 208) has 
 given fully the legend of St. James. In the year 936 he appeared 
 to King Ramirez in Spain promising him a victory over the 
 Moors, and, on the following day, he (St. James) appeared at 
 the head of the army on a milk-white horse, when sixty thousand 
 Moors were slain ; hence the Spanish war-cry " Santiago." 
 
62 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 The transfigured representative of the " Head of 
 Days" was there, but not the transfigured world. 
 The event was as a rehearsal ; the actual perform- 
 ance had to be postponed for a thousand years. The 
 hopes of those who had expected to see the thorn- 
 crown changed to a coronet and the crucified Jew 
 appearing, resplendent with the aureole of Moses and 
 the chariot of Elias, to enter on his kingdom, faded 
 away. It was replaced by the rumours that Jesus 
 and a few chosen friends were invisibly moving near, 
 and would befriend the faithful unto the millennial 
 hour. Then they should all awaken from what, for 
 believers who had eaten the vitalising body and 
 blood of Christ, would be but a sleep. 
 
 Animistic philosophy in the second century was 
 such as to admit of the transient death of a Messiah 
 provided his body was not supposed to be left long 
 enough under ground to taste corruption. The 
 Psalm (xvi. 10) said, " Thou wilt not suffer thy holy 
 one to see corruption ;" but, as in the case of Alcestis, 
 a human being might live again if wrested from death 
 by the third day. In the case of Lazarus the miracle 
 consisted in the recovery of life after the body had 
 been buried four days. The resurrection of Christ, so 
 far from being a proof of human immortality, mani- 
 festly means that Jesus did not die in the ordinary 
 
TRANSFIGURATION. 63 
 
 sense, but recovered in the sepulchre the ghost he had 
 breathed out on the cross. In theological statement 
 he might be thought of as dwelling in heaven ; but 
 for a long time his ascension into heaven was as 
 much an excursion as his descent into hell ; in both 
 he but went through the rdle of Enoch, and in 
 Christian folk-tales he was still "always with them," 
 moving near, as when he met Peter near Rome, where 
 his foot-prints are still worshipped.* 
 
 That which was Job's aspiration had become the 
 humble Christian's faith. Unable amid perishing 
 nature to believe that one who died could live 
 again, Job wishes that he could be hid "in the 
 under-world," concealed for " an appointed time, then 
 remembered." All the days of his hard time there he 
 would await his " change." And finally he does believe 
 that his Vindicator will secure something like this ; 
 not that he expects to live for ever, but, however 
 wasted his body, he will live long enough to see 
 Elohim no longer an adversary, but on his side. 
 With Paul this belief has arrived at the phase of 
 comparing the human body to a seed which rises to a 
 flower. After the alleged resurrection of Jesus it was 
 evidently important to show that it was the same 
 
 * The sacred footprints of Christ are also pointed out on the 
 Mount of Olives, and at Poitiers, Aries, Fecamp, Rheims, and 
 Soissons. 
 
64 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 body, even to its wounds, but at the same time so 
 transformed that it was with difficulty recognised, and 
 was mistaken for a spirit. In the Gospel according to 
 the Hebrews (Nicholson, p. 68) it Is written, after the 
 story of James living without food until he saw Jesus 
 risen from the dead, that "when he (Jesus) came 
 to those about Peter, he said to them, 'Take, feel 
 me, and see that I am not a bodiless dsmon.' " 
 Ignatius, who preserved this, says (Ep. ad Smyrnceos, 
 c. iii.), "I both know that he was in the 'flesh after 
 the resurrection and believe that he is [in it]. . . . 
 And straightway they touched him and believed, being' 
 constrained by his flesh and spirit Because of 
 this they thought lightly even of death, and were 
 found superior to death. And after the resurrection 
 he ate and drank with them as one in the flesh 
 though spiritually united to the Father." 
 
 The main difficulty about earthly immortality, pre- 
 sented in the shrivelled form of Tithonus, solved in 
 Enoch's case by transfiguration, was settled in later 
 mythologies by the theory of a fountain of Perpetual 
 Youth. When Ponce de Leon heard of the New 
 World he hastened thither to find this Fountain : in 
 the depths of luxuriant Florida he searched, and 
 never reappeared. 
 
VI. 
 
 MANTLES OF THE IMMORTALS. 
 
 We have already seen that in the Gospel of Nicodemus 
 (xxv.), Enoch and Elias are represented as welcoming 
 those who arrive in Paradise. In an Arabian legend 
 Grasse finds an important form of this tradition. It is 
 said that Enoch and Elias came to the Land of Dark- 
 ness, and there drank of the fountain of Perpetual 
 Youth ; and thenceforth, one on land, the other on sea, 
 they went about to watch over pilgrims, much the same 
 as Castor and Pollux, who guarded wanderers. In the 
 intervals of such services they rest in gardens amid all 
 earthly joys. Towards the end of the world they will 
 appear to prepare the way for the Messiah. But in the 
 sixteenth year of the Hegira, Elias had not yet found 
 the Fountain. When the Arabians had conquered a 
 certain city they rested between two mountains of 
 Syria. At night when Fadilah, their commander, 
 
 5 
 
66 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 began to pray, " Allah Akbar," a voice pronounced 
 the words and continued to the end of the prayer. 
 Fadilah at first thought it an echo, but presently knew 
 it could not be such, and appealed to him who had 
 spoken, if man and not a ghost, to appear. Then an 
 aged man with a staff appeared, and said, " I am here 
 by command of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has left 
 me in this world until his second coming. Therefore 
 I await this Lord who is the source of all happiness." 
 He gave his name as Zerib Ben Bar Elia. Fadilah 
 having asked if the end of the world were near or far, 
 Elia answered, "When there shall be no difference 
 in sex between men and women ; when the blood of 
 innocents shall be shed ; when abundance of food 
 shall not lessen its price; when the poor beg alms 
 without finding anything to live on ; when love to 
 man shall be lost ; when the Holy Scriptures shall be 
 put into songs ; when temples dedicated to the true 
 God are filled with idols — then be sure that the Day 
 of Judgment is near !" Whereupon the old man dis- 
 appeared.* 
 
 Occasionally the cant of persons pretending to be 
 
 the Wandering Jew has faintly echoed this Eastern 
 
 specimen. As for the " two witnesses," it may be 
 
 remembered that we have already noticed (I.) efforts 
 
 * Herbelot : Bibl,~ Orient, iii. p. 607 (ref. by Crasse). 
 
MANTLES OF THE IMMORTALS. 67 
 
 made in the seventeenth century to prove that two 
 survivors from the time of the Crucifixion existed. 
 This could be done by regarding Cartaphilus (' the 
 famous Joseph ') and Ahasuerus as different persons. 
 Or it may have been that Joseph and Malchus were 
 thought of, especially in Italy, where these seem to 
 have been the corresponding figures. 
 
 Jewish superstitions of this character were rein- 
 forced from another direction. The Greeks had their 
 legend of the long sleep of Epimenides on the Isle of 
 Knossus. Epimenides being one of the Seven Sages, 
 there might easily grow from his legend that of the 
 Seven Sleepers. 
 
 The familiar form of this legend is that given by 
 Gibbon (xxxiii), who follows Gregory of Tours, as an 
 incident of the Decian persecution. It is also in the 
 Koran (xviii.). Goethe follows the Koran mainly in 
 his poem on the subject, but assigns the legend to a 
 pre-Christian period, no doubt on good grounds. 
 According to this version the Sleepers were youths of 
 Caesar's household who refused to worship that emperor 
 when he proclaimed himself a god ; saying they would 
 worship him alone who had created the sun, moon, 
 and stars. Thereupon they departed, but Caesar pur- 
 sued them ; and when they had taken refuge in a 
 cavern near Ephesus, the emperor walled up the en- 
 
 5—2 
 
58 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 trance, so that they could not escape. After the 
 lapse of some centuries the wall gave way, and one of 
 them entered Ephesus to buy bread. He offered an 
 ancient coin ; was suspected of having found treasure ; 
 but by telling of various things hidden about the city, 
 unknown before, the story of the miraculous slumber 
 was confirmed. When the king and others went out 
 to visit the youths, the Angel Gabriel appeared, 
 closed the cavern, and led the Seven into Paradise. 
 According to the version which Goethe used, one of 
 the Seven was a faithful dog which had accom- 
 panied the six young men, and passed into paradise 
 with them.* 
 
 The tale of the Wanderings of Odysseus would 
 appear to have touched the Spanish variant of the 
 Seven Sleepers myth, which probably influenced the 
 tnind of Columbus. According to this story, Seven 
 Bishops, flying from persecution, sailed westward and 
 reached a beautiful island where they built seven 
 splendid cities. This was dreamed of as the ' Island 
 of the Seven Cities ' (Baring-Gould, Curious MytJis y 
 ii. 277). A legend told by Washington Irving 
 
 * A curious instance of the supremacy of the artist over the 
 man, when Goethe's horror of dogs is remembered. Goethe 
 threw up his connection with Weimar Theatre because Carl 
 August insisted on admitting, to 'perform' on the stage, the 
 animal which this poem introduces into Paradise. 
 
MANTLES OF THE IMMORTALS. 69 
 
 relates that Don Fernando was wafted to this 
 island, where he dwelt in great happiness, until he one 
 day sank into unconsciousness. When he awakened 
 from this Circe spell, he found himself on his ship 
 near the Iberian coast. He repaired to the house of 
 a lady to whom he was affianced ; she disclaimed all 
 knowledge of him ; and when he addressed her by 
 name it appeared that he was thinking of her great- 
 grandmother, whom she closely resembled.* 
 
 These mingled Greek and Jewish traditions came 
 into Christendom mainly through the words Jesus is 
 reported to have said concerning John, " If I will that 
 he tarry till I come." It was on St. John that the 
 mantle of the undying saints first fell in the Christian 
 period. The place of his slumber was located beside 
 that of the Seven Sleepers, at Ephesus. The story 
 stands well-framed in the fossil English of the four- 
 teenth century traveller, Sir John Maundeville. 
 
 " From Pathmos men gon unto Ephesim, a fair 
 citie, and nyghe to the see. And there dyede Seyntc 
 Johne and was buryed behynde the highe Awtiere, in 
 a Toumbe. And there is a fair Chirche. For Christene 
 
 f This legend may, in turn, have helped to create the figure 
 of Don Juan, the unsaintly Wanderer whose story is possibly 
 related to the mythology we are considering. There are 
 interesting suggestions in Le Sage's Diable Boiteux, but the 
 figure of Don Juan awaits further study. 
 
7o THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Mere weren wont to holden that place aiweyes. And 
 in the Tombe of Seynt John is noughte but Manna, 
 that is clept Angeles Mete. For his Body v. as trans- 
 lated in to Paradys. And Turkes holden now alle 
 that Place and the citee and the Chirche. And ail 
 Asie the lesse is y cleped Turkye. And zee shulle 
 undrestonde, that Seynt Johne leet make his Grave 
 there in his Lyfe, and leyd him self there inne alle 
 quyk And therefore somme Men seyn, that he dyed 
 noughte, but that he restethe there till ten Day of 
 Doom. And forsothe there is a gret Marveyle : For 
 Men may see there the Erthe of the Tombe apertly 
 many tymes steren and meven, as there weren quykke 
 thinges undre." 
 
 The legends concerning Saint John given by St 
 Hippolyte, followed by Eusebius, and Augustine, and 
 the ordeals he survived — such as drinking hemlock — 
 were suggestive of the potency of the words spoken 
 by Christ, however casually, " Tarry till I come." The 
 same formula spoken to the Wandering Jew made 
 him as indestructible as the disciple " whom Jesus 
 loved." Despite the ingenuity of the theory, one can 
 hardly doubt that M. Schoebel is right in supposing 
 that the Wanderer's early name, Cartaphilus, is formed 
 of the Greek xdpra <pi\o<;, signifying " the Beloved." 
 
VII. 
 
 THE MARK OF CAIN. 
 
 In the Oberammergau Passion Play, where scenes 
 from the New Testament are preceded by tableaux 
 from the Old, Cain killing Abel is made to foreshadow 
 Judas betraying Jesus. In some Eastern lands Cain 
 has always been regarded as a Wanderer still living ; 
 and to this day the Bedouin recognises his presence in 
 the hot Khamseen (Cain-wind), as in the destructive 
 hurricane the Picardy peasant exclaims, "C'est le Juif 
 errant qui passe." For a long time, indeed, Cain was 
 supposed to be the Wandering Jew, and possibly this 
 belief was thought of by Shakspeare (King Richard II., 
 v. 6) in the words of Bolingbroke to Exton : 
 
 " With Cain go wander through the shade of night, 
 And never show thy head by day nor light." 
 
 In Tabari (i. 30), Adam says : 
 
 " We one have had in the midst of us whom death hath not 
 yet found. 
 No peace for him, no rest for him, treading the blood- 
 drenched ground.' 
 
72 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 The so-called ' mark ' of Cain was conceived to be 
 a physical sign, and this appears in the legend of the 
 Wandering Jew : he was said to have the mark of a 
 blood-red cross on his forehead. Xeniola says the 
 Inquisition sought to secure him by this sign, but the 
 Wanderer concealed it under a black bandage. 
 
 In Rabbinical superstition Cain was not the son 
 of Adam but of Sammael, the later demon derived 
 from wandering Esau. He (Cain) was banished to the 
 Wilderness of Dendain, where his companions are 
 Behemoth and Leviathan, who harm him not, though 
 they are ever fattened by devouring wicked mortals 
 in order that they ma)' supply food for the righteous 
 amid the desolations preceding the last day. 
 
 As Cain wandered in a wilderness to the east of 
 Eden, in distinction from Seth, who dwelt in a fair 
 region of the west, so while St. John was bodily alive 
 in his paradise, Judas " went to his own place." As 
 Cain was son of Sammael, Satan "entered into" Judas. 
 
 The obvious evil counterpart of John was Judas. 
 The two had sat nearest Jesus at the Last Supper, and 
 had come in contact with his immortalising flesh — one 
 by leaning on his breast, the other by a treacherous kiss. 
 A more potent security against death lay in the imme- 
 diate way in which Jesus gave to both the bread and 
 wine, of which he said, "he that eateth my flesh and 
 
THE MARK Of CAIN. 
 
 drinketh my blood shall never die." This was indeed 
 given to all of the disciples, and it was — still is — the 
 Christian theory that they who partake of the Eucharist 
 do not die, but " fall asleep." But there were always 
 degrees of quickening effect in this communion. Thus, 
 the Seven Sleepers of Tours, who came to that city to 
 receive the benediction of St. Martin, received from him 
 the Eucharist, and afterwards sank into an unconscious- 
 ness from which they never awoke. Their bodies 
 remained, with all the external appearance of life in 
 their seven graves, still shown in front of their grotto.* 
 It is doubtful whether any such person as Judas ever 
 lived. The name is the Greek form of Judah, and the 
 traitor may be a personification of the kingdom which 
 refused to part with the sceptre at the demand of the 
 Christian's " Shiloh," before whom alone, in the words 
 of Jacob, Judah was to surrender. It may also be that 
 this hostility was assigned the form of treachery, be- 
 cause of a real Judas who, according to Josephus, 
 betrayed a fortress of Jerusalem to the army of Titus. 
 
 * The present grotto was built in 1S79. The old one, which 
 I saw the year before, had on its ceiling faint frescoes of the 
 sun, moon, and stars — recalling the legend of the Seven 
 Sleepers of Ephesus who turned their backs on Divus Caesar, 
 saying they would worship him alone who made the sun, moon, 
 and stars. The angel Gabriel, who led them into Paradise, 
 guided them mythologically to Touraine, of old called " the Para- 
 dise of France." 
 
74 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 However this may be, even the circumstantial account 
 in the New Testament of his death could not save 
 Judas from becoming one of the evil wanderers. 
 
 But this fate of Judas was postponed because of cir- 
 cumstances which brought a more important agent of 
 Antichrist to the front. While Rome was yet pagan, 
 and the Christians suffering there, the Man of Sin con- 
 fronting the Son of Man wbuld naturally be visible 
 there. The mark of Cain is seen as the mark of the 
 Beast, and the forehead of the Beast was Nero. It so 
 happened that among the Romans themselves there 
 prevailed, for some time after his death, a belief that 
 Nero had not really died. The fears of some, the pride 
 of others, forbade them to believe that this powerful 
 representative of the throne of the Caesars was no more, 
 and they looked for his return to give battle to the 
 rising kingdom of the Nazarene.* 
 
 But when Rome had been converted to Chris- 
 tianity, it became necessary to transfer the role of 
 Antichrist to some race which still refused to surrender 
 to the new kingdom. 
 
 * This legend has been discussed by Mr. Call, in an essay- 
 already referred to (p. 30). From references kindly supplied by 
 him, I incline to believe it of Eastern origin. It is mentioned 
 by Tacitus (Hist. ii. 81), and by the Sibylline Oracles (iv.), at 
 nearly the same period. Suetonius, Commodianus, Victorinus, 
 and Sulpicias Severus, were familiar with the story that Nero 
 was still alive. Neander, Merivale, and Canon Farrar, connect 
 the legend with the formation of the theory of an Antichrist. 
 
THE MARK OF CAIN. 
 
 75 
 
 The one unconquerable race — outside Rome, where 
 the poor Jews had found their need of an immediate 
 revolution too strong for their sufferance and loyalty 
 to old traditions — was the Jewish. This people could 
 be tortured, driven from land to land under the curse 
 of Cain, but not converted to Christianity. Then 
 attention returned from Nero to Judas. 
 
 There was an ancient story about Cain, reproduced 
 in the Koran, but no doubt following- the much earlier 
 rabbinical tradition before mentioned, that the Devil 
 came to Eve in a dream, when she was pregnant with 
 her first son, and persuaded her to call the child by a 
 name which meant " servant of Satan." In the course 
 of time a somewhat similar legend grew around the 
 phantasmal Judas. It was said that the mother of 
 Judas had a dream shortly before his birth, in which it 
 was disclosed to her that her son would murder his 
 father and sell his God. She and her husband there- 
 upon resolved that the child should not live, and at his 
 birth he was enclosed in a chest and cast into the sea. 
 But the sea cast him on shore, and he was found by a 
 king and queen, who adopted him. But they had 
 another son, whom Judas slew during a quarrel over a 
 game of chess. Thereupon he fled to Judea,and entered 
 the service of Pilate as his page. Having committed 
 other predestined crimes, including the murder of his 
 
76 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 father, Judas learned from his mother the secret of his 
 birth, and of the dream that preceded it. In terror 
 and contrition, Judas hears of a prophet who has power 
 to forgive sins ; he seeks out Jesus, throws himself at 
 his feet ; and Jesus, recognising his predestined be- 
 trayer, accepts him as a disciple, and entrusts him with 
 the purse, so that Judas's avarice might be cultivated 
 and this peculiarly divine scheme should not fail. 
 Judas was thus made a retrospective Wanderer. 
 
 In old Greek and Russian pictures, Judas is repre- 
 sented on the knees of Satan as his beloved son, 
 beside the serpent which appears to be the dove in 
 this infernal trinity ; but this Christian fable about 
 Judas would seem to show Satan indebted to Jesus 
 for his beloved son's training in wickedness. 
 
 That, according to the New Testament, Judas had 
 grief and remorse, and expiated his offence by death, 
 might naturally have awakened some compassionate 
 feeling for him, or sense of his humanity. But in the 
 mediaeval faith this grief and remorse were not in him, 
 they were Furies sent to torment him. In the old 
 Passion Plays Remorse is a real personage, who 
 torments Judas until he invokes Despair, who lays 
 before him poison, a dagger, and a rope to choose 
 from. Nor was Christian logic equal to the consis- 
 tency of Disraeli's contention that, according to the 
 
THE MARK OF CA1X. 
 
 faith, the betrayal and crucifixion, being essential to 
 salvation, were compulsory on Judas and the Jews. 
 
 It will be remembered that the earliest recorded 
 Wandering Jew, Cartaphilus, informed the Armenian 
 Bishop that he had been Pilate's doorkeeper. By 
 this item he is linked with the legendary Judas, who 
 is said to have been a page in Pilate's palace. It may 
 now be remarked that Pilate also was the subject of a 
 somewhat similar legend. There are two classes of 
 legends concerning him. In the Abyssinian Church 
 Pilate became a martyr and a saint, his calendar da}- 
 being June 25. But in the south of Europe the story 
 ran that Pilate became a remorseful Wanderer. He 
 committed suicide by drowning himself in a tarn on 
 Mount Pilate, near Lucerne. It is a myth, as Professor 
 Sayce has shown, evolved from the old name of the 
 mountain — "Pileatus," meaning capped (either with 
 foliage or cloud*). That little lake has lost all its 
 
 * Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 246. "It 
 is remarkable," adds Professor Sayce, " that a French range of 
 hills in the neighbourhood of Vienne bears the same name as 
 the Swiss mountain, and from the same cause. Vienne, how- 
 ever was actually the place to which Pilate was banished ; and 
 the accidental coincidence is a striking example of the im- 
 possibility of our discovering historic truth in a myth, although 
 we may know from other sources that it has accidentally 
 attached itself to a real event. Close to Vienne is a ruin called 
 the 'Tour de Mauconseil,' from which, it is said, Pilate threw 
 
7 S THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 natural picturesqueness. It is called the "infernal 
 lake." Now and then, in the dusk, a man is seen to 
 emerge and wash his hands in it as in a basin ; when 
 he disappears a hurricane follows. 
 
 The curse of Cain came upon yet another name, — 
 Malchus. This servant of Caiaphas, whose ear cut 
 off by Peter was healed by Jesus, had no reason to be 
 thankful, it would appear by the legend ; this relates 
 that he struck Christ with an iron gauntlet, and was 
 doomed to walk around a column underground, 
 against which he vainly dashes his head, until Judg- 
 ment Day. We have already seen (I.) that the 
 Wandering Jew, under the name of Joseph, was re- 
 ported as undergoing a similar punishment in Jeru- 
 salem, in 1641. The story of Malchus seems to blend 
 that of Ahasuerus with the Talmudic myth of Cain, 
 which is related in Mr. Baring-Gould's Curious MytJis 
 (ii. p. 1 16). When Seth sought the Tree of Knowledge 
 in order to plant a scion of it in the grave of Adam, 
 (see VIII.), he saw its roots in Hell, and Cain trying 
 to climb thereby into Paradise. The roots laced 
 themselves around Cain and pierced him through and 
 through, holding him bound in living agony for ever. 
 
 According to Christian and Jewish revelations Cain 
 
 himself in despair. But the value of the legend may be easily 
 estimated when we learn that the tower is really a tcte-du-pont 
 built by Philippe de Valois." 
 
THE MARK OF CAIN. 79 
 
 must have discovered that, in his fratricide, he 
 had been unsophisticated in the art of punishing an 
 offender against one's will. The divine method is more 
 ingenious. In the romance of Huon de Bordeaux 
 (13th Cent.) by Huon de Villeneuve, the writer reports 
 having seen a cask, with serpents and iron prongs 
 nside, rolling rapidly along. Cain is shut in it, and 
 therein must roll on till the end of the world. This 
 rolling cask would appear to be the prison and punish- 
 ment of Malchus, adapted to the idea of perpetual 
 wandering. Al Sameri was also called A I kharaiti, 
 "the turner." Professor D'Ancona {Nuova Antologia, 
 Oct., 1880, " La Leggendadell' Ebreo Errante ") shows 
 that the story of Malchus is Italian. M. Gaston Paris 
 ascribes it great antiquity, identifying the name and 
 idea with the legend of Marcus the Leper, which is old 
 enough to be represented in early Italian proverbs. 
 This Marcus, having been cured by Jesus, afterwards 
 struck him, and the curse laid upon him was held to 
 explain the incurability of leprosy. M. Paris finds 
 in this legend the idea of the blow given Jesus. 
 If with this are combined the legend of Joseph of 
 Arimathea (thrown into prison by the Jews, where his 
 life was miraculously preserved), and the words to St. 
 John, we have, he thinks, the story of Cartaphilus. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE JEW IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 THE fable concerning Judas is one of many which 
 indicate the formation of a special Christian doctrine 
 concerning the Jewish race. 
 
 After the ruin of their Temple at Jerusalem and 
 desolation of their city, the Jews made repeated efforts 
 — like that led by Bar-Cocheba — to recover their 
 independence. As the possibility of recovering their 
 city and rebuilding their Temple faded away they 
 managed, even in their dispersed condition, to consti- 
 tute an imperium in imperio under an officer called 
 Resh Gelutha, or " Prince of the Captivity." As was 
 natural, they never lost an opportunity of opposing 
 the new empire, of which Jesus had been made 
 General. In the fourth century they joined the 
 Arians. When Julian was called the Apostate he 
 gave them leave to rebuild their Temple at Jerusalem, 
 
THE JEW IN THEOLOGY. 81 
 
 their hope of doing which was suddenly quenched by 
 that Emperor's death. These great events, of which 
 the most typical can alone be mentioned here, were 
 steadily constituting a definite creed concerning 
 the Jewish race, a creed afterwards to be written upon 
 all Europe in their blood, and illustrated in the flames 
 that consumed them. 
 
 The Christians believed that the Jews, as a race, 
 gave themselves up to be the devil's agent for the 
 crucifixion of Christ. Even the idea of converting 
 them seems hardly to have occurred to any Christian 
 before the Reformation — unless the Holy Cross Day 
 torture at Rome be called such — and, justly as the 
 Jews now resent the efforts of conversionists, the 
 existence of a Society of that kind is a result of the 
 tardy recognition of their humanity. The scenes of 
 the Passion — so long preached, pictured, acted on 
 the stage — cast upon the Jews a shadow never relieved, 
 and were a perpetual instruction in horror of that 
 people. The supernatural character ascribed to them 
 by Christians as well as themselves, implied, since 
 they had rejected Christ, infranatural wickedness. 
 They were to Christendom the chosen people still, 
 but now chosen of Satan. 
 
 While the sacred names and superstitions of the 
 Jewish people were preserved, a deadly hatred of those 
 
 6 
 
S2 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 who had really founded Christianity, and furnished 
 its Messiah, was carefully fostered. The connection 
 of Christianity with Judaism was reduced to a series 
 of fairy-tales. Characteristic of these was that about the 
 True Cross. Seth receives from the Archangel Michael 
 a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to plant in Adam's 
 grave, and is told that when it should bear fruit Adam 
 would recover. Out of Adam's grave grows the Tree, 
 which Solomon hews down for the Temple. The 
 workmen cannot so adapt it, and it is used as a bridge 
 over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, crossing it, beholds 
 a vision of Christ on the Cross, and informs Solomon 
 that when a certain person shall be suspended on that 
 wood the fall of the Jewish nation would be at hand. 
 Solomon in alarm buries the wood, and then springs 
 over it the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the, 
 crucifixion the tree floated on the water, and ulti- 
 mately, as a cross, bore its fruit. The Jews concealed 
 the Cross, while pagans built a Temple of Venus on 
 the spot where it stood. Helena, mother of Con- 
 stantine, having sentenced a Jew to torture and death, 
 remits the punishment on condition that he will inform 
 her where the Cross is. Out of the three found the 
 true one manifests itself by performing cures. Thus 
 the Cross itself was a holy immortal Wanderer, with 
 the branded Jew ever beside it, seeking to destroy or 
 bury it. 
 
THE JEW IN THEOLOGY. 8. 
 
 o 
 
 Race-hatred had much to do with the shaping of 
 this theology, which anathematised the race from 
 whose primitive superstitions it was chiefly borrowed, 
 without discrimination or comprehension. 
 
 The "anti-Semitic" venom crept for ages through the 
 veins of Christendom. Fed by millions of pulpits the 
 deadly stream percolated through the world, and a 
 consistent theory concerning the Jews was formed, 
 not very different from that which at length appeared in 
 Swedenborg's pious phantasmagoria. In the history 
 of Israel, says Mr. White, Swedenborg " sees nothing 
 but selfish Jacob over and over again ; and through- 
 out the Arcana Celestia he pursues the Jews with one 
 whip of epithets as the basest of mankind."* The 
 Jewish race was " chosen " by God not because of 
 their excellence, but for their baseness : their lack of 
 interior religion made them fit actors in a drama 
 where literalness was needed ; their sensuality adapted 
 them to be the instrument of incarnation ; and Jesus 
 was born of a Jewish mother because he could go 
 no lower ! " In that body, whose every faculty was an 
 avenue to the Hells, he met as on a battle-field the 
 Powers of Evil and Darkness and subdued them." 
 A fine offset this to the late Lord Beaconsfield's proud 
 
 * Emanuel Suiedenborg; his Life and Writings. By 
 William White. (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1868.) P. 197, .sy. 
 
 6—2 
 
84 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 reflection that the majority of Christendom hold a 
 Jewess to be Queen of Heaven ! It is true that Mary- 
 was excepted by Christendom from the general curse 
 which it saw resting upon the Jewish race ; but her 
 exaltation, in the fifth century, was largely due to 
 legends of the Jews, which represented her as an 
 unchaste woman. Her apotheosis among Christians 
 was the other side of her condemnation by the Jews ; 
 their vision of her in Hell was replied to in the 
 story of her Assumption. The Jews were never bene- 
 fited by any of the holy personages transmitted from 
 their race for the homage of Christendom. They were 
 held to be the official persecutors and crucifiers of 
 such as were divinely sent unto them : whatever the 
 light seen in their history, the only credit of the Jews 
 was to lie under the shadow it cast. 
 
 It was largely through the Miracle Plays that hatred 
 of the Jews, diffused by mediaeval homilies, gained the 
 shape which proved so fatal to the Jews. On the 
 stage the holy drama represented a great struggle 
 between the hosts of Heaven and Hell, of which the 
 scene was on earth. In that drama the Jewish 
 race was not merely the " heavy villain," it was the 
 incarnation of all devils. It would appear that for a 
 thousand years no Christian regarded any Jew as a 
 man at all. In those excesses of cruel tv too wild to 
 
THE JEW IN THEOLOGY. £5 
 
 be now comprehensible — when every European river 
 ran red. with Jewish blood, when Jews' eyes and teeth 
 were plucked out and their bodies burnt as torches 
 in saturnalia beside which those of Nero with his 
 Christian martyrs were trivial — it is plain that there 
 was an epidemic possession wrought by the long 
 education of the people in the belief that the Jews, from 
 a supernatural, had become an infranatural people. 
 
 They from whose ears the reported denunciations 
 of the Jews by Jesus — as "of their Father the Devil," 
 as "vipers," "children of Hell" — were never suf- 
 fered to die out, and who avenged the crucifixion 
 of one man by the crucifixion of a race for cen- 
 turies, are condemned for inhumanity. But the 
 charge is inexact. They were as charitable as are 
 their posterity to those whom they regarded as human 
 beings. Their theology had dehumanised the Jews, 
 and its progress was traced in Christian inhumanities 
 wrought in pious zeal for the Trinity. It was not a 
 suspicion admitted into any mind, thus sophisticated, 
 that it was a man against whom Judas and the Jews 
 had raised their hand. It was against the Eternal 
 Majesty. That they saw as the obvious functional 
 work of Satan. It was the culminating attack in an 
 eternal war against God. Hence those perpetual 
 dooms beheld overhanging all concerned in the cruci- 
 
86 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 fixion, which denoted the unpardonable and everlast- 
 ing nature of the offence against the eternal Avenger 
 of his honour. It is only the God of Theology whose 
 vengeance never sleeps nor ends with any generation, 
 whose wrath is fresh every day, and his hell eternal. 
 Only when man has had his human heart dexterously 
 removed, and has become the changeling of some 
 vampyre Phantasm he coweringly adores, could he be 
 the instrument of the crimes that Christianity has 
 committed against humanity. 
 
 Seven times shall Cain be avenged, seventy and 
 seven times Lamech, ran the old song ; but Jesus 
 said, seventy times seven shalt thou forgive. The 
 human Jesus was speedily overlaid and lost beneath 
 the myths that gathered around the passive Jesus — 
 the babe, the dead body. No holiday was appointed 
 for the Sermon on the Mount, nor was there any 
 Festival of the Golden Rule. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE TEW IN FOLK-LORE. 
 
 It is related in the Legenda Aurca of John Capgrave 
 that St. Brendain, on his famous voyage, came to an 
 island filled with beautiful birds whose music en- 
 tranced the souls of listeners. The birds told the 
 saint that they had been angels ; when the rebel 
 angels plotted their designs in heaven they had been 
 tempted by the Archfiend to join his party ; they did 
 not yield, but dallied with the temptation, and when 
 the wicked beings were cast into the sea of fire, they 
 were transformed into birds. They sang hymns of 
 joy, awaiting their release. 
 
 On the other hand, the ill-omened " Seven Whist- 
 lers " or " Seven Plovers," of English superstition arc 
 said to have been Jews who assisted in the crucifixion 
 of Jesus. 
 
 These birds are types of the fables that flitted about 
 
SS THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the world in the Middle Ages, each the transformation 
 and diminution of their like which had been set free 
 by the decay of both European and Jewish mytho- 
 logy. Christianity had preserved both with care. 
 The Jewish mythology it had disintegrated and re- 
 combined for its own supernatural authentication ; to 
 the European deities it had given a new lease of life 
 by degrading them to devils, affirming their power to 
 haunt and harm their former worshippers. If there 
 had been any kindly attributes or pleasant talcs asso- 
 ciated with these deities they were transferred to the 
 Christian saints ; if any evils had been told of such, 
 they were intensified under the sweeping anathema of 
 the new religion. 
 
 Into this miasmatic atmosphere anti-Semitic pre- 
 judice and theology were diffused. The same pro- 
 cess as that just mentioned concerning "paganism" 
 presently overtook the Jews. When all hope of 
 changing or exterminating it had passed away the 
 theological theory was naturally formed by which all 
 the good in the Jewish system was transferred to 
 Christianity, and everything repulsive was diaboliscd. 
 Unfortunately for the Jews their anathema came later 
 than that which had degraded the deities and beliefs 
 of pagan Europe ; their sacred forms, rites, supersti- 
 tions were the more vivid ; so that the fading phan- 
 
THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 89 
 
 toms of European mythology were able to acquire 
 new life by union with the fresher ones imported from 
 the East. In this way the demons, gnomes, witches, 
 which, from representing the majesty as well as the 
 menace of nature, had been doomed to bear responsi- 
 bility for all its cruelties, now came to nestle with the 
 Jews. These were already the normal scapegoat for 
 the fall of man and martyrdoms of Christians ; now 
 there entered into them a troop of imaginary horrors 
 worse than any known to their most barbarous days. 
 Of these a few characteristic examples may be 
 selected from the very large number known to every 
 student of folk-lore. 
 
 The periodical assemblies of witches believed to 
 occur in various wild places were called "Witches' 
 Sabbaths," because Jews were supposed to be the chief 
 attendants at them. They there received their wages 
 for supporting the kingdom of Antichrist. They 
 celebrated a grand mass before the Devil. The blood 
 of Christian children was said to be essential to their 
 sacrifices. In some regions where, under the ancient 
 religion, the effigy of winter had been burnt on one or 
 anotherdayof spring,it became the custom to burn it on 
 Good Friday and under the name of Judas. The cere- 
 mony of scourging and burning Judas still takes place 
 annually in the London Docks. In Spain it is con- 
 
90 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 sidered necessary to spit after pronouncing the word 
 "Jew;" arid from that country the paganised effigies 
 of that people have spread through distant regions 
 of the world. In some regions (as Oldenberg) the 
 birthday of poor everlasting Judas is said to be 
 February 14, in others (as Franconia) it is fixed as 
 April r, and these days are unlucky. The stigma 
 of Iscariot passed upon certain trees, as the aspen, 
 which was said to tremble perpetually because he 
 hung upon it; and the Judas-tree, with its blood- 
 drop blossoms. In the Bergstrasse, or high road 
 between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, the peasantry 
 still believe that every Jew possesses the " evil eye," 
 and that if a sick person wishes to die swiftly he must 
 get a Rabbi to pray for his convalescence. In sundry 
 places Jews are believed able to foretell the weather 
 by means of dividing a loaf of bread, putting the 
 parts together again, and shoving it with a mysterious 
 word into an oven. They are also believed to spread 
 diseases by spells written in Hebrew on bits of paper, 
 and to deal in such charms. In some regions noises 
 heard in mines were indifferently attributed to 
 kobolds, or to the ghosts of Jews believed to have 
 been made to work in them as slaves by the Romans. 
 In East Friesland it is considered very unlucky to meet 
 a Jew first in the morning ; if a Jew is the first to enter 
 
THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE. qi 
 
 one's house on Monday, or even to look into the win- 
 dow, it renders the whole week unlucky to the house, 
 and was once an offence that might be prosecuted.* 
 Other Jews impaled in the ever-repeated Christian 
 legend took on, in the popular imagination, the dia- 
 bolical forms into which the pagan deities had been de- 
 graded by missionaries. In storms Herod was said still 
 to hunt the Innocents. The Perigord peasant names 
 the fierce thunderstorm " la chasse Herode." This 
 was probably an ingenious development of the Herr- 
 Rote, or Haar-Rote, the red-haired demon-huntsman. 
 Associated with him was Herodias. Grimm says that 
 the Italians sometimes identify their misshapen fairy 
 Befana — a terror to children, who has sprung out of 
 Epiphania — as Herod's daughter (Salome); so that both 
 mother and daughter were made into evil wanderers, f 
 Herodias, who prompted her daughter to demand the 
 head of John the Baptist, was associated with Diana 
 and Holda in the nocturnal expeditions of demons 
 and witches. She was at the head of an aerial host 
 of such. Only from midnight to cockcrow can she 
 rest, and then sits upon oaks and hazel-trees. She 
 was said to have an unrequited passion for John, 
 
 * Dcr deutsche Volksaberglmtbe dcr Gcgenwart. Dr. Adolf 
 Wuttke. Berlin, 1869. 
 
 t Deutsche Mythologie, xiii. 5, 6. (Tr. by J. S. Stallybrass. 
 Sonnenschein and Allen, 1SS0.) 
 
92 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 and when his head was brought in on a charger would 
 have kissed it, but it recoiled and blew upon her, and 
 she was whirled into the air, where she wanders. In 
 Lower Saxony whirlwinds are accounted for by the 
 dancing of Herodias, as elsewhere to that of the devil. 
 Herod and Herodias are said by Josephus to have 
 been banished to Lyons, and eventually to have died 
 in Spain ; perhaps this may account for the special 
 prominence she holds in the folk-lore of Spanish 
 America. In Mexico the puppet Herodias dances in 
 a kind of Punch and Judy show in Holy Week, to the 
 music of rattles made of " Judas bones." In Eugene 
 Sue's Wandering Jew Herodias appears in Arctic 
 America. M. Gaston Paris cites several Italian pro- 
 verbs in which Judas and Malchus are united (as in 
 Sicily, hi Juda-Marcu) to characterise an ugly or un- 
 pleasant countenance. It has been thought (though 
 I have not investigated the matter) that our puppet- 
 show, Punch and Judy, is a distant outcome of an old 
 play, Pontiles cum Judcsis, in which the Jews were 
 severely handled by the pro-consul. 
 
X. 
 
 THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. 
 
 There is one class of survivals from the fatalistic 
 ideas of all so-called paganisms which have always 
 been very strong in the popular mind of Europe. It 
 was a creed in which all ancient faiths converged, 
 that an irresistible power was lodged in any officially- 
 uttered curse. The word once solemnly spoken, be- 
 came the weird, the fatum, and not even the tongue 
 that spake could revoke it. Oftenest the dooms that 
 represented this belief in the Middle Ages were 
 supposed to come from Heaven in response to some 
 defiant invocation, or blasphemous challenge like that 
 of the Flying Dutchman. It is a notable fact for the 
 antiquarian that in the year 1881 the courts of Eng- 
 land should be trying a case involving the question of 
 whether a lecturer took out his watch and gave the 
 deity, whose existence he denied, five minutes to strike 
 
94 
 
 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 him dead. That is an old myth normally fixed on 
 misbelievers ; and it is probable that the motives for 
 selecting that particular slander for judicial denial, if 
 traced out, would be found connected with the ancient 
 superstition that such words must have the eternal 
 effect of real natural forces. From the ancient 
 patriarchalism, which has so many political and social 
 survivals in Europe, came the idea that a father's 
 curse (or blessing) carried with it the fatal forces of 
 the universe. More universal still was the potency 
 supposed to attend the word of a priest, however 
 casual. This notion is still met with in the many 
 stories of persons said to have died soon after ridicul- 
 ing the proceedings of " revivalists." 
 
 Grasse has collected some examples of such super- 
 stitions in Europe, beginning so far back as the legend 
 of Domitilla, the grand-daughter of Domitian. In 
 her room, after she had become a Christian, her hus- 
 band introduced dancers to win her back to the world 
 and to himself: he began showing them how to dance, 
 but could not stop ; and after dancing two days and 
 nights, died. Such " dances " are now familiar in 
 folk-lore, and are associated with some of the stone 
 circles of England. In Kolbeck, near Halbustadt, 
 there is a legend that, in the year 1012, a peasant 
 named Albrecht and fifteen others who danced before 
 
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. 95 
 
 the Church on Christmas while Mass was going on, 
 were ordered by the priest to dance for a year. The 
 Bishop of Cologne had to come and release these 
 dancers, who had worn a deep hole in the ground. In 
 the same vein is the story of " the merry smith of 
 Jiiterbogk," a small survival of Sisyphus. A remark- 
 able story of this kind is that of Freiburg (A. Miiller, 
 Tlieatr. Freiburg Chron., 1633). An irritable father, 
 Lorent Richter, ordered his son of fourteen years to 
 do something : the boy hesitated, standing in the 
 middle of the room. " Cursed boy," cried the father, 
 " may you stand there for ever \" The boy remained 
 standing there, propped by supports, and after many 
 years the priests, by many prayers, could only secure 
 the small commutation of a removal to a corner where 
 he would not be so much in the way of the household. 
 " At last the kind God a little altered the punishment 
 by allowing him to sit during the last six months of 
 the year, and also to lie in a bed placed near him. 
 When asked what he did, he answered that he was 
 punished by God the Lord for his sins ; that he left 
 all to His will ; and trusted in the merits of Christ to 
 obtain final happiness." After seven years — a number 
 associated with many famous sleepers — the boy " was 
 relieved, nth Sept., 1552." His footprints were 
 pointed out on the floor for a hundred years. The 
 
96 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 father had wished to obliterate this memento of his 
 anger, but the authorities decided that the footprints 
 should remain as a warning to wrathful parents and 
 disobedient children. 
 
 The great majority of "dooms" known to Northern 
 paganism have exchanged connotations with the legend 
 of the Wandering Jew. The sentence pronounced 
 upon such royal huntsmen or robber-knights as 
 Dyterbjernat of Danzig, Diedrick of Bern, Duke Abel 
 the fratricide (Schleswig), and others, is usually of this 
 character. In the Netherlands it is the story of a son 
 who refused to listen to his father's Christian advice, 
 but called his dogs into the wood : the father cried, 
 " Hunt, then, for ever !" and so he hunts on, and his 
 voice, mingled with che baying of dogs, is heard in 
 the woods about the Castle of Wynedal. In Thuringia, 
 it is Hakelnberg who would not listen to the priest, 
 who bade him " hunt until the last day.'' These for- 
 mulas of the curse are related to that of the Jew 
 legend : the primitive pagan legend is different, e.g. 
 the hunt long known as the Horlething, on the banks 
 of the Wye. It was said King Herla went to the 
 marriage feast of a dwarf : when he returned to his 
 palace he found that he had been in the mountain 
 with the dwarf two hundred years, and was under a 
 doom to ride on until the day of judgment. The 
 
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. 97 
 
 visit to the dwarf's festival simply meant a relapse 
 into paganism. 
 
 That the myth of the Wandering Jew was interwoven 
 with that of the Demon Huntsman of Germany (which 
 is called Aaskarreya in Norway), there can be no 
 doubt. " Perhaps," says Karl Blind, " one of the 
 clearest proofs of the phantom figure of the Wander- 
 ing Jew having been grafted upon that of the great 
 Wanderer and World-hunter, Wodan, is to be found 
 in a tale of the Hartz Mountains. There it is said 
 that the Wild Huntsman careers ' over the seven 
 mountain -towns every seven years.' The reason 
 given for his ceaseless wanderings is, that ' he would 
 not allow our Lord Jesus Christ to quench his thirst 
 at a river, nor at a water-trough for cattle, from both 
 of which he drove him away, telling him that he ought 
 to drink from a horse-pond.' For this reason the 
 Wild Huntsman must wander about for ever, and feed 
 upon horseflesh. And whoever calls out after him, 
 when his ghostly chase comes by, will sec the Wild 
 Huntsman turn round, and be compelled by him to 
 eat horseflesh too. No allusion whatever is made in 
 this tale to a Jew, though the name of Christ is pressed 
 into it in a way very like the Ahasuerus legend. We 
 seem to get here a mythic rendering of the struggle 
 between the old Germanic faith and the Christian 
 
S S THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 religion. The 'horse-pond' and the 'horseflesh' 
 are, to all appearances, references to our horse-worship- 
 ping, horse-sacrificing, horseflesh-eating forefathers, 
 who came to Britain under the leadership of Hengist 
 and Horsa. To call out after the eternal Huntsman 
 entails the danger of being forced by him to eat 
 horseflesh — that is, to return to the old creed. The 
 Holy Supper of the Teutonic tribes consisted of horse- 
 flesh and mead. When Christianity came in, the 
 eating of horseflesh was abolished as a heathen cus- 
 tom. But at German witches' banquets — in other 
 words, at secret festive ceremonies in which the pagan 
 traditions were still kept up — there continued for a 
 long time a custom of drinking from horse-shoes."* 
 
 We have in this sentence last quoted from Mr. Blind's 
 able article a suggestion of the probable origin of the 
 horse-shoe as a charm against witches. To the pagan 
 Teuton it was as sacred an emblem as to the Christian 
 his cross. While the Christians still believed in the 
 power of the Wild Huntsman and his train to work 
 them mischief, they might naturally show this symbol 
 of pagan orthodoxy over their doors to induce the 
 witches to pass on and visit their wrath on the openly 
 disloyal. 
 
 * The Gentleman's Magazine, July, 18S0. Wodan, the Wild 
 Huntsman, and the Wandering yew. 
 
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. 99 
 
 This article in The Gentleman's Magazine contains 
 an original speculation and theory concerning two 
 remarkable problems connected with our legend. 
 How is it that the name Cartaphilus was replaced by 
 Ahasuerus ? How did the " doorkeeper " of the thir- 
 teenth century become the " shoemaker " of the six- 
 teenth century legend ? Mr. Blind, with a creditable 
 caution, suggests that the name may have been a 
 modification of As-Vidar. This god (As) Vidar was 
 in the Scandinavian mythology the symbol of ever- 
 lasting force : he was the deity who was alone to sur- 
 vive the universal destruction of Ragnarok, " Twilight 
 of the Gods." In the Prose Edda it is written : " The 
 Wolf (Fenris) swallows Odin, but at that instant 
 Vidar advances, and setting his foot on the monster's 
 lower jaw, seizes the other with his hand, and thus 
 tears and rends him till he dies. Vidar is able to do 
 this because he wears shoes for which stuff has been 
 gathering in all ages, namely, the shreds of leather 
 which are cut off to form the toes and heels of shoes ; 
 and it is on this account that those who would render 
 a service to the JEsk (gods) should take care to 
 throw such shreds away." It is said there are (or 
 were) preserved in the Government Library at Berne 
 traditional relics left by the Wandering Jew, his staff 
 and pair of shoes. These shoes are said, by an early 
 
 7—2 
 
ioo THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 local authority, to be " uncommonly large and made 
 of a hundred snips — a shoemaker's master-piece, be- 
 cause patched together with the utmost labour, dili- 
 gence, and cleverness out of so many shreds of leather." 
 A similar pair of shoes are said to have also been left 
 by Ahasuerus at Ulm. 
 
 It may be remarked that the name given to the 
 Wandering Jew in the Praxis Alchyminc of Libavius, 
 viz., Buttadseus, may possibly refer to the boot (A. S. 
 buttc) of the Wanderer, and it may have been that 
 dais was added. Whether it meant the " booted god," 
 or the man who struck God with a boot, or bouter dim 
 (to push God), must remain doubtful. It is a striking 
 coincidence, if no more, that, in Talmudic legend,. 
 Enoch also was a shoemaker, who with every stitch 
 exclaimed, " The Lord and His Majesty be praised !" 
 
 The names of the Wandering Jew are characteristic- 
 ally various, not to say vagarious ; they are also 
 sometimes puzzling. Cartaphilus is pretty certainly 
 Kupra <£t'\o?, in allusion to the " beloved " disciple ; 
 Ahasuerus is perhaps the Hebrew form of Xerxes, 
 though there is nothing in the history of that king to 
 connect him with the Wandering Jew. Several give 
 his name as Gregorius, through a mistake, as M. Paris 
 has pointed out, as to the meaning of Botorcius, who 
 wrote that Jesus stopped " ante tabernam gregorii 
 
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. ioi 
 
 illius ;" the Turkish Spy names him Michob Ader. 
 One name popularly ascribed to him in Brussels 
 is " Isaac Laquedem." Concerning this Grasse has 
 a note in which he says, " I asked for an explana- 
 tion of the word, and my friend Dr. Bottcher, the 
 celebrated expert in Hebrew, gave me the follow- 
 ing answer, ' If the name Laquedem is written and 
 pronounced in French (Walloon) " Lakedem," and is 
 derived from the Hebrew, it can scarcely be any- 
 thing else but la-kedem, i.e., " the former world " 
 [belonging to an anterior world], in which case we 
 must say the use of the prefix "la" is without a parallel 
 in names of later Jews, and therefore the " la," the 
 French article, may be considered due to a half- 
 learned inventor of names {vide Lacroix, Lamarque, 
 La Loresh. Wolf, Bibl. Hebr. iv. 812).' " 
 
 As for the name " Joseph," given by the Armenian 
 Bishop as the baptismal name of Cartaphilus, there is 
 evidence in the old Chronicle itself that it was derived 
 by association with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said 
 to have wandered through a large part of the world 
 and to have come to Britain in the year 66, where his 
 blossoming staff fixed the site of Glastonbury Abbey. 
 
 It is an indication of the steadiness with which 
 every being, however exalted originally, was degraded 
 by coming under the supposed preternatural fate of 
 
io2 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the Jewish race, that this Joseph of Arimathea, by 
 giving a baptismal name to Cartaphilus, gave the 
 English populace their epithet for the beggars or 
 impostors who were supposed to be the Wandering 
 Jew. He was called " Poor Joe !" Of him, as repre- 
 senting the dregs of the myth, more must be said 
 hereafter. Another example of this degradation is 
 shown in the fact that in various parts of Europe the 
 storm-demon is called Maccabee. The process by which 
 this was brought about has not, to my knowledge, 
 been traced, but the following facts seem to bear on it. 
 In 2 Maccabaeus, v. 2-4, it is written — " Then it hap- 
 pened that through all the city, for the space almost 
 of forty days, there were seen horsemen running in the 
 air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances like a band 
 of soldiers ... Wherefore every man prayed that that 
 apparition might turn to good." These apparitions, 
 resembling those said by Josephus to have reappeared 
 at the siege of Jerusalem, were adopted as good 
 Christian omens. Judas Maccabaeus also records his 
 vision of the prophet Jeremiah giving him a golden 
 sword to defend the holy people. It is probable that 
 this was the germ of the superstition which proved so 
 fatal to the Christians at the siege of Constantinople 
 (T453). After the capture of the city, men, women 
 and children rushed into the Church of St. Sophia for 
 
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER. 103 
 
 protection, because of a prophecy that " one day the 
 Turks would enter Constantinople and pursue the 
 Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the 
 square before St. Sophia ; but that this would be the 
 term of their calamities ; that an angel would descend 
 from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would 
 deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a 
 poor man seated at the foot of the column. ' Take 
 this sword,' would he say, ' and avenge the peopie of 
 the Lord.' At these animating words the Turks 
 would instantly fly . . . While they expected the 
 descent of the tardy angel, the doors were broken 
 with axes ; and, as the Turks encountered no resist- 
 ance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting 
 and securing the multitude of their prisoners" (Gibbon, 
 ch. lxviii.). 
 
 It looks as if the association of the wild aerial chase 
 with Maccabee, in France and other southern regions, 
 might have resulted from the diffusion of the supersti- 
 tion which drew such a thunderbolt upon the Chris- 
 tians of Constantinople, and its gradual subjection to 
 the demonising doom which rested upon even the 
 brightest figures of Jewish history not wearing the 
 Christian uniform. 
 
XI. 
 
 " THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION." 
 
 " Enter Launcelot Gobbo !" So begins Scene ii. of 
 Act II. in the Merchant of Venice. Or as the original 
 stage-direction ran, " Enter the Clown !" His very 
 name suggests the glutton and knave, yet it seems to 
 be from him some Shakspearian guides derive their 
 chief light on the great poet's picture of Shylock ! 
 
 Gobbo does indeed cast light upon the Jew, but it 
 comes from the mob which he represented. To say 
 " my master is a very Jew," and " the Jew . . is the 
 devil himself," are equivalent phrases in the capacious 
 mouth of Gobbo. He speaks for his gaping herd, and 
 their breed is not unknown. Judenhetze is able to 
 turn out such men in the latter days of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 Bochart,in his Hierozoicon (seventeenth century), says 
 there was a Sea-monster called " The Old Jew ;" with 
 the white-bearded face of a man he had the hairy body 
 
" THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION:' 105 
 
 of an ox, otherwise calf-shaped. This monster always 
 appeared the night before Saturday on the surface of 
 the sea, and one could see him until sunset next day 
 leaping and diving like a frog, and following ships. 
 This monster, no doubt a variety of Al-Sameri, 
 elsewhere considered, is a fair type of what every Jew 
 was, for many centuries, in the eyes of the multitudi- 
 nous Gobbites. What stood for religion in them was 
 the vulgar ribaldry of the Miracle Plays, under which 
 those holy farces presently perished. In them Judas, 
 still the buffeted Wanderer, was the one figure-head 
 of the Jewish race, with the devil for his familiar. 
 
 In ancient Persian pictures Ahriman and his host 
 have flame for hair. After the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity the deities of Europe, which it degraded to 
 devils, were described and painted with fiery hair and 
 beard ; as it stands in the German saying, " Roter 
 Bart, Teufelsart." In the early Miracle Plays Judas 
 was made up with red hair and beard to show the 
 fiery abode to which he belonged. This feature sur- 
 vived also in the "yellow bonnet" which the Jews 
 were compelled to wear, which replaced the scarlet or 
 red bonnets which the " Scarlet Woman " found too 
 like her own.* The significant costume, and the ideas 
 
 * See Knight's Shakspcare, notes to the Merchant of Venice. — 
 Blanco White, in his Letters from Spain (1806), speaking of 
 the Passion Week shows, says : " The dress of the Apostle John 
 
io6 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 it expressed, passed to the conventional stage-Jew. 
 Barabas, in Marlowe's Jew oj Malta, and after him, 
 Shylock, were represented with the "orange-tawny 
 bonnet," and fiery red hair and beard. 
 
 In keeping with this the crimes popularly ascribed 
 to the Jews, for which they suffered so terribly, were 
 not human crimes. They were utterly without motive 
 — such as no man, however vile, could have com- 
 mitted. For one example out of many, the Jews of 
 Lincoln were charged with having fattened a Christian 
 child of eight years on white bread and milk, then 
 scourged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified him, 
 giving him gall. For that impossible crime 112 
 eminent Jews were tortured and slain. It was 
 rumoured that the earth would not receive the body 
 of that child, yet for years Christian pilgrims visited 
 its grave. 
 
 is green, that of Judas yellow ; and so intimately associated 
 is this circumstance with the idea of the traitor, that it has 
 brought that colour into universal discredit .... The Inquisi- 
 tion has adopted it for the Sambenito, a coat of infamy, which 
 persons convicted of heresy are compelled to wear. The red 
 hair of Judas, like Peter's baldness, seems to be agreed upon by 
 all the painters and sculptors of Europe. Judas' hair is a usual 
 name in Spain ; and a similar appellation, it should seem, was 
 used in England in Shakspeare's time. " His hair" says Rosa- 
 lind, " is of the dissembling colour." To which Celia answers 
 " Something browner than Judas's." 
 
" THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION:' 107 
 
 Such wild, popular notions were faithfully reflected 
 in Marlowe's Jew oj Malta. " Barabas," says Charles 
 Lamb, " is a mere monster, brought in with a large 
 painted nose, to please the rabble. He kills in sport 
 — poisons whole nunneries — invents infernal machines. 
 He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two 
 earlier, might have been played before the Londoners, 
 by the Royal command, when a general pillage and 
 massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved 
 on in the cabinet." 
 
 It will be now apparent to those who have followed 
 the travels of this Jew-myth that it had carried about 
 in its endless wanderings the belief in which it 
 originated, and of whose development it was a type — 
 the infranatural, finally the infernal, nature of the 
 Jewish race. It inevitably blended with all the super- 
 stitions about uncanny phantoms, bringing the most 
 evil and ominous shapes haunting the popular 
 imagination in every locality into connection with the 
 detested race. Demons from the air, goblins from 
 their caves, birds of ill-omen, fearful gales, betokening 
 the proximity of the Wandering Phantom, brought 
 an ever-accumulating mass of fear, suspicion and 
 hatred upon the race of which its supposed doom was 
 a too faithful emblem. This vast cesspool of vulgar 
 superstition mirrored the dogmas of a theology ever 
 
io8 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 developing downward. It was not permitted the 
 masses to look upon the alleged offences of Judas cr 
 Ahasuerus in comparison with offences familiar to 
 them. As we have seen, the offence thought of was 
 the wrong and insult done to a God ; it was an intensi- 
 fication of the same feeling that regarded theft from 
 a church as worse than theft from the poorest widow, 
 or a slight untruth under oath as more wicked than 
 the most malicious lie not sworn to. Out of such a 
 principle of unreason naturally came the doom of a 
 race through many centuries to realise every ingenuity 
 of torture fabled in the Greek Hades, with Gehenna 
 added. Every revolving century was their Ixion- 
 wheel, and every stream their Phlegethon. 
 
XII. 
 
 THE WANDERING RACE. 
 
 PROFESSOR Child, of Harvard University, has re- 
 marked that, " in the second form of the legend, the 
 punishment of perpetual existence, which gives rise to 
 the old names, Judcsus 11011 mortalis, Ewiger Jude, is 
 aggravated by a condemnation to perpetual change of 
 place, which is indicated by a corresponding name, 
 Wandering Jew, Juif Errant, etc." * In this change a 
 great deal of history is represented. The Jewish race 
 under persecution steadily became a wandering race. 
 They were compelled to " move on " by the remorse- 
 less police of Christendom. One after another the 
 laws of nations detached them from the soil, from the 
 trade-guilds, from civic position, and they became a 
 nation without a country. 
 
 This process went on for a long time before it was 
 represented in any myth or legend. Mohammed 
 * English and Scottish Ballads, viii. 7S. 
 
no THE WANDERING JEW- 
 
 said, " The Jews are the People of the Book." Joshua 
 ben Siras ben Eliezer, a priest in Jerusalem two hun- 
 dred years before the burning of the Second Temple 
 (quoted by Heine), wrote, " All this is the Book of 
 the Covenant made with the Most High God, namely, 
 the Law which Moses commanded as a precious trea- 
 sure to the House of Jacob. Wisdom floweth there- 
 from as the water of Pison when it is great, and as the 
 water of Tigris when it overfloweth its banks in 
 spring. Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates 
 when it is great, and as Jordan in the harvest. Cor- 
 rection cometh forth from it as the light, and as the 
 water of the Nile in autumn. There is none that 
 hath made an end of learning it, there is none that 
 will ever find out all its mystery, for its wisdom is 
 richer than any sea and its word deeper than any 
 abyss." 
 
 So spake the genius of Israel, and, so speaking, 
 itself uttered its first doom. A people to whom a 
 book had become their Fatherland, which had come 
 to see in it their Jordan, their Tigris, their Nile, had 
 already given up their hold upon the territories of 
 this world and become a wandering colony of Jahve, 
 governed by a code unrelated to the vices or the aims 
 of other races. This abstract country, whose geo- 
 graphy was books and texts, was fenced around and 
 
THE WANDERING RACE. m 
 
 fortified as strongly as the territory of any nation. 
 Its fortresses were ceremonies, customs, national 
 traditions, and a perfect patience derived from faith 
 in the God of their fathers. The Cain whom they 
 abhorred was not more effectually " cursed from the 
 earth," prohibited from tillage of the ground than this 
 race which had taken Jahve for their portion and his 
 law for their habitation. 
 
 In such a system there could be no compromise. 
 And as a matter of fact there never was any compro- 
 mise with the enemies of their faith. These people, 
 who have shown ingenuity and cleverness of every 
 kind, have never developed any sort of Jesuitism. I 
 was astonished lately at learning of an instance in 
 which a Jew outwitted his persecutors in true Chris- 
 tian style, for I never heard of another. This Jew 
 was a pedlar, and he was wandering in France in the 
 neighbourhood of one of those districts where the 
 Virgin Mary is still continually opening new water- 
 cure establishments. This Jew, having heard the latest 
 miracle which had evoked a new fountain, smiled, and 
 even made light of it. Thereon the innkeepers excited 
 a mob, and they resolved to hang the miscreajit — that 
 is, the unbeliever — faggots being old-fashioned. They 
 seized the poor pedlar and bore him off pallid with 
 terror. As they passed near the new fountain, the 
 
H2 '.THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Jew begged permission to moisten his lips thereat ; 
 this was conceded, but no sooner had the water 
 touched his lips than he leaped about with joy, and 
 declared that the fountain had healed a severe rheu- 
 matism which he had suffered from for many years. 
 " A miracle ! a miracle !" shouted the crowd ; the Jew 
 suddenly became a hero, and was carried before the 
 priest, who appointed the next day to baptize him 
 before all the people and make a grand demonstra- 
 tion. The Jew, however, disappeared during the- 
 night. 
 
 This story, which I found in a recent number of 
 the Jewish World, is a modern appendage to the old 
 legend mentioned by Mr. Baring-Gould, that the 
 gipsies were said to wander under a doom pronounced 
 on them because they refused to shelter the Virgin 
 and child in the flight into Egypt. But this witty 
 pedlar is not a fair representative of the race. 
 " Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe," said 
 Shylock. Though Shylock has been regarded by 
 many as a type of avarice and extortion, yet even he 
 cannot be tempted by money when his struggle with 
 the Merchant becomes a religious issue. Shakspcarc 
 rightly shows Shylock unyielding; many times the 
 money due to him cannot bribe him from the blow he 
 feels empowered to strike for his despised Israel. And 
 
THE WANDERING RACE. n 3 
 
 when, in the beginning of this century, Nathan Roth- 
 schild started as the great banker of London, no 
 temptations could induce him, shrewd as he was, to 
 lend money or enter into any contracts for the benefit 
 of Spain or its colonies. The Israelite was never lost 
 in the banker, and showed his supremacy when it 
 came to a race which had banished his own from the 
 Iberian Peninsula ; though at the same time his 
 charities and those of his house have included Chris- 
 tians hardly less than Jews. The same unyielding 
 religious spirit was shown when thirty-three years ago 
 Baron Lionel de Rothschild was elected Member of 
 Parliament for the City of London. The honour 
 of being the first Jew in that body could not induce 
 him to swear his allegiance '' on the true faith of a 
 Christian," and on the New Testament. He remained 
 out of his seat for eleven years — and with him David 
 Salomons, who paid the penalty of £500 for voting in 
 the House without being duly sworn — when Parlia- 
 ment yielded to men who did not yield, and the oath 
 was changed for Jews. 
 
 It has sometimes excited wonder why this wanderer 
 among the races, uncompromising amid the hatred of 
 ages, was not exterminated. It must often have 
 appeared to them that, like the bush in their own 
 
 legend, they were burnt without being consumed, 
 
 S 
 
iu THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 because their God was in the bush. But no miracu- 
 lous force need be sought in the case, nor any excep- 
 tional tenacity of life in them as a race; their circum- 
 stances developed in them special faculties adapted to 
 the commerce and civilisation of the world. Heine 
 said truly "the Jews were legally condemned to 
 become rich." The populace generally believed that 
 Jewish wealth was got from the Devil, their wages for 
 maintaining the kingdom of Antichrist in the world. 
 The Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, who died in 
 1789, leaving a large property, had a black cock which 
 was popularly believed to be connected with his 
 wealth. The suspicion was confirmed when the bird 
 died a day or two before its master. 
 
 As a matter of fact the Jews were driven to deal in 
 money and jewellery — a word supposed by some to be 
 derived from " Jew " — by the general exclusion of 
 them from the possession of land and from the acqui- 
 sition of property by handicraft. Gold and silver 
 alone were left for their enterprise. 
 
 And there were good causes why they amassed 
 wealth. The first was that they did not spend it on 
 Gentile baubles. They cared not for the pomps and 
 luxuries of a world to which they did not belong 
 Why then did they want to accumulate it ? Why 
 were they so thrifty and unwearied in their pursuit of 
 
THE WANDERING RACE. 115 
 
 gold ? To ascribe this to avarice is to accept a popular 
 fallacy refuted by the history of that people, who are 
 even lavish in their charities and in their support of 
 public enterprises (as in England and America) where 
 they are free and equal citizens. In their earlier days 
 the Jews' hope of recovering their country and re- 
 establishing their Theocracy under the Messiah was a 
 passionate aspiration, it was as sincere as any 
 patriotism ; every Jew held his wealth and his life as a 
 trust for that end. All their wealth they hoped one 
 day to lay at the Messiah's feet. So it began, and 
 then a new factor re-enforced it. The wealth of the 
 Jews became the main means of their survival as a 
 people. Kings and Popes protected them for the 
 money they could get out of them. But for this they 
 would certainly have been exterminated. From them 
 chiefly was extorted the money for Henry the Second's 
 Crusade in their own Holy Land. Mainly by their 
 labour and wealth Westminster Abbey was built. 
 By such protective extortions there was established a 
 certain force of natural selection and evolution, based 
 on their wealth, which gradually made them the 
 financial princes of Europe and bankers of the 
 world. 
 
 Whatever German bigots may say, the financial 
 supremacy of the Jews has been well and wisely exer- 
 
n6 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 cised. The nations not included under it have fared 
 according to their folly. When Queen Isabella of old 
 wished to protect the Jews because of such advantages, 
 she was confronted by the fanatic who said, " Judas sold 
 his Lord for thirty pieces of silver ; will you sell Him for 
 thirty millions ?" So the Jews suffered in Spain ; but 
 what did Spain suffer ? What did Holland and 
 England gain by the Spanish Jews, first tolerated, 
 then welcomed in their cities ? This Germany will be 
 able to answer if the jealous bigots there let loose on 
 the Jews should succeed in driving them out of the 
 country. 
 
 " Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the 
 book, even to the time of the end : many shall run to 
 and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." So early 
 did the compulsory tendencies of the Jews reveal 
 themselves. Their alienation among other peoples 
 made them close up in their ceremonial law as in a 
 shell ; their book was sealed amid interior ' revelations' 
 swarming around them, and themselves sealed in it : 
 but, meanwhile, detached from the soil and the guilds 
 of every country, forced to be exchangers, pedlars, 
 they must travel to and fro, and their knowledge was 
 increased. They became so well acquainted with the 
 lore of different lands, with the medical and other 
 knowledge of various countries, that they were sup- 
 
THE WANDERING RACE. 117 
 
 posed to possess occult powers. Occasionally, this 
 reputation might be of service to them, as in the in- 
 stance where Queen Elizabeth employed a Jewish 
 physician for his supposed occult knowledge ; but 
 more often it harmed them, as in the evil fate that 
 overtook that same physician, whom jealous rivals 
 accused of an attempt to poison the Queen. For 
 many centuries they presented the most remarkable 
 instance of a people who had largely outgrown their 
 primitive superstitions, and acquired a religious and 
 intellectual enlightenment beyond the rest of the world, 
 who yet kept all this culture within the hard walls of 
 their barbaric stronghold, their ancient forms and 
 formulas, from which they did not dare to venture. 
 
XIII. 
 
 THE POUND OF FLESH. 
 
 PASSING out of Rome by the Via Appia, one comes 
 to many places of antiquarian interest, but presently 
 arrives at a spot whose significance increases with 
 time. This is the church called Domine quo vadis. 
 There, says the legend, St. Peter, once more flying 
 from danger, met Jesus, and said, " Lord, whither 
 goest thou ?' Jesus answered, ' Venio Romam iterum 
 crucifigi! Whereupon Peter returned, and met his 
 fate— that hard one of a mythical martyrdom, fol- 
 lowed by resurrection as a Pontifical Jupiter, wielding 
 his keys as thunderbolts. A fac-simile of the holy 
 footprints of Jesus is here in the church, the originals, 
 sunk in marble, being preserved in Saint Sebastian's 
 Church. 
 
 Goethe had perhaps seen the worshippers around 
 these footprints (near by the Jewish catacomb with 
 its seven-branch candlestick), when there arose in him 
 
THE PO UND OF FLESH. i , 9 
 
 the idea of a poem which, alas, never got farther than 
 the outline given in a further chapter. Writing from 
 Terni, October 27th, 1786, he says: "Yesterday I felt 
 inspired to undertake a work which at present would 
 be ill-timed. Approaching nearer and nearer to the 
 centre of Romanism, surrounded by Roman Catholics, 
 boxed up with a priest in a sedan, and striving 
 anxiously to observe and to study without prejudice 
 true nature and noble art, I have arrived at a vivid 
 conviction that all traces of original Christianity are 
 extinct here. Indeed, while I tried to bring it before 
 my mind in its purity, as we see it recorded in the 
 Acts of the Apostles, I could not help shuddering to 
 think of the shapeless, not to say grotesque, mass of 
 heathenism which heavily overlies its benign begin- 
 nings. Accordingly, the 'Wandering Jew' again 
 occurred to me as having been a witness of all this 
 wonderful development and envelopment, and as 
 having lived to experience so strange a state of things, 
 that Christ himself, when he shall come a second time 
 to gather his harvest, will be in danger of being 
 crucified a second time. The legend Venio iterum 
 crucifigi was to serve me as the material of this 
 catastrophe."* 
 
 Perhaps Goethe also witnessed " Holy-Cross Day " 
 
 * Morrioon's translation (Bohn). 
 
120 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 in Rome, when the Jews were " compelled to come in " 
 and hear the annual sermon — "haled," as one said, 
 " as it were by the head and hair, and against their 
 obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace." 
 Had the two visionary Wanderers — Jesus and Aha- 
 suerus — once more encountered each other in sight 
 of the crosses, they could only have hung side by side ; 
 he who gave the blow in Jerusalem, now conceivably 
 the one person in Rome able to recognise the freshly- 
 crucified from a cross of his own — the cross of his 
 race. From another poet have come the words which 
 typical Ahasuerus might, after the experience of so 
 many centuries, speak to the fellow-sufferer he once 
 had insulted : 
 
 " Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus, 
 But, the judgment over, join sides with us ! 
 Thine too is the cause ! and not more Thine 
 Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine, 
 Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed, 
 Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed ! 
 
 " We withstood Christ then ? be mindful how, 
 
 At least we withstand Barabbas now ! 
 
 Was our outrage sore ? but the worst we spared. 
 
 To have called these — Christians, had we dared ! 
 
 Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee, 
 
 And Rome make amends for Calvary ! 
 " By the torture prolonged from age to age, 
 
 By the infamy, Israel's heritage, 
 
 By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's di--;:race. 
 
 By the badge of shame, by the felon's pkee, 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. m 
 
 By the branding tool, the bloody whip, 
 And the summons to Christian fellowship — 
 
 " We boast our proof that at least the Jew, 
 Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew 
 Thy face took never so deep a shade, 
 But we fought them in it, God our aid ! 
 A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band, 
 South, east, and on to the Pleasant Land !" * 
 
 Holy-Cross Day was appropriate for this work of 
 striking the Jewish race in the face, as they fainted at 
 the Christian door, and showing them now themselves 
 the crucified, by a High Priest Christ taught to hate 
 his enemies and pierce them with nail and spear. 
 For it was about the time of the alleged discovery of 
 the True Cross, already noticed, that this fable of the 
 Wandering Jew probably first began its career.t 
 
 ° Robert Browning : " Holy-Cross Day." 
 
 t " Quel est done l'origine et ia date de cette legende ? Je la 
 crois, comme celle du voile de sainte Vdronique et generalment 
 comme toutes les histoires relatives k la Passion, ne'e vers le 
 quatrieme siecle, a Constantinople, et contemporaine de sainte 
 Helene et de la decouverte de la vraie croix. Mais ces tradi- 
 tions sont restdes longtemps orales." — Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 Dec. i, 1833. Published as introduction to Quinet's "Ahasuerus." 
 Goethe connects Saint Veronica with Ahasuerus in the plan of 
 his intended work elsewhere given. Veronica, whose name 
 means the true portrait {i.e. of Christ which was retained on the 
 apron with which she wiped the sweat from his face), would be 
 a natural counterpart of the man who refused all succour to the 
 fainting sufferer. In enthusiasm about the true cross might be 
 born a myth of the true image, and of a " witness : ' to both. 
 
122 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Already at that time it was shown on the walls of im- 
 perial Christendom that Jesus and Ahasuerus, as types 
 of Humanity, had changed places — the nails and the 
 thorn-crown transferred from one to the other ; and, 
 what is more, the cruel dogmas and superstitions 
 abandoned by the one made by the other into the 
 established religion of Europe. 
 
 In the familiar legend of the True Cross, Helena 
 is for a time baffled by a certain Judas, who has 
 occult sources of knowledge, and warns the Jews that 
 the empress is coming to find what, if found, will 
 cause the downfall of their religion. But she having 
 threatened «a general massacre, the Jews inform her 
 that this Judas can alone reveal the place of the 
 cross. He refuses ; is starved at the bottom of a dry 
 well for six days ; on the seventh, consents. When 
 the cross appears, Judas is converted by its miracles 
 and baptized. 
 
 In a paper read to the New Shakspeare Society, 
 April 9th, 1875, Miss Toulmin Smith announced her 
 discovery that the story of the " Pound of Flesh " is 
 contained in the thirteenth century English poem, 
 " CursorMundi" 'there interwoven with the legend of the 
 Finding of the Holy Cross. A Christian goldsmith, 
 in the service of Queen Helena, owes a sum of money 
 to a Jew ; if he cannot pay it at a certain time he is 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 123 
 
 to render the weight of the wanting money in his own 
 flesh. The bond is forfeit ; the Jew prepares to cut 
 the flesh ; but the judges decide that no drop of blood 
 must be shed. The Jew being thus defeated, Queen 
 Helena declares that he must give up all his goods to 
 the State and lose his tongue. This sentence is 
 remitted on his agreeing to tell her where the Holy 
 Cross is hidden, — which he did. 
 
 It might easily arise, as a saga on this Jew's know- 
 ledge, that he had personally participated in the hiding 
 of the Cross, just after the crucifixion, and had been 
 miraculously preserved throughcenturies as "a witness'' 
 to reveal its place of concealment, and thereby also to 
 be " a witness " to the truth of the Christian legend. 
 This might even have been in the minds of those who 
 gave him the name of Judas, though perhaps that is 
 merely a token of homage to the True Cross, as potent 
 enough to convert a Judas. It is in harmony with 
 the endless plots and counterplots of the True Cross 
 Tale that the traitor of Christ should live to become 
 traitor to Antichrist. At the same time there is a 
 suggestion in it of precise retribution in kind which 
 naturally combines with the story of the " Pound of 
 Flesh." It is highly probable that Shylock and the 
 Eternal Jew are twins of the True Cross Mythology, 
 though Ahasuerus be a later name and figure. 
 
124 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 But this Holy Cross itself was, and is, a perpetual 
 symbol of the pound-of-flesh principle which lay at 
 the foundation of the ancient Jewish system, and from 
 it, after that foundation had crumbled for the Jews, 
 was adopted as the chief corner-stone of Christianity. 
 This I have demonstrated elsewhere,* and the history 
 of the legend, with the conclusions based on it, though 
 they may appear here as an episode, will be found 
 closely related to the development of our subject. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne speaks of Marlowe's Jew as the real 
 man, while Shakspeare's is a mouthpiece for the 
 finest poetry .-f- A surprising criticism ! The genesis 
 of the conventional stage-Jew in England has already 
 been given in this work (XL), and my reader will do 
 well to refer to it at this point. 
 
 It is sufficiently remarkable that, in this year 1881, 
 London should have witnessed on the stage, as acted 
 by two eminent Shakspeare interpreters, the two 
 stage-Jews which competed for popular favour in the 
 time of Marlowe and Shakspeare. The "Shylock " of 
 Mr. Booth is an odious, avaricious, bloodthirsty villain ; 
 that of Mr. Irving is a fatal, powerful and pathetic 
 character. The fine acting of Mr. Booth cannot strive 
 against the art of Shakspeare, who at no point could 
 
 Nineteenth Century, May, 1S80. 
 
 t "Study of Shakspeare." (Chatto and Windus.) 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH, 125 
 
 have raised sympathy with a man he meant should be 
 utterly repulsive. Mr. Booth's personation rests too 
 much on the traditional make-up of Shylock, which 
 is really that of Barabas. When Edmund Kean, as 
 a poor unknown actor, first went to play Shylock at 
 Drury Lane, he raised some laughter behind the 
 scenes by taking from his small bundle a black wig ! 
 Black it was, not red ; human, not diabolic : the 
 smiling company said, " That will be a failure " ; but 
 it was not. One after another the outside traits of 
 Shylock, costume borrowed from Barabas, have dis- 
 appeared ; not a word of Shakspeare's text has had to 
 disappear with them ; the character which the poet 
 conceived has been largely unsheathed by Mr. 
 Irving. 
 
 We know that no such figure as that at the Lyceum 
 appeared on Shakspeare's own stage at the Globe. 
 Shylock, as acted by Shakspeare's friend Burbage, 
 was a comic figure. His make-up consisted of ex- 
 ceedingly red hair and beard, a false nose preter- 
 naturally long and hooked, and a tawny petticoat. 
 Such a figure must have been largely meant to make 
 fun for the pit and gallery, of which Shakspeare was 
 rarely oblivious, and Burbage never. 
 
 But a conventional stage-figure is generally an 
 evolution, and this farcical Shylock was no exception. 
 
126 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 The famous Isaac of Norwich was a typical Jew in 
 his time. A thirteenth century caricature, preserved 
 in the Pell Office, shows us the popular notion of him. 
 He is pictured as a three-faced idol surrounded by 
 devils. The three faces are not especially ugly or 
 comical, but repulsive enough ; and we may detect in 
 the figure the reflection of a period when the dia- 
 bolical theory of the Jew was serious, and no laughing 
 matter. Similarly, in the old Miracle Plays, Satan 
 was a serious figure, though he gradually became a 
 mere laughing-stock.like Pantaloon in the pantomimes. 
 The stage-Jew shared the same decline as the stage- 
 devil — his supposed inspirer. In his malignant and 
 formidable aspect he was, indeed, in Shakspeare's 
 day, the main figure of Marlowe's popular play ; but 
 even he had . the long nose and sundry grotesque 
 features ; and it can hardly be doubted that, in the 
 still more ludicrous make-up' of Shylock, the Globe 
 Theatre followed the popular feeling. 
 
 Perhaps there may be hidden in the name Shylock 
 the idea of a lock-shearer, shaver of the last hair 
 from his victim; at any rate "the shearer sheared" 
 would include the whole significance of the story 
 which Shakspeare took in hand. In the character 
 of Shylock, he retained the grotesquerie which might 
 please the rabble, at the same time turning their scowl 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 127 
 
 to laughter. Even now, while Mr. Irving is giving 
 his pathetic impersonation, the occasional laugh re- 
 minds us how easily some parts of the text would 
 lend themselves to a farcical interpretation, if the 
 painted nose and comic gestures were present. But 
 it is more remarkable to observe how rare and super- 
 ficial are these ludicrous incidents. The farcical 
 Shylock has passed away from the English stage 
 through force of the more real character which 
 Shakspeare drew. Shakspeare may not have in- 
 tended all the far-reaching moral belonging to the 
 ancient legend of the pound of flesh, but surely no one 
 can carefully compare his Shylock with the Barabas 
 of his contemporary without recognising a purpose to 
 modify and soften the popular feeling towards the 
 Jew, to picture a man where Marlowe had painted a 
 monster, if not indeed to mirror for Christians their 
 own injustice and cruelty. 
 
 Let us take our stand beside Portia when she sum- 
 mons the Merchant and Shylock to stand forth. The 
 two men have long legendary antecedents and have 
 met many times before. There are eleven versions of 
 the bond story in the early literature of Europe. In 
 four of these versions no Jew appears. Karl Simrock 
 believes that it is an ancient law-anecdote — an illus- 
 tration of the law of retaliation pressed to an extreme. 
 
128 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 The evidences he gives of its use for this purpose are 
 interesting, and it appears to me probable that it 
 might have been in this way that the Jew was first 
 introduced into the story. Where a Jew and a Chris- 
 tian confronted each other in any issue it might be 
 assumed that all mitigations of the summum jus were 
 removed from the question ; only the naked technical 
 terms of the law could then be conceived as restrain- 
 ing either from doing the utmost injury he could to the 
 other. There is an old Persian version of the tale, in 
 which, perhaps for a similar reason, a Moslem and an 
 Armenian confront each other ; and in this case the 
 failure of the bond is not because of the blood, but 
 because of the extreme exactness of weight demanded 
 by the court. An Egyptian form of the story has a 
 similar end. 
 
 Side by side, in all ages and races, have struggled 
 with each other the principle of Retaliation and that of 
 Forgiveness. In religion the vindictive principle has 
 euphemistic names : it is called law and justice. The 
 other principle, that of remission, has had to exist by 
 sufferance, and in nearly all religions has been recog- 
 nised only in subordinate alliance with its antagonist. 
 An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, 
 is primitive law. Projected into heaven, magnified in 
 the divine majesty, it becomes the principle that a 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 129 
 
 deity cannot be just and yet a justifier of offenders. 
 " Without the shedding of blood there is no remission 
 of sins." Since finite man is naturally assumed to be 
 incapable of directly satisfying an infinite law, all 
 religions, based on the idea of a divine lawgiver, are 
 employed in devising schemes by which commutations 
 may be secured and vicarious satisfactions of divine law 
 obtained. Nature never forgives. No deity inferred 
 from the always relentless forces of nature has ever 
 been supposed able to forgive the smallest sin until it 
 was exactly atoned for. For this reason the divine 
 mercifulness has generally become a separate personifi- 
 cation. The story of the "Pound of Flesh" is one of the 
 earliest fables concerning these conflicting principles. 
 The following legend was related to me by a Hindu, 
 as one he had been told in his childhood. The chief 
 of the Indian triad, Indra, pursued the god Agni. 
 Agni changed himself to a dove in order to escape ; 
 but Indra changed himself to a hawk, to continue the 
 pursuit. The dove took refuge with Vishnu, second 
 person of the triad, the Hindu Saviour. Indra flying 
 up, demanded the dove ; Vishnu, concealing it in his 
 bosom, refused to give up the dove. Indra then took 
 an oath that if the dove were not surrendered he 
 would tear from Vishnu's breast an amount of flesh 
 equal to the body of the dove. Vishnu still refused to 
 
 9 
 
1 30 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 surrender the bird, but bared his breast. The divine 
 hawk tore from it the exact quantity, and the drops of 
 blood — the blood of a Saviour — as they fell to the 
 ground wrote the scriptures of the Vedas. 
 
 Among the various versions of this story in India I 
 have not been able to find any in accepted sacred 
 books preserving with the simplicity of this folk-tale 
 the ancient moral antagonism between the deities after- 
 wards found in alliance as a triad. Hindu orthodoxy 
 has outgrown the phase of faith which could sanction 
 that probably provincial legend. Its spirit survives in 
 one of Vishnu's titles, Yadjna Varaha, " the boar of 
 sacrifice," derived from Vishnu's third incarnation, by 
 which he saved the world from demons by becoming 
 himself a victim. We may see in the fable reflection 
 of a sacrificial age, an age in which the will and word 
 of a god became inexorable fate, but also the dawning 
 conception of a divineness in the mitigation of the 
 law, which ultimately adds saving man-gods or demi- 
 gods to nature-gods that cannot be appeased. 
 
 The earliest version, probably B.C. 300, is the story 
 in the Mahabharata (Vanaparva) of the trial of the 
 best of mankind, King Usinara. Indra and Agni, 
 wishing to test his fidelity to the laws of righteous- 
 ness, assume the forms of falcon and pigeon. The 
 latter (Agni) pursued by the former (Indra) seeks and 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 13 1 
 
 receives the king's protection. The falcon demands 
 the pigeon, and is refused on the ground that it is 
 written that to kill a twice-born man, to kill a cow, 
 and to abandon a being that has taken refuge with 
 one, are equal sins. This is a quotation from the 
 Laws of Manu. The falcon argues that it is the law 
 of nature that it shall feed on pigeons, and a statute 
 against nature is no law. He (the falcon) will be 
 starved, consequently his mate and little ones must 
 perish, and thus in preserving one the king will slay 
 many. The falcon is offered by Usinara other food — 
 a boar, bull, gazelle — but the falcon declares that it is 
 not the law of its nature to cat such things. The 
 king then declares that he will not give up the pigeon, 
 
 but he will give anything else in his power which the 
 falcon may demand. The falcon replies that he can 
 
 1 
 
 only accept a quantity of the king's own flesh equal in 
 weight to the pigeon's body. Usinara gladly accedes 
 to this substitution. Balances are produced, and the 
 pigeon is placed in one scale. The king cuts off a 
 piece of his flesh that appears large enough, but is in- 
 sufficient ; he cuts again and again, but still the 
 pigeon outweighs his piled-up flesh. Finally, all his 
 flesh gone, the king gets into the scale himself. The 
 two gods then resume their divine shape, announce to 
 Usinara that for the sacrifice he has made he will be 
 
 9—2 
 
132 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 glorified in all worlds throughout eternity, and the 
 king ascends transfigured into heaven. 
 
 This legend is repeated under the title Syena-Kapo- 
 tiyam (Dove and Hawk) in the Purana Sariiasvan in 
 the Bodleian Library, where it is in Bengali charac- 
 ters. There is another version in the Markandeya 
 Purana (ch. iii.), in which Indra appears to the sage 
 Vipulasvan in the form of a large famished bird. 
 Finding that this bird can only be nourished by 
 human flesh, the sage appeals to his sons to give it 
 some of their flesh ; and on their refusal he curses 
 them, and tells the bird that after he has performed 
 certain funeral ceremonies his body shall be for its 
 nourishment. Whereupon Indra bids the sage abandon 
 his body only by the power of contemplation, reveals 
 his divine nature, and offers Vipulasvan whatever he 
 may ask. 
 
 Indra here says, " I eat no living creature," which 
 shows a moral advance. Perhaps his conversion ma)' 
 have been in some measure due to the teaching of 
 Buddha. It is instructive to compare the Mahabha- 
 rata legend with an early Buddhist version cited by 
 M. Focaux from the Dsang-lotmg* a version all the 
 more significant because the hero of it, Sivi, was tra- 
 ditionally the son of Usinara and had already appeared 
 * Lc Mahabarata, p. 241. 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 133 
 
 in the fourth book of Mahabharata as tried in the 
 same way with his father, and with the same results. 
 Sivi had become a popular type of self-sacrifice. 
 According to the Buddhist legend, Indra, perceiving 
 that his divine existence was drawing to a close, con- 
 fided to Visvakarman* his grief at not seeing in the 
 world any man who would become a Buddha. Vis- 
 vakarman declared King Sivi such a man. The falcon 
 and pigeon test is then applied. But the Buddhist 
 Sivi does not, like his Brahman prototype, offer to 
 compensate the falcon with the flesh of other animals. 
 He agrees to give his own flesh. The gods descend 
 and weep tears of emotion at seeing the king as a 
 skeleton outweighing the dove which all of his flesh 
 could not equal. Nor is the Buddhist saint caught up to 
 heaven. He is offered the empire and throne of Indra 
 himself, but refuses it ; he desires only to be a Buddha. 
 Sivi's body is restored to greater beauty than before, 
 and he becomes the Buddha amid universal joy. 
 
 Other versions show the legend further detached 
 from brahmanic ideas, and resting more completely 
 upon Buddha's compassionateness to all creatures. 
 Of this description is one in the " Sermons " by 
 Asphagosha, for the translation of which I am in- 
 
 * The ' omnificent,' who offered up all worlds in a general 
 sacrifice, and ended by sacrificing himself. 
 
134 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 debted to Professor Beal. Sakra (a name of Indra) 
 tempted by a heretic to believe that the teaching of 
 Buddha was false, and that men followed it from 
 motives of self-interest, sought for a perfect man who 
 was practising austerities solely for the sake of becom- 
 ing a Buddha. Finding one, Sivaka Raja, he agreed 
 with Visvakarman to tempt him. All happens as in 
 the old legend, except that Sivaka rests his refusal 
 not upon the law of Manu, nor upon the sanctity of 
 asylum, but upon his love of all living things. To this 
 his mercifulness the falcon appeals, reminding him of 
 its own young, and Sivaka calls for a knife and cuts 
 off a piece of his flesh, not caring whether it is more 
 or less than the body of the dove. He then faints. 
 All living creatures raise lamentations, and the deities, 
 much affected, heal the wound. 
 
 The influence of Buddhism is traceable in the 
 modifications of the original legend, which show the 
 sacrifice not accepted as it was in the case of Vishnu, 
 and to some extent in that of Usinara, whose earthly 
 life terminates. With Buddha the principle of re- 
 mission supersedes that of sacrifice. His argument 
 against the Brahmanic sacrifice of life was strong. 
 When they pointed to these predatory laws of nature 
 in proof of their faith that the gods approved the in- 
 fliction of pain and death, he asked them why they did 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 135 
 
 not sacrifice their own children ; why they did not offer 
 to the gods the most valuable lives. The fact was that 
 they were outgrowing direct human sacrifices — pre- 
 serving self-mortifications — and animals were slain in 
 commutation of costlier offerings. This moral revolu- 
 tion is traceable in the gradual constitution of Vishnu 
 as a Saviour. There is a later legend that Vishnu 
 approached Sivi in the form of a Brahman in want of 
 food, but would accept none except the flesh of Sivi's 
 son Vrihad-Garbha. The king killed and cooked his 
 son and placed the food before the Brahman, who 
 then bade him eat it himself. Sivi prepared to do so, 
 when Vishnu stayed his hand, revealed himself, re- 
 stored the son to life, and vanished. This legend be- 
 longs to a transitional period. Its outcome is found 
 in several Hindu folk-tales, one of which has been 
 told by the charming story-teller, Mr. W. R. S. 
 Ralston. The king of a country is dying, and a poor 
 man is informed of the fact by a disguised "fate." 
 He asks if there is no way to save the king's life, and 
 is told there is but one way ; if a child should be 
 sacrificed, with its own consent, that would save the 
 king. The man returns home and proposes to his 
 wife to slay their beautiful little boy. She consents ; 
 the boy having also consented, the knife is about to 
 descend on the child, when the fates appear, an- 
 
136 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 nouncing that they only wished to try his loyalty tc 
 his king, who had already recovered. 
 
 We may feel pretty certain that originally that king 
 was a deity, though not so certain that the knife was 
 arrested without killing anything at all. In several 
 popular fables we find the story preserved essentially 
 in the old sacrificial form, to teach the rewards of self- 
 sacrifice, though, in order to escape the scandal of a 
 human sacrifice, the self-devotion is ascribed to 
 animals. Thus, in the Panchatantra, a pigeon roasts 
 itself to save a famished bird-catcher, who had just 
 captured his mate; and the bird-catcher presently 
 seeing its radiant form rising to heaven, spends his 
 life consuming his flesh in the fire of devotion, in 
 order that he also may ascend there. 
 
 In the Hebrew story corresponding to that of 
 Vishnu and Sivi, the Hindu Abraham, we may see 
 that where a god is concerned the actual sacrifice can- 
 not be omitted. That may do in the case of a dying 
 king or hungry hawk, but not for a deity. In the case 
 of Abraham and Isaac the demand is not remitted 
 but commuted. The ram is accepted instead of Isaac. 
 But even so much concession could hardly be recog- 
 nized by the Hebrew priesthood as an allowable 
 variation from a direct demand of Jahve, and so the 
 command is said to have been given by Elohim, its 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. i 37 
 
 modification by Jahve. The cautious transformation 
 is somewhat in the spirit of the disguises of the Aryan 
 deities, who may partially revoke as gods the orders 
 they gave as hawks. It would indicate a more ad- 
 vanced idea if we found Jahve remitting a claim of his 
 own instead of one made by the Elohim. 
 
 It is worthy of a remark that in some regions where 
 this change of names in the story of Abraham's 
 sacrifice is overlooked or unknown by Semitic re- 
 ligionists, there has sprung up a tradition that the 
 sacrifice was completed, and the patriarch's son 
 miraculously restored to life. Thus, in another branch 
 of the Jewish religion we find Mohammed flinching at 
 the Biblical story. He does not like to admit that 
 Allah altered his word and purpose except for a 
 serious consideration, so he says, " We ransomed him 
 with a noble victim." The Moslems believe that Isaac 
 was not then born, and that it was Ishmael across 
 whose throat Abraham actually drew the knife, which 
 was miraculously kept from killing the lad, according 
 to some, but others say resulted in a death and 
 resurrection. 
 
 In the year 1879 the highly educated State of 
 Massachusetts was thrilled with horror by the tidings 
 that a man named Freeman had offered up his beauti- 
 ful and only child, Edith Freeman, as a sacrifice to 
 
ijS THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 God. It occurred in the historical town cf Pocas'set. A 
 thousand years ago the Northmen who first discovered 
 America wintered there, and possibly they there 
 offered human sacrifices to their god Odin— that is, if 
 they got hold of one or two red men ; for there has 
 been a notable tendency among men in such cases to 
 prefer other victims than themselves for their gcd.s. 
 Since that first landing of white men in America the 
 religion of Odin had yielded to that of Christ ; Po- 
 casset and all New England had been converted to 
 Christianity ; the Bible had found its way into every 
 home. Yet this well-to-do citizen, Mr. Freeman, 
 and his wife, had learned in Sunday School about 
 Abraham's touching proof of his faith. They had 
 pondered the lesson until they heard the voice of 
 Abraham's God summoning them to a similar sacrifice, 
 and they committed a deed which probably would 
 have shocked even those rude Vikings who wintered 
 at Pocasset a thousand years before. So much might 
 the worship of a pitiless primitive deity arrest the 
 civilisation of a household in the land of Channing 
 and Parker. They prayed over the little girl, then the 
 knife was plunged into her heart. Little Edith is now 
 in her grave. The God of Abraham and Isaac got 
 his pound of flesh this time. The devout priest of that 
 horrible altar has just passed from his prison to an 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 139 
 
 asylum. To the many who have visited him he puts 
 questions hard to be answered. " Do you believe the 
 Bible or not ?' he says. " If you do, and have read 
 the account of Abraham, why should you deny that 
 God could require a man to sacrifice his child ? He 
 so required of me. I did hope and believe that he 
 would stay my hand before the blow fell. When he 
 did not I still believed he would raise my child to life. 
 But that is his own affair. I have given that which I 
 loved most to God because He commanded me." 
 The American people waited to see whether a Christian 
 community which trains up children to admire the 
 faith of Abraham would hang them when they grow 
 up to imitate that faith so impressed upon them. 
 The embarrassing dilemma was escaped after eight 
 months, by getting Freeman into an asylum for the 
 insane, without trial. A rather mean way of confess- 
 ing that theocratic piety is republican insanity ! 
 
 I observed, soon after the occurrence of this tragedy, 
 a picture of it in the Police News exposed in the shop 
 windows of London. The designer had placed a crucifix 
 near the little victim's head. It is probable that Free- 
 man and his wife never saw a crucifix in their lives ; 
 they belong to the hardest, baldest dogmatic Protes- 
 tantism. The rude artist perhaps placed the crucifix 
 in his picture because the Abrahamic sacrifice was 
 
J40 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 supposed to be typical of a holier one— a sacrifice in 
 which a Son was offered up to satisfy the fatal law of 
 a Father. In the human sacrifice symbolised by that 
 crucifix culminated all these sacrifices of which men- 
 tion has been made ; and there was embodied that 
 principle which has maintained through the ages that 
 though to forgive may be human, to avenge is divine. 
 Let us return now to Shylock and the Merchant 
 whose life is forfeit. Shylock is a primaeval Jew ; he 
 represents the law, the letter and rigour of it. He is 
 Indra tearing Vishnu's breast ; Elohim demanding 
 Isaac's death ; the First Person exacting the Second 
 Person's atoning blood. His bond, his oath registered 
 in heaven, its sanction by Venetian law, are by him 
 identified with eternal justice. It is the irrevocable 
 " thing spoken," fatmn, weird, or word. Portia is 
 exact in telling him that he represents that " justice " 
 in whose course, " none of us should see salvation.' 
 The Jew personates his ancient god precisely. Nor 
 is there wanting a certain majesty in his position. There 
 is nothing mean aboutShylock now, whatever there'may 
 have been at first. He has been called avaricious. 
 But, as we have already seen (XII.), the wealth of the 
 Jews was the main factor in their survival. There is, 
 indeed, an illustration of this in the only version of 
 the Bond legend which makes any pretension to be 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 141 
 
 considered historical. A Jew named Ceneda forfeited 
 a pound of his flesh to a Christian merchant, on a 
 wager ; the case was brought before the Pope, 
 Sixtus V., who decided that the Christian must pay- 
 two thousand scudi to his treasury for attempting 
 manslaughter, and the Jew pay in an equal sum for 
 having hazarded his life, that being a taxable pro- 
 perty belonging to the Pope. Balzac tells us of a 
 mediaeval seneschal in France who declared the Jews 
 to be the best taxgatherers in his region. It was his 
 custom to let them gain money as bees collect honey : 
 then he would swoop down on their hive and take 
 it all away. The Jews were driven by oppressive 
 statutes to the dealings in money which brought 
 opprobrium upon them ; and in hating Antonio 
 because he lent money without interest, and so 
 lowered the rate of usance in Venice, Shylock was 
 hating him for undermining the existence of his tribe. 
 Shylock scorns thrice his principal. For now he has 
 been summoned by his own woes, the taking away of 
 his daughter and his property, including that ring 
 mourned because given by his lost Leah — artfully 
 contrasted with the surrender by the Christian lovers 
 of the rings they had vowed never to part with — to 
 stand forth as an avenger of the ages of wrong heaped 
 upon his race. That is an Elohistic moment for 
 
i 4 2 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Shylock, and ducats become dross in its presence. 
 When the full tidings of his woes and wrongs are told 
 him he cries, " The curse never fell upon our nation 
 till now : I never felt it till now." Thenceforth we 
 may see in Shylock the impersonation of the divine 
 avenger of a divinely chosen people, and the majesty 
 of his law confronting an Edomite world. 
 
 On the other hand stands Antonio, representing 
 rather feebly, until he too is summoned from being a 
 mere rich merchant to become a shorn victim, the 
 opposite principle. He stands for the Christ, the 
 Forgiver, the Sufferer. In the course of its travels 
 the legend had combined with one told by Hyginus. 
 The patriot Moros having conspired to rid his country 
 of its tyrant, falls into the hands of that tyrant, Diony- 
 sius of Sicily, who orders him to be crucified. But 
 Moros is allowed a respite and absence of three days 
 to visit his sister, his friend Selenuntius having agreed 
 to become his hostage. On his way back, Moros is 
 impeded by a swollen river, and when he reaches the 
 place of execution finds his friend on the point of 
 being nailed to the cross. The two friends now insist 
 each on being crucified for the other, at which sight 
 Dionysius is so affected that he releases both, resolves 
 to be a more humane king, and asks the friends to 
 take him as " the third in their bond of friendship." 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 143 
 
 It is remarkable that this legend (which suggested to 
 Schiller his ballad Die Biirgschaft, the Suretyship) 
 should have been a popular one at the beginning of 
 the Christian era, introducing as it does an exactor of 
 vicarious suffering — that too by a cross — and ending 
 with the tyrant becoming one in a trinity of friendship. 
 
 Shakespeare has brought this vicarious feature into 
 a prominence it never had in any version he could 
 ever have seen, and his art, creating as it must in 
 organic consistency, has dramatised the psychological 
 history of mankind. 
 
 Antonio, the merchant called on to suffer, is the 
 man who gained nothing at all from the bond. He 
 has incurred the danger and penalty in order that his 
 rather worthless friend Bassanio may get the money 
 necessary to secure a rich marriage which shall free 
 him from his debts. It is the just suffering for the 
 unjust. Antonio is the man who gives, hoping for 
 nothing again ; in low simplicity he lends out money 
 gratis ; and, when Shylock agrees to lend the three 
 thousand ducats, the merchant says, " This Hebrew 
 will turn Christian ; he grows kind." At the trial, 
 Antonio speaks like the predestined victim : 
 
 I am a tainted wether of the flock, 
 Meetest for death. 
 
 And, when the trial is over, Antonio is the only man 
 
144 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 who offers to relax his hold on the Jew's property. He 
 gives up his own half, and takes the other only to give 
 it away to Shylock's daughter and her husband. 
 
 To be kind Antonio calls Christian ; but it was not 
 that spirit which finally brought Shylock into the 
 same fold with his judges. His life is spared on 
 condition of his becoming a Christian. Professor 
 Morley and other critics say that was harsh. But 
 Shylock is no longer a genuine Jew, and Shakespeare 
 properly relieves that race of his connection. The 
 Jews had indeed, in primitive ages, begun with the 
 eye-for-an-eye principle, but fiery trials had long 
 taught them patience under injury. Shylock, remind- 
 ing Antonio, when he asks help, of his outrages, says : 
 
 Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, 
 For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. 
 
 So had it been for many ages, and the Jew had rele- 
 gated the principle of vengeance to his fossil theology, 
 practically becoming the patient victim ; while, on the 
 other hand, Christianity, reaching the throne, had 
 antiquated Christ's principle of mercy, and was 
 dealing out the rigours of the Judaic law which Israel 
 had outgrown by suffering. Shylock had grandly 
 asserted the humanity of the Jew, in the first words of 
 that kind ever heard in Europe ; but he had gone on 
 to assert his Christianized nature. " If we are like 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. i 45 
 
 you in the rest, we will be like you in that. If a Jew 
 wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge ; if 
 a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance 
 be by Christian example ? why, revenge. The villainy 
 you teach me I will execute." But when Shylock 
 thus repairs back to the old eye-for-an-eye spirit, when 
 he draws from the armoury of the ancient law the old 
 weapon of retaliation, it is only to find that the 
 sacrificial knife grown rusty for a Jew is bright and 
 keen enough in Christian hands. In pressing to 
 practise the blood-atonement and vicarious principle 
 he enters upon Christian ground, and Shakspeare 
 rightly baptizes him a Christian. 
 
 We may naturally question whether Shakspeare 
 meant this irony. Did he intend any subtle hit when 
 he made these Christians claim as a co-religionist, 
 ripe for baptism, a man who had just attempted to 
 take a fellow-man's life ? That cannot be affirmed ; 
 but it is notable that there should be in the play 
 another passage liable to that construction. Shylock's 
 enemies have just converted his daughter Jessica into 
 a good Christian ; and the first sign of the work of 
 grace in her heart is the facility with which she steals 
 and squanders her father's money. Shakspeare does 
 not fail to connect with this pious robbery the 
 Christian customs of the time towards Jews. When 
 
 10 
 
146 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the robbery and elopement have been planned, the 
 Jew's Christian servant, Lancelot, says to Jessica : 
 
 There will come a Christian by 
 Will be worth a Jewess' eye. 
 
 That seems to be a play upon the then familiar 
 phrase " worth a Jew's eye " — a Jew having often to 
 pay an enormous sum in order to avoid having his 
 eye put out. With that Christian usage the poet 
 apparently connects the robbery of Shylock's treasure. 
 So by adopting the Christian usage of the time, by 
 saying to Antonio what King John said to the Jews 
 — " Your money or your flesh " — Shylock had given 
 evidence of a change of heart, and his right place was 
 in the Christian fold. 
 
 But among all these representative figures of the 
 Venetian court-room, transformations from the flying 
 doves and pursuing hawks, bound victims and exact- 
 ing deities of ancient mythology, there is one who 
 possesses a significance yet to be considered. That is 
 Portia. Who is this gentle woman in judicial 
 costume ? She is that human heart which in every 
 age, amid hard dogmatic systems and priestly in- 
 tolerance, has steadily appealed against the whole 
 vindictive system — whether Jewish or Christian — and, 
 even while outwardly conforming, managed to rescue 
 human love and virtue from it. With his wonted yet 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. 147 
 
 ever-marvellous felicity, Shakspeare has made the 
 genius of this human sentiment slipping through the 
 technicalities of priest-made law a woman. In the 
 mythology of dooms and spells it is often that by the 
 seed of the woman they are broken : the Prince must 
 remain a Bear till Beauty shall offer to be his bride ; 
 the Flying Dutchman shall find repose if a maiden 
 shall voluntarily share his sorrow. It is, indeed 
 the woman-soul which has silently veiled the 
 rude hereditary gods and laws of barbarism — the 
 pitiless ones — with a host of gentle saints and inter- 
 cessors, until the heartless systems have been left to 
 theologians. Inside the frowning buttresses of 
 dogmatic theology the heart of woman has built up 
 for the home a religion of sympathy and charity. 
 
 Portia does not argue against the technique of the 
 law. She agrees to call the old system justice — so 
 much the worse for justice. In the outcome she 
 shows that this so-called justice is no justice at all. 
 And when she has shown that the letter of "justice " 
 kills, and warned Shylock that he can be saved from 
 the fatal principle he has raised only by the spirit 
 that gives life, she is out of the case, save for a 
 last effort to save him from the blind law he has in- 
 voked. The Jew now sues before a Christian Shylock. 
 And Portia — like Mary, and all sweet interceding 
 
 10 — 2 
 
143 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 spirits that ever softened stern gods in human hope 
 — turns from the judicial Jahves of the bench to the 
 one forgiving spirit there. " What mercy can you 
 render him, Antonio ?" The Christian Gratiano in- 
 terposes, " A halter gratis : nothing else, for God's 
 sake." A natural appeal for the victim-loving God ; 
 but the forgiving Christ is heard, however faintly, above 
 the Christian, and Antonio forgives his part of Shy- 
 look's penalty. 
 
 " Vengeance is mine," says the deity derived by 
 fear from the remorseless course of sun and star, ebb 
 and flow, frost and fire. Forgiveness is the attribute 
 of man. We may reverse Portia's statement, and say 
 that, instead of Mercy dropping as the gentle rain 
 from heaven, it is projected into heaven from compas- 
 sionate human hearts beneath. And heavenly power 
 doth then show likest man's when mercy seasons the 
 vengeance of nature. From the wild forces above not 
 only droppeth gentle rain, but thunder and lightning, 
 famine and pestilence ; it is man with his lightning- 
 rod, his sympathy, his healing art, who turns them 
 from their path and interposes a shield from their 
 fury. When, as the two walked together in the night, 
 Leigh Hunt looked up to the heaven of stars, and 
 said, " God, the Beautiful," Carlyle looked, and said, 
 " God, the Terrible." It was the ancient worshipper 
 
THE POUND OF FLESH. : 49 
 
 of the Laws of Nature beside Abou ben Adhem, who 
 loving not the Lord, yet loved his fellow men, and sees 
 a human sweetness in the stars. All religions,beginning 
 with tremblingsacrificestoelemental powers personified 
 — powers that never forgive — end with the worship of 
 an ideal man, the human lover and Saviour. That 
 evolution is invariable. Criticism may find this or 
 that particular deified man limited and imperfect, and 
 may discard him. It may take refuge in pure theism, 
 as it is called. But it amounts to the same thing. 
 What it worships is still a man — an invisible, vast 
 man, but still a man. To worship eternal love, 
 supreme wisdom, ideal moral perfection, is still to 
 worship man, for we know such attributes only in 
 man. Therefore the Shylock-principle is non-human 
 nature, hard natural law moving remorselessly on its 
 path from cause to effect ; the Portia-principle, the 
 quality of Mercy, means the purely human religion, 
 which, albeit for a time using the terms of ancient 
 nature- worship and alloyed with its spirit, must be 
 steadily detached from these, and on the ruins of every 
 sacrificial altar and dogma build the temple whose 
 only services shall be man's service to man. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 
 
 IN the East and South, beneath climes that suggest 
 an ideal paradise of repose or idle felicity, the undying 
 saints were represented as dwelling in enchanted 
 islands far from the toiling world, or slumbering in 
 secret grottoes, while those whose immortality was a 
 doom were compelled to roam restlessly over the 
 earth. But when these myths had migrated into the 
 active regions of Europe they were steadily trans- 
 formed. It was felt to be hardly a satisfactory 
 distribution of parts for the saintly immortals to be 
 sleeping or enjoying themselves with fairies while the 
 evil ones were so busy careering through earth and 
 air. So, gradually the saintly sleepers awake. The 
 Seven Sleepers sally forth as the Seven Champions 
 of Christendom. Joseph of Arimathea cannot lie 
 down in his sacred sepulchre which he had given for 
 the body of Jesus, and becomes a holy wanderer. 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 151 
 
 St. James emerges from the rock which had closed 
 around his body like soft wax, and leads Spain against 
 the Moors. St. John does not rest in his grotto at 
 Ephesus, but makes pilgrimages, on one of which he 
 asks alms of Edward the Confessor, near Westminster 
 Abbey, who gives to the mendicant a gold ring, after- 
 wards sent him from the East, with the saint's 
 benediction. St. Peter goes abroad also. When the 
 first Abbot of Westminster is about to be ordained in 
 the Abbey, St. Peter appears in the night, crosses the 
 Thames in a boat, himself ordains the Abbot, and 
 leaves a wondrous fish to convince the Archbishop 
 next day that the consecration has been performed, 
 rendering the future Deans of Westminster responsible 
 to Peter alone, and able to preach what heresies they 
 like, without episcopal interference. Popular supersti- 
 tion is sometimes good-hearted, and liberated even 
 the sorcerer Merlin from his prison of air, as appears 
 in the lines of Southey : 
 
 " In his crystal ark 
 Whither sail'd Merlin with his band of bards, 
 Old Merlin, master of the mystic lore ; 
 Belike his crystal ark, instinct with life, 
 Obedient to the mighty Master, reached 
 The land of the Departed."* 
 
 ' Madoc, xi. This, however, is contrary to Welsh orthodoxy. 
 I remember being- present at a dinner-company in Wales, given 
 
i:2 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 But while Merlin thus finds freedom again ending 
 in repose, Arthur comes forth from his subterranean 
 palace to lead the hunt, or from his Avalon to wing 
 his way in form of a raven. 
 
 Thus the doomed Wandering Jew, under whatever 
 name, finally found himself wandering in good com- 
 pany. This opens the way for human compassion to 
 proffer those little mitigations of divine remorse - 
 lessness which, as they gradually appear in folk-lore, 
 •are such severe, because unconscious, satires upon the 
 deity of theology. The sentence of the deity, or of 
 the sadly deified Jesus, once uttered cannot be 
 revoked ; but the human heart is no such victim of 
 its own egotism or passionate impulse. Thus, Kuhn 
 (2, 32) mentions the belief in Westphalia that the Jew 
 may obtain a night's repese if there be left in a field 
 two harrows with the teeth downward. If one wishes 
 to do the gcd-like thing he must leave the teeth of 
 his harrow upward ; then the Jew must wander on. 
 In some other regions of Germany (Wiittke, 759). the 
 Jew can find rest at any place where two oaks grow 
 
 to Ralph Waldo Emerson, when a gentleman present w;:s 
 sceptical enough to assure the eminent American that though 
 he had often passed the traditional spot of Merlin's aerial 
 prison, he had never heard any voice from the air, and did not 
 believe the story. Emerson answered : " You must be a bold 
 man/' 
 
THE WAXDERIXG JEW IX FOLKLORE. 153 
 
 together in such a way as to form a cross. In Olden- 
 burg it is said he can rest from the middle of May to 
 the end of July, which is also the time when the Wild 
 Huntsman may find repose. An old Metz picture 
 shows the Jew with Wodan's flying hair and mantle, 
 but with a kindly countenance. It is only in a recent 
 instance that anything diabolical has been associated 
 with him pictorially, this being in a Lorraine engrav- 
 ing of 1842, where he has the hat and feather of Fra 
 Diavolo. 
 
 There is a tone of pity in the old verses which 
 spread abroad the fable in Flanders, and has thence 
 gone through many lands as The Wandering Jew's 
 Complaint, though with many variations. I find them 
 quoted in Mr. Hoffman's book, referred to elsewhere. 
 The burgesses of Brabant address the Wanderer : 
 
 '&*■ 
 
 " We used to think your story 
 Was but an idle dream ; 
 But when thus wan and hoary 
 And broken down you seem, 
 The sight can not deceive 
 And we the tale believe. 
 
 " Are you that man of sorrow 
 Of whom our authors write — 
 Grief comes with every morrow, 
 
 And wretchedness at night ; 
 Oh, let us know are you 
 Isaac, the Wandering Jew ? 
 
154 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 "Then he replied, ' Believe me, 
 
 I suffer bitter woe ; 
 Incessant travels grieve me — 
 
 No rest's for me below ; 
 A respite I have never, 
 But onward MARCH forever ! 
 
 " 'Twas by my rash behaviour 
 I wrought this fearful scathe : 
 As Christ our Lord and Saviour 
 
 Was passing to the grave, 
 His mild request I spurned, 
 His gentle pleading scorned. 
 
 " A secret force expelled me 
 That instant from my home, 
 And since the Doom hath held me 
 
 Unceasingly to roam — 
 But neither day nor night 
 Must check my onward flight. 
 
 " I have no home to hide me, 
 No wealth can I display ; 
 Yet Unknown Powers provide me 
 
 Five farthings every day ; 
 This always is my store, 
 'Tis never less nor more.' " 
 
 I may here mention an extremely important work, 
 Histoire de Ulmagerie Popidaire, par CJiampfleury 
 (Paris : Dentu, 1869), which contains a number of 
 pictures taken from the old ballads and folk-books 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 155 
 
 concerning the Wandering Jew. The early pictures 
 represent the Jew as a man of noble form, and 
 generally of a handsome and melancholy countenance. 
 The only picture in the volume which betrays anti- 
 Jewish feeling is a modern one from Sweden (where 
 the Wandering Jew is still believed in), which repre- 
 sents him in semi-caricature, carrying top-boots at his 
 back. In most of the pictures the boots worn consti- 
 tute a prominent feature. This work of Champfleury 
 is of value beyond its pictorial representations, on 
 account of the curiosities which the author has dis- 
 covered concerning the adventures of the legend 
 among rustic populations. The author does not give 
 us his authority for saying that the Wandering Jew 
 appeared in some of the mediaeval miracle-plays, but 
 he shows that he was introduced into a French ballet, 
 Mariage de Pierre de Provence et de la belle Mague- 
 loutie, dance" par son Altcsse Roy ale dans la Ville de 
 Tours, le 21, en son Hostel, and at Paris in 1638. 
 There may also be found in this work the Breton 
 ballad of the Wandering Jew, consisting of 180 verses, 
 sung at country fairs, to the popular air Giierz, Santcz 
 Anna. This ballad is very ancient, and much more 
 interesting than that in Percy's Reliques. The 
 Wanderer calls himself Boudedeo, and tells of the 
 many countries he has visited. He has always five 
 
156 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 sous in his pocket, and is never disturbed by sickness 
 or hunger. The ballad ends, 
 
 " Chretiens, priez Dieu pour le malheureux Boudedeo \" 
 
 Champfleury describes a Wissembourg picture which 
 shows a beggar raising his hat to the Wanderer and 
 the latter drops his five sous into the beggar's cap. 
 This incident tells much of the popular sympathy 
 felt for persons believed to be the doomed man, and 
 is remembered by Beranger in his poem : 
 
 " Pius d'un pauvre vient implorer 
 Le denier que je puis repandre, 
 Qui n'a pas le temps de serrer 
 La main qu'au passant j'aime A tendre." 
 
 Champfleury remarks that, in popular belief, it was 
 always for inhumanity that Ahasuerus was punished ; 
 and the meaning of this Wissembourg picture is that 
 as he was punished for lack of charity, he is saved by 
 his charity. The picture shows a citizen giving the 
 Wanderer a glass of beer. It is all a lesson of 
 humanity, but is pictured on a background of such 
 inhumanity on the part of Christ, that Ahasuerus, 
 giving away his sous, seems to have taken the place 
 in human sympathy of the Jew who cursed him. 
 Dr. Coremans, in his Bulletin de la Commission 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IX FOLK-LORE. 157 
 
 royale cThistoire de Belgiqiu (X., No. 1) says that most 
 of the Belgian villages have their legend of the 
 passage of the Wandering Jew through them, and 
 that there is a general notion that he rejuvenates old 
 women. 
 
 The Man in the Moon with his thornbush — if, as 
 some think, he represents the doom of a Jew, who 
 picked up fire-wood on the Sabbath, doomed to go on 
 picking up sticks forever, and be bayed at by Gabriel's 
 hounds — might typify the shrivelling up in English 
 folk-lore of the great myths of earthly immortals, in- 
 cluding Ahasuerus. 
 
 Mr. William Henderson gives the following example 
 from the North-country : " An old woman of the 
 North Riding once asked a friend of mine whether 
 it was wrong to wash on Good Friday. ' I used to do 
 so,' she said, ' and thought no harm of it, till once, 
 when I was hanging out my clothes, a young woman 
 passed by (a dressmaker she was, and a Methodist) ; 
 and she reproved me, and told me this story. While 
 our Lord Jesus was being led to Calvary, they took 
 him past a woman who was washing, and the woman 
 " blirted " the thing she was washing in his face ; on 
 which he said, " Cursed be everyone who hereafter 
 shall wash on this day !" And never again,' added 
 the old woman, 'have I washed on Good Friday.' 
 
158 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Now it is said in Cleveland that clothes washed and 
 hung out to dry on Good Friday will become spotted 
 with blood ; but the Methodist girl's wild legend 
 reminds me more of one which a relation of mine 
 elicited from a poor Devonshire shoemaker. She was 
 remonstrating with him for his indolence and want of 
 spirit, when he astonished her by replying, 'Don't 
 'ee be hard on me. We shoemakers are a poor slob- 
 bering race, and so have been ever since the curse that 
 Jesus Christ laid on us.' ' And what was that ?' she 
 asked. ' Why,' said he, ' when they were carrying him 
 to the cross, they passed a shoemaker's bench, and the 
 man looked up and spat at him ; and the Lord 
 turned and said, " A poor slobbering fellow shalt thou 
 be, and all shoemakers after thee, for what thou hast 
 done to me." ' "* 
 
 Such, by the blessing of Protestantism, is the out- 
 come of the great legends of Veronica and Ahasuerus ! 
 Tithonus, outliving his time, is changed to a grass- 
 hopper. Another instance of the chirpings to which 
 great myths are reduced may be heard from our 
 above-mentioned " Seven Whistlers," of which in- 
 genious use is made by the authoress of " That Lass o' 
 Lowrie." Mr. James Pearson contributed to " Notes 
 
 * Folk-lore of the Northern Counties. Published for the 
 Folk-lore Society by Satchell, Peyton and Co. 1879. P. 82. 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 159 
 
 and Queries" (September 30, 1871) the following: 
 ' One evening, a few years ago, when crossing one of 
 our Lancashire moors, in company with an intelligent 
 old man, we were suddenly startled by the whistling 
 overhead of a covey of plovers. My companion re- 
 marked that when a boy the old people considered 
 such a circumstance a bad omen, ' as the person 
 who heard the Wandering Jezvs' — as he called the 
 plovers — ' was sure to be overtaken with some ill 
 luck.' On questioning my friend on the name given 
 to the birds, he said, ' There is a tradition that they 
 contain the souls of those Jews who assisted at the 
 crucifixion, and in consequence were doomed to float 
 in the air forever.' When we arrived at the foot of 
 the moor, a coach, by which I had hoped to complete 
 my journey, had already left its station thereby 
 causing me to finish the distance on foot. The old 
 man reminded me of the omen." 
 
 This superstition is connected with the Gabriel- 
 hounds, believed in Yorkshire to be human-headed 
 dogs, or sky-yelpers, as Wordsworth calls them. That 
 poet tells of an aged peasant — 
 
 " With ample sovereignity of eye and ear ; 
 Rich were his walks with supernatural cheer ; 
 He the seven birds hath seen that never part, 
 Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds, 
 
160 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 And counted them ! And oftentimes will start, 
 For overhead are sweeping Gabriel's hounds, 
 Doomed with their impious lord the flying hart 
 To chase for ever on aerial grounds." 
 
 I may quote here part of the interesting account of 
 superstitions concerning the Wandering Jew contri- 
 buted to " Notes and Queries " (vol. xii. p. 503) by 
 Mr. V. T. Sternberg. " Sometimes, during the cold 
 winter nights, the lonely cottager will be awoke by a 
 plaintive demand for ' Water, good Christian ! water, 
 for the love of God !' And if he looks out, he will see 
 a venerable old man in antique raiment, with grey 
 flowing beard and a tall staff, who beseeches his 
 charity with the most earnest gesture. Woe to the 
 churl who refuses him water or shelter ! My old 
 nurse, who was a Warwickshire woman, and, as Sir 
 Walter Scott said of his grandmother, ' a most aiufiC 
 leer' knew a man who boldly cried out, ' All very fine, 
 Mr. Ferguson, but you can't lodge here !' And it was 
 decidedly the worst thing he ever did in his life, for 
 his best mare fell dead lame, and corn went down I am 
 afraid to say how much per quarter. If, on the con- 
 trary, you treat him well, and refrain from indelicate 
 inquiries respecting his age — on which point he is very 
 touchy — his visit is sure to bring good luck. Perhaps, 
 years afterwards, when you are on your death-bed, he 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 161 
 
 may happen to be passing, and if he should, you are 
 safe ; for three knocks with his staff will make you 
 hale, and he never forgets any kindnesses. Many 
 stories are current of his wonderful cures, but there is 
 one to be found in Peck's History of Stamford which 
 possesses the rare merit of being written by the patient 
 himself. Upon Whitsunday, in the year of our Lord 
 1658, ' about six of the clock, just after evensong,' one, 
 Samuel Wallis, of Stamford, who had been long 
 wasted with a lingering consumption, was sitting by 
 the fire, reading in that delectable book called Abra- 
 ham's Suit for Sodom. He heard a knock at the 
 door, and, as his nurse was absent, he crawled to open 
 it himself. What he saw there Samuel shall say in 
 his own style : ' I beheld a proper, tall, grave old man. 
 Thus he said, " Friend, I pray thee, give an old 
 pilgrim a cup of small beere ?" And I said, " Sir, I 
 pray you, come in and welcome." And he said, " I 
 am no sir, therefore call me not sir ; but come in I 
 must, for I cannot pass by thy doore." After finishing 
 the beere, " Friend," he said, " thou art not well ?" I 
 said, " No, truly, sir, I have not been well this many 
 years." He said, " What is thy disease ?" I said, " A 
 deep consumption, sir ; our doctors say, past cure : 
 for truly, I am a very poor man, and not able to 
 follow doctor's counsel." " Then," said he, " I will tell 
 
 11 
 
i62 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 thee what thou shalt do ; and, by the help and power 
 of Almighty God above, thou shalt be well. Tor 
 morrow, when thou risest up, go into thy garden, and 
 get there two leaves of red sage and one of bloodworte, 
 and put them into a cup of thy small beere. Drink 
 as often as need require, and when the cup is empty, 
 fill it again, and put in fresh leaves every fourth day, 
 and thou shalt see, through our Lord's great goodness 
 and mercy, before twelve dayes shall be past, thy 
 disease shall be cured and thy body altered." ' After 
 this simple prescription, Wallis pressed him to eat. 
 But he said, ' No, friend, I will not eat ; the Lord 
 Jesus is sufficient for me. Very seldom doe I drinke 
 any beere neither, but that which comes from the 
 rocke. So, friend, the Lord God be with thee.' So 
 saying, he departed, and was never more heard of ; 
 but the patient got well within the given time, and for 
 many a long day there was war hot and fierce among 
 the divines of Stamford, as to whether the stranger 
 was an angel or a devil. His dress had been minutely 
 described by honest Sam. His coat was purple, and 
 buttoned down to the waist ; ' his britches of the same 
 couler, all new to see to ;' his stockings were- very 
 white, but whether linen or jersey, deponent knoweth 
 not ; his beard and head were white, and he had a 
 white stick in his hand. The day was rainy from 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 163 
 
 morning to night, ' but he had not one spot of dirt 
 upon his clothes.' Aubrey gives an almost exactly 
 similar relation, the scene of which he places in the 
 Staffordshire moorlands. He there appears in a 
 purple shag gown,' and prescribes balm-leaves." 
 
 Brand mentions having seen one of these ' impostors ' 
 going about Newcastle-on-Tyne, followed by a crowd, 
 and murmuring to himself " Poor Jack all alone 1" 
 Probably Brand did not hear the phrase rightly, 
 since the cry of the Wanderer was " Poor Joe all 
 alone !" There was a crossing-sweeper near St. Paul's 
 Churchyard, who murmured the same, of whom there 
 is an engraving in the British Museum. A picture of 
 the Newcastle man was made for the Musgraves of 
 Eden Hall, which has beneath it "Poor Joe all alone !" 
 My friend Mr. W. B. Scott, who once resided at New- 
 castle, writes that he remembers hearing of him. 
 " He seemed to have left an impression of a some- 
 what respectful kind, but from what cause I never 
 heard ; probably he had a history of a melancholy 
 kind, and had been left alone by some calamity." 
 
 This, so far as I can learn, was the last appearance 
 in the world of any man pretending to be the Wander- 
 ing Jew, if indeed he did so pretend, and the honour 
 was not thrust upon him by the superstitious crowd. 
 There had been advantages enough in earlier times 
 
 11 — 2 
 
164 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 to entice Ahasuerus, or "the famous Joseph," to 
 make his appearance. He came as a " witness " for 
 Christ ; he was generally a pious Christian ; a tra- 
 dition tells of his gambling in Naples, but, as the 
 people there invoke their saints for luck in gambling, 
 the exception is not considerable. Jurisconsult Louvet 
 heard him preaching to street crowds in a French 
 province like a revivalist friar. But in England com- 
 mon sense gradually chilled the Wandering Jew. When 
 it was found that he was not above receiving sixpences 
 to support his imperishable existence the public lost 
 interest in him. 
 
 A question addressed by me a few weeks ago to 
 the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle elicited the following 
 answer : 
 
 " It is quite true that a man who was known as 
 ' The Wandering Jew ' lived in Newcastle during the 
 latter part of last century. He left a son, who I 
 believe has lived in Hull the greater part of this 
 century, and who is now a very old man indeed, 
 keeping a small public-house named the Cricketers' 
 Arms. He is very eccentric, is known as ' Topper, 
 the Newcastle Fossil,' and attracts a deal of attention 
 on account of his appearance and the condition of his 
 house. He is a very peculiar-looking man, with 
 
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE. 165 
 
 features of a decided Jewish cast. His clothes appear 
 to be as old as himself. He has never been known to 
 be clean : and old people in Hull do not remember 
 the counter or floor of his house to have been washed. 
 He is supposed to be emulating ' Dirty Dick ' of 
 London in this respect. 
 
 " George Cooper." 
 Hull. 
 
 This may be regarded as the epitaph upon an 
 ancient dream which branched into a vast and 
 various mythology, and, in its time, bore for millions 
 their hopes of a renovated earth, and their visions of 
 resurrection from the sleep of death ! 
 
XV. 
 
 THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 
 
 Having, as a figure of popular faith, gathered to him 
 all related elements of mould and decay, and found fit 
 extinction in the Newcastle " fossil " just mentioned, 
 Ahasuerus rises for new wanderings as a poetic 
 ideal. 
 
 The Germans were the first to deal seriously with our 
 legend, and their literature of the Wandering Jew is 
 indicated in this chapter. The subject attracted the 
 unhappy DANIEL FRIEDRICH SCHUBART during his 
 imprisonment. Carlyle, in the notes to his Life of 
 Schiller, says the idea of making old Joannes a tempo- 
 ribns, the ' Wandering,' or, as Schubart's countrymen 
 denominate him, the ' Eternal Jew,' into a novel hero 
 was a -mighty favourite with him. " In this antique 
 cordwainer, as on a raft at anchor in the stream of 
 time, he would survey the changes and wonders of 
 two thousand years : the Roman and the Arab were 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 167 
 
 to figure there, the Crusader and the Circumnavigator, 
 the Eremite and the Thebaid, and the Pope of Rome. 
 Joannes himself, the Man existing out of Time and 
 Space — Joannes, the unresting and undying — was to 
 be a deeply tragic personage. Scbubart'warmed him- 
 self with this idea, and talked about it in his cups, to the 
 astonishment of simple souls. He even wrote a cer- 
 tain rhapsody connected with it, which is published in 
 his poems. But here he rested ; and the project of 
 the Wandering Jew, which Goethe likewise meditated 
 in his youth, is still unexecuted. Goethe turned to 
 other objects, and poor Schubart was surprised by 
 death in the midst of his schemes, on the 10th of 
 October, 1791." But the project, as we shall see, is not 
 unexecuted. 
 
 Schubart's Rhapsody appeared in his " Poems, 
 Frankfort, 1787."* His Ahasuerus has retired into 
 the wild solitudes of Mount Carmel. There he is 
 seen, with frantic laughter, casting away the dry skulls 
 of his relatives, which break to pieces, crying, " That 
 is my father ! Those are my wives ! these my chil- 
 dren ! They could die, but I — outcast — cannot die !" 
 
 * The outlines of German poems that follow, are condensed 
 from a pamphlet entitled -.—Die Sage vom ' Ewigen Juden,' ihre 
 poetische Wandlung ttnd Fortbildung. Von Friedrich Helbig. 
 Berlin, 1874. For this pamphlet and assistance in its translation 
 I am indebted to Fiiiulein Almata Jacobi (Bremen). 
 
1 68 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 And again, " Jerusalem fell ; I crushed the babe, I 
 rushed into the flames, cursed the Roman ! — Rome 
 fell, whole nations perished, and — I remained !" He 
 tries to kill himself in different ways, but in vain. He 
 feels pain acutely, but has to endure every variety of 
 it, even to the agonies of the moment of death, with- 
 out this moment ever arriving. The snake bites 
 him, the dragon tortures, the burning forest blisters 
 him. He says to himself, " Under my feet the mine 
 exploded and threw mc high into the air ; sense- 
 less I fell down, and found myself roasted amidst 
 blood, and brains, and bones." He is obliged to carry 
 on a corpse-like body, infirm, smelling of the grave ; 
 and through thousands of years he must see, like a 
 yawning monster, an everlasting sameness. The 
 rhapsody brings the Wanderer to a peaceful end. 
 Ahasuerus throws himself down from the top of 
 Carmel into the abyss, " and night covers his bushy 
 eyelids. An angel carries, him into a recess in the 
 rocks. ' There mayest thou sleep now,' says the 
 angel ; ' sleep, Ahasuerus, sleep soundly ! God's 
 anger does not last for ever.' " 
 
 In 1 807 appeared the ballad of The Eternal Jew,by 
 Aloys Schreiber. The torture of this Ahasuerus 
 consists in his not being able to enjoy life and nature, 
 open to all other men, on account of his restlessness. 
 
THE NEW AHASVERVS IN GERMANY. 169 
 
 He cannot drink the water of the fountain, he cannot 
 rest in the shade of a tree, he cannot break a flower to 
 enjoy its smell, for which he longs ; he must start, he 
 must wander. In this he differs from Schubart's 
 Ahasuerus, who had long been weary of life. Being 
 continually obliged to renounce everything, he at last 
 becomes timid, shy ; he flies all men and hurries on 
 heedlessly. Finally he observes a crucifix by the way- 
 side ; about to rush on, an impulse brings him to his 
 knees, imploring the Crucified for forgiveness. Christ 
 answers him from the cross, "Whoever has failed 
 may repent ; and none who loves and believes in me 
 shall need to shun my countenance." The Wanderer 
 is found dead, kneeling before the cross. 
 
 WlLHELM MULLER, in his Wanderlieder (published 
 in his works, 1830) has a poem on " The Eternal Jew," 
 which pictures the desolation and loneliness that 
 torture a life satiated to disgust, longing for rest and 
 death. It is pervaded by melancholy. " Although I 
 have seen everything I am never allowed to rest !" 
 All around him has an end : the river in the ocean, 
 the eagle on the Alps, the cloud in the falling rain, 
 and also " to the tired wanderer a certain limit has 
 been fixed. What, does he complain of his day's 
 misery? — before night death will have taken him 
 home." The end of the poem is a wish of the poor 
 
170 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Wanderer that those who have finished their earthly- 
 pilgrimage might, ere they go to sleep for ever, ask 
 of God one hour's rest for him. 
 
 NlKOLAUS LENAU has treated the subject in a 
 similar manner. The scenery of his poem, Ahasucnts, 
 the Eternal Jew, is a lonely heath. In a distant 
 meadow shepherds are seen surrounding and weeping 
 over the corpse of a beloved youth. Whilst they are 
 thus standing a Wanderer passes that way: his hair is 
 grey, his countenance pale, cold, deeply wrinkled ; his 
 beard long and white, his fiery eyes in dark sockets. 
 He walks on to the bier, and calls out, with mingled 
 mockery and mournfulness, " Suppress your ungrateful 
 tears ; his rest is good ; oh yes, his rest is good ! 
 Though fools like you complain, his heart is still ; 
 while mine beats on by night and day, in restless 
 longing to find its sabbath in the grave !" The 
 Wanderer utters the philosophy of Schopenhauer, 
 explaining that the earth is only the lie of Paradise, 
 that it is always the same old delusion of Time — all 
 flowering to its destruction : a philosophy which ter- 
 minates in a marriage with Madness, personified in 
 Lenau himself. 
 
 Meanwhile, says the poem, the shepherds cover the 
 coffin. Suddenly the stranger gets sight of the 
 crucifix on the lid of the coffin. He is frightened, and 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 171 
 
 tears come to his eyes. Now the Lenau-Schopen- 
 hauer turns out to be Ahasuerus. He tells the story 
 of his life in the usual form of the myth. He tells the 
 different kinds of death he had vainly sought. Then 
 he wanders on, on — on ; above his head you hear the 
 whizzing of the birds ; a long shadow walks behind 
 him ; the shepherds tremble and make the sign of the 
 cross. 
 
 Although Adalbert von Chamisso was by birth 
 French, his life and culture were German ; his mixed 
 origin is shown in his subjective poem, the " New 
 Ahasuerus" (1836), where the Wanderer is simply a 
 lover whose mistress has married another ! This re- 
 jected lover compares himself to Ahasuerus, who can- 
 not die or rest until the Day of Judgment, while the 
 faithless lady represents the fallen city of Jerusalem. 
 Ahasuerus says, " Time stands still before me ; the 
 age of man is as one moment, and the moments ages. 
 Every hundred years I come once more to Jerusalem, 
 mourning over its cold ashes, trying to put the ruins 
 in their old place again, but nobody takes notice of 
 me ; evermore I come to the same thing — a grave !" 
 Ahasuerus is " the son of sorrow turned into stone." 
 
 The poem of A.W. Schlegel, "The Eternal Jew," 
 follows the old myth, with nothing new. His Ahasu- 
 erus, on account of his unbelief, wanders through the 
 
172 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 world as a solace for all those who are miserable, 
 until the reappearance of Christ releases him. 
 
 JULIUS MOSEN is the first who treated the subject 
 in a fuller and more independent way. His " Ahasu- 
 erus" (1838) is an epic. In the notes it is stated that 
 the myth belongs to the poet's earliest recollections, 
 the supposed Wandering Jew having passed through 
 his birthplace, and that a shepherd had spoken to him. 
 The poem carries this idea out with poetical realism. 
 Mosen's idea of the myth is human nature imprisoned 
 by an earthly existence. Ahasuerus symbolises the 
 spirit of Tradition embodied in an individual being, 
 who, at first in unconscious obstinacy, but at length 
 deliberately, opposes himself to the God of Christen- 
 dom. Mosen gives his Ahasuerus from the first a 
 human trait. His deceased wife has left him two 
 beautiful children, Eve and Reuben. A young Roman 
 prince, living at Jerusalem, likes these children, and he 
 wishes to take them with him to Rome. He applies 
 to Pilate, who orders Ahasuerus to part with the chil- 
 dren. The father in his desperation implores the 
 assistance of Jesus, the new prophet. He will believe 
 in him and his new doctrine, if he can save his chil- 
 dren. Jesus will not grant such private wishes, but 
 goes on to prophesy the fall of Jerusalem. Upon 
 this Ahasuerus tears his clothes into pieces, and in 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 173 
 
 pain and wrath accuses Jesus of falsehood and im- 
 posture : " Thou art our God ? And yet to save thou 
 hast no power ! If man or God, thou hast deceived 
 the people !" When the Roman prince comes to 
 fetch the children, Ahasuerus has slain them. In his 
 despair he becomes more and more a disbeliever. 
 What, he asks himself, did Israel commit to become 
 so wretched ? " Through its piety it has been led to 
 misery. Why, then, does man crowd after this 
 haughty God ? I will cast off his memory ; death to 
 this Nazarene, to God, to everything !" In this excite- 
 ment Ahasuerus scornfully forbids Jesus to rest at his 
 door when he asks that favour. Jesus pronounces his 
 sentence in these words, " Thou shalt live without rest 
 thy immortality upon earth !" 
 
 The Archangel Michael appears and gives Ahasuerus 
 a hope that mercy may be obtained at three different 
 times of trial. The trials follow. Ahasuerus has 
 married again and has once more two children, Eve 
 and Reuben. Rome declares war against Judea, Titus 
 surrounds Jerusalem ; Ahasuerus is full of resentment 
 against God, who declines to help, and in his anger 
 sets the temple on fire. During the conflagration, 
 with his children at his side, he enters the flames, 
 which do not touch him. Eve's lover, Matthias, who 
 has become a Christian, for that reason rejected by 
 
'74 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Ahasuerus, serves in the Roman army and comes 
 rushing through the flames to save his beloyed. 
 Ahasuerus bids him welcome as a suitor, and pushes 
 him into the flames. His children shriek with terror, 
 and Ahasuerus throws them both after him, crying, 
 " Here, heartless God ! now thou canst rejoice !" 
 
 The first trial thus passes without redemption for 
 Ahasuerus, and the second comes. Ahasuerus, having 
 tried all possible ways of suicide, at last addresses 
 Death with an appeal for pity. Death replies that he 
 has orders to pass him by until he shall believe in 
 God. Ahasuerus refuses. He is once more father 
 of two beautiful children, Leah and Reuben. He 
 enjoys the purest happiness, when all at once, in a 
 thunderstorm, the God of the Jews appears to renew 
 the old league with him against Christ. Ahasuerus 
 consents, and is sent to Julian the Apostate as the 
 great adversary of Christendom. Ahasuerus arrives 
 there in the very moment when the wounded Julian, 
 under a night-vision of Christ, begins to doubt his 
 pagan faith. Ahasuerus gains him back to his former 
 antagonism, and obtains permission to rebuild the 
 temple at Jerusalem. But during the building, a 
 dispute breaks out among the workmen. All order 
 is gone, the work is interrupted ; one looks at another 
 in amazement, when suddenly a prophet announces 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 175 
 
 that for the reconstruction of the temple, the God of 
 Judea and the God of the Christians were contending ; 
 and that the latter could only be made to yield if the 
 blood of two innocent children should soak the 
 ground. Ahasuerus offers his own children. Before 
 the sacrifice is finished, Christ invisibly takes the 
 children to Himself. Then the earth is rent asunder ; 
 flames dart out and consume the new building. 
 
 The second trial having passed without saving 
 Ahasuerus, twice a murderer of his own children, the 
 third trial advances. In this Death passes, with souls 
 that have found repose, before Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus 
 is in mortal agony ; his soul has nearly departed, but 
 one point still remains, which no effort of his will can 
 destroy. This point begins to assume a shape, a form 
 once more. It is the same point of life which goes 
 through all organic nature, and nowhere admits of 
 destruction or state of rest. So our Wanderer, too, 
 is once more filled with the wish to live. Again the 
 God of Judea animates him to struggle against the 
 doctrine of Christ. Again he follows his advice. He 
 is now sent to Arabia, where Mohammed leads on the 
 nations asfainst the Cross. Ahasuerus allies himself 
 with Mohammed to conquer Jerusalem ;. he calls his 
 people together, but they will not hear him, they have 
 only stones to throw at him who suffered so much for 
 
176 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 their -sake. Then, with tears in his eyes, Ahasuerus 
 leaves them for ever, and bestows henceforth his love 
 upon Humanity. 
 
 Mosen's Ahasuerus thus becomes a hero of 
 Humanity, and his aims rise high above his first 
 purpose. He is at the head of Mohammed's warriors, 
 driving away the defenders of the Holy Sepulchre, 
 menacing death to all who approach it. All fly away ; 
 two children only remain — his own. Ahasuerus em- 
 braces them, and rejoices to have found them at last. 
 Then Mohammed reminds him that he has sworn 
 death to whomsoever should approach the sepulchre. 
 Ahasuerus now cries out in his grief. For the third 
 time he falls under the curse of his disbelief. He 
 calls for some one to slay him, and the third trial so 
 releases him of his vow. Arrows dart through the air : 
 the children fall ; he, too, sinks down, to awake once 
 more for fulfilment of his real mission. " One thing 
 has been ended ; another begins, that neither time nor 
 dark eternity can end. Loosed from Him and His 
 mercy, henceforth I begin a long struggle until I have 
 saved mankind from Him." Ahasuerus declares an 
 everlasting war against Christ, " in the name of all 
 forces and powers, all sighs, all sorrows, shed tears 
 and blood, broken spirits and crushed hearts." Christ 
 accepts the combat : " Thou facest Me, Thought 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 177 
 
 against Thought. Wrestle on and on, until at last, 
 the circle ended, the Day of Judgment shall 
 decide !'* 
 
 There the poem ends, or rather, as Helbig remarks, 
 " does not end ;" the end is put off to the day of the 
 last Judgment. The struggle now only begins, never 
 to end, between Ahasuerus and Christ, between 
 Humanity and Christendom, between Earth and 
 Heaven. 
 
 Ludwig K6HLER, too, makes the Wanderer a type 
 of human tendency. His New Ahasuerus (1845) is a 
 prophet of freedom. The sufferer he has derided says 
 to him : " March o;i then for eternities, until veracity 
 has found its residence on earth, filling it with purest 
 brightness! until a golden Dawn as of springtide breaks, 
 and Liberty awakes the light now hidden in night!" 
 Often the Wanderer thinks this morning has come, and 
 exults in his hope of rest ; but his joy, his hopes are 
 vain. Napoleon crushes the French Revolution, " the 
 Burschenschaft " leads to the errors of Sand ; the 
 rebellious Greeks are betrayed, and so on. Every- 
 where is oppression of conscience and thought. 
 Ahasuerus despairs, and complains that he cannot 
 die, when suddenly Jesus addresses him with a 
 rebuke : he tells Ahasuerus that he is unworthy of the 
 longed-for liberty, so long as he has not mastered self 
 
 12 
 
178 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 and sacrificed his egotism. " Thygrave, not humanity, 
 was thine aim, so thou hast striven in vain. Liberty 
 shall be aim, not instrument to thee. Whilst thou 
 vvert complaining of Destiny, it went its way, and 
 Liberty began its heavenly progression. Tis no dream 
 and delusion ; ere thou thinkest, it sunders hell and 
 displays its light. The world gets free. Already in 
 the vale a stir is heard. Its reign is near !" With this 
 vision of hope for the future the poet leaves us. 
 
 Franz Horn (1818) published in Fouque's 
 FrauentascJienbticJi his novel " The Eternal Jew." His 
 Ahasuerus is a rich Jew in Jerusalem, who only 
 believes in Christ's external mission. He thinks 
 that Jesus, though for the time full of humility, 
 will rule with a commanding sceptre when clad in 
 purple, and by his healing power will extirpate 
 disease and death from the earth. In this he is dis- 
 appointed : Jesus is laughed at, despised, ill-treated, 
 and endures all unresistingly. Mistaken in his dearest 
 hopes, Ahasuerus conceives a deep hate against 
 Jesus. So, when the latter, fallen under the burthen 
 of his cross, asks for a moment's rest at his door, 
 Ahasuerus drives him on without compassion. Then 
 Christ rises, and says : " Well, receive then what thou 
 wishest ; live, live on, as never man before ; die not 
 till thou hast become worthy to die !" 
 
THE NEW A HAS UERUS IN GERMANY. 1 79 
 
 And so it came : all around him died ; everything 
 became strange to him ; only the sky above him 
 remained the same. He comes to understand that 
 Christ by his death has sealed death, and that he 
 (Ahasuerus) by his life has to represent the insuffi- 
 ciency and misery of mere life. He moves on with 
 aimless strides, his form as of iron, his visage weather- 
 beaten like lichened stone, a nameless grief upon his 
 features. The scene of the novel is laid at the end 
 of the Thirty Years' War. Ahasuerus has saved a 
 young count in the tumult of battle, and afterwards, 
 by telling him the story of his life, converts him from 
 the blasphemy and despair into which he had fallen 
 by the sudden death of his family — a misfortune 
 attributed to the appearance of Ahasuerus. 
 
 From this novel, AUGUST KLINGEMANN (1827) 
 took the subject of his tragedy, Ahasuerus. The 
 Wanderer was a favourite character with the dis- 
 tinguished actor Ludwig Devrient. With Klinge- 
 mann the myth signifies purification by suffering 
 in order to obtain an imperishable liberty. Christ 
 appears as the mediator between natural and super- 
 natural things, and points the wandering man to his 
 coming empire. The hero of Klingemann's drama is 
 the murderer of Gustavus Adolphus, the Count of 
 Werth, a fanatical Catholic, who, in disguise of a 
 
 12 2 
 
i So THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Protestant, has assassinated the champion of Protes- 
 tantism. The deed weighs heavily on his soul, drives 
 him to melancholy and despair, and he finally drowns 
 his conscience in Atheism. The son of Gustavus 
 Adolphus enters his family as a visitor ; and in his 
 presence, and that of his family, the guilty Count 
 speaks of the deed with abhorrence. Only one person 
 knows of his guilt — the mysterious man who saved 
 him out of the battle. To get rid of him the assassin 
 challenges him ; but his lance breaks on the breast of the 
 stranger — for it is Ahasuerus, he who has blasphemed 
 his Lord, like the now atheistical Count of Werth. 
 The curse upon him is that which strikes the Denier 
 of God. Ahasuerus, after the fruitless combat, reveals 
 to the count his story, and his longing to die, im- 
 ploring him no longer to blaspheme God. The Count 
 after this discovery acknowledges the existence of 
 God, and confesses his murder of Gustavus Adolphus. 
 He then kills himself, and so finds rest ; but Ahasuerus 
 wanders on — on ! 
 
 THEODOR Oelkers has treated the subject in a 
 novel, Princess Mary of Oldenhoff, or the Wander- 
 ing Jew, (Leipzig, 1848). Oelkers adds a curse upon 
 Ahasuerus : in order to reconcile Christ he must 
 sacrifice what is dearest to him, but his sacrifices are 
 always ineffectual. He takes from time to time a 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. i3i 
 
 wife, he has children ; he survives each wife, slays his 
 children ; he is driven to do this by necessity, while 
 conscious that the offerings will be in vain. He has 
 the fearful gift of reading the future : foresees all that 
 shall happen to himself and his beloved ones. In 
 bitterness of heart he says : " Let men see in me how 
 vain is their hope for divine love and mercy !" But 
 at length he finds reason to hope for release at a very 
 distant period. " I am only," he says, " condemned in 
 Time : Eternity belongs to me, as it belongs to all when 
 Time shall end. Then shall I be free to move about 
 in endless regions, breathing the air of heaven ; then 
 the partial tyranny of Grace shall be dethroned ; 
 Justice will occupy the throne, sharing it with her 
 sister, Love." 
 
 Oelkers thinks that before this time comes there 
 will also appear a Wandering Moslem and a Wander- 
 ing Christian. 
 
 Levin Schucking, too, brings our hero before us 
 in an episode, full of imagination, called "The 
 Three Suitors" which belongs to his novel The 
 Peasant Prince, 1851. In the hotel of " The Three 
 Moors," at Augsburg, during the twelve nights after 
 Christmas in the year 1700, three strangers met 
 together. One was a weary half-decayed Jew, with a 
 long dirty gown, who next morning changes into a 
 
i8z THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 handsome young Armenian Prince, Isaac Laquedam. 
 The second was the Dutch admiral Van der Decken, 
 who arrives in a carriage with four horses. The third 
 was his Excellency the Master of Chase en chef, Herr 
 von Rodenstein, with a large suite. These individuals 
 have a rendezvous in this inn every hundred years, and 
 pass one year together in revelling, after which they 
 disappear. They lose their human form and wander 
 as spectres, one over the earth, one over the sea, the 
 third in the air, as the Eternal Jew, the Flying Dutch- 
 man, the Wild Huntsman ; all in bond and service of 
 Satan, except for this one year, wherein he has no 
 power over them. Whenever one century is passed, 
 Ahasuerus-Laquedam is seized by a burning fever, 
 after which his body resumes the appearance it had 
 when he raised his hand against Jesus. 
 
 All three do a great deal of mischief during that 
 year in quiet Augsburg, especially in the hearts of the 
 young women. Among these is one distinguished by 
 great beauty, but also by her haughtiness and disdain 
 towards the male sex. All three try to win her proud 
 and frosty heart, which unfortunately has been 
 chained to an ugly, paralytic husband. She once 
 says to them that she is not proud of her beauty, 
 but that she would take a pride in standing a danger 
 or conquering a difficulty of which, centuries later, 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 1S3 
 
 the world would say, a man zcou/d Jiave been unable 
 to subdue it. 
 
 The handsome Armenian prince takes her at her 
 word and invites her to follow him one whole year : 
 she promises it, and gives him as pledge of her word 
 a ring. The two others obtain similar promises. At 
 the end of the year she accompanies the Armenian. 
 Suddenly she sees his youth disappear, a musty smell 
 comes from him, and a third shadow walks at their 
 side. " Who are you," she cries aghast. " I am 
 Ahasuerus !" She tries to fly, but Ahasuerus holds 
 her with an iron hand. In her despair she sells her 
 soul to the third shadow (the Devil) who promises her 
 deliverance. But first, she has to keep her word to the 
 Rodensteiner. With him, the Wild Huntsman, she 
 rides through the air, and from aloft beholds the 
 depravity of human life. From what she has seen, 
 and from the wild ride, her soul and body are tor- 
 mented, she is unable to go any farther, and again 
 implores deliverance of the Devil. Already the Fly- 
 ing Dutchman has come to claim fulfilment of her 
 promise to him. The Devil agrees to save her if she 
 will pledge him, besides her own, the soul of her 
 child. 
 
 " No, never my child, never !" the tortured woman 
 cries ; she prefers another year's ride, over the sea. 
 
1 34 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 ' Take her, she longs still for a third trial," says the 
 laughing Devil to the Dutchman ; but he replies : 
 ' The trial was great enough, she is released. Her 
 force was superior to that of a man. A man would 
 not luive spared the soul of his child more than lie did his 
 own." She wakes to find her child sleeping sweetly 
 in its cradle ; she finds also the three rings ; but from 
 the dream of a night her beautiful hair was grey. 
 
 JOSEPH VON ZEDLITZ, an Austrian poet, in his Wan- 
 derings of Ahasuerus (1844), transfers the end of the 
 Jew's life to the Golden Age, when the reign of eternal 
 Peace has begun. Ahasuerus has long been buried on 
 Golgotha, when an angel awakes him, and bids him 
 wander until Noah's white dove, the messenger of 
 peace, comes back, bringing peace on earth and songs 
 of joy, dispersing all wrath and hatred, uniting the 
 nations under the sceptre of Humanity. Ahasuerus, 
 lying in his grave, half-dreaming, sees history pass 
 before his eyes ; he awaits the time that shall come. 
 Whenever he thinks this moment has arrived, he rises 
 from his grave, and wanders about to see the world. 
 It seems to him that the Golden Age is near, when 
 the Roman Empire sinks and the star of Christendom 
 rises ; when the cherub's song of peace strikes his car, 
 he begins his pilgrimage. He expected to find peace, 
 but he finds ruins, ashes, death. He meets Attila's 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 185 
 
 wild bands on his way. When Ahasuerus, 1300 
 years later, rises once more, he finds another Attila, 
 who wants to bend a whole world under his sceptre. 
 Terror-stricken, Ahasuerus cries : " Who can say 
 Attila will not return a third time ?" and returning to 
 his grave, he asks: "Jehovah, how long must I still 
 sleep ?" 
 
 Hans Christian Andersen's Ahasuerus is 
 the angel of Doubt, who comes upon earth to live 
 with men, whom he resembles, for like them he denies 
 and doubts. He is born on earth at the same moment 
 with Jesus, and now, as a human being, bears the 
 name Ahasuerus. As a man he grows wiser and 
 better, like his fellow-men, whose increasing perfection 
 will, in many thousands of years, lead them to heaven. 
 Then Ahasuerus too will return. 
 
 After this Prologue Ahasuerus is seen as a Jewish 
 shoemaker ; he is at the same time a favourite narrator 
 of the stories of the Bible. Merry children, as well as 
 serious Pharisees, come to his workshop, and listen to 
 his words. He becomes conceited, and complains 
 that he is only a shoemaker, and not allowed to sit 
 among the Scribes. Among his auditors is young 
 Veronica, who is enchanted with the new prophet 
 from Nazareth, who had just made his appearance. 
 Ahasuerus counts Jesus amongst the false prophets ; 
 
1 86 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 he also resrards him as the cause of the death of his 
 mother and sister, who had been slain by the agents 
 of Herod. But when he hears Jesus preach in the 
 desert, he changes his mind, and shares the admiration 
 of Veronica. Now, he thinks, the days of splendour 
 v/ill come, according to the prophets, and the reign of 
 David in all its magnificence. Judas, the friend of 
 Ahasuerus, and the enthusiastic disciple of Jesus, is 
 the first to doubt him. He thinks Jesus does not 
 show enough energy in his proceedings, calls him a 
 loiterer ; at length decides to test whether he is really 
 the Messias. If so, legions of angels will certainly 
 assist him at his call ; if not, he may perish. Judas 
 betrays Jesus, in order to give him an opportunity to 
 show his power — an idea suggested by Goethe. The 
 hope of Judas is not realised. Jesus consents to be 
 made a prisoner. " Man he was, and not Messiah !" says 
 Ahasuerus, turning apostate ; " how could I imagine 
 that the son of a carpenter was a prophet ? He feels 
 the cold, suffers hunger, thirst, needs sleep." 
 
 After the usual scene on the way to Golgotha, a 
 voice from above says to the disbelieving Ahasuerus : 
 " Ahasuerus, Ahasuerus ! thou art the type of man- 
 kind ; thou disputest and deniest God himself. Ye 
 are all alike ; so thou mayest wander until we shall 
 meet once again !" 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 187 
 
 It is not real Atheism, but a rigid Judaism that 
 will not surrender to what the author deems the 
 unfolding purposes of God, which appears in this 
 Ahasuerus. 
 
 The first person whom Ahasuerus meets in his 
 wanderings is Barabbas, who lives as an hermit in 
 Lebanon, repenting his sins. He has already been 
 mentioned in the poem as a profligate who only 
 knows the god of his senses ; but the crucifixion and 
 the resurrection of Christ, which he has witnessed, 
 have converted him. He receives his friend with the 
 words, " Blessed be Jesus Christ." Ahasuerus answers 
 with a curse. Full of wrath, not believing in the 
 resurrection, he takes his leave of Barabbas. He trusts 
 in the strength of Israel, but soon after he is told of 
 Jerusalem's fall. He travels to Rome, where Domitian 
 is persecuting the Christians. He rejoices when he 
 sees the burning pyres and the Christian martyrs. 
 He stands at the side of executioners who torture 
 some Christians. Among these is Veronica. He 
 cannot convert her, and tries therefore to slay her. 
 He does not succeed in so saving her from torture, 
 but is suspected and (apparently) killed by the ex- 
 ecutioners. Ahasuerus awakes to find beside him the 
 dead Veronica, and many other bodies of martyred 
 Christians. He starts forth in terror to flee the king- 
 
1 88 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 dom of the Crucified, which he sees consisting only 
 of " graves laden with the smell of Pestilence." 
 
 Having passed through distant parts of the world, 
 Ahasuerus, at the end of three centuries, returns to 
 Rome. He finds that the doctrine of Christ has 
 conquered heathendom. The Emperor and his people 
 are kneeling with Christ's name on their lips. " The 
 spirit of Jehovah has left the earth ; his people is lost 
 in this world-chaos. The old is all dead ; the new is 
 vain and empty ! Jehovah ! my breast is Thy temple, 
 the last in this ruined world !" 
 
 Ahasuerus passes the Alps. The Huns sweep by. 
 He inspires Attila to attack Rome and crush Chris- 
 tendom. But he — he wanders on, farther on, to the 
 region of the Northern Light. On his return he finds 
 thick in the forests the symbols of Christ ; he finds 
 Christ now worshipped in Gaul, and in Rome the first 
 Pope. Compelled now to believe in the power of the 
 Christian faith, he yet persists in his belief that a still 
 greater God will come, the true Messiah promised to 
 Israel. The poet then describes the small communi- 
 ties of Jews, with their quiet and secret worship, still 
 awaiting their Messiah. Some think he has come in 
 the person of Mohammed, and to him Ahasuerus now 
 goes. He advances with him to Jerusalem ; there he 
 is about to set the temple on fire, when Veronica 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 189 
 
 appears and prevents him. He journeys on. In 
 Rome Charlemagne has been made emperor; the 
 Jews have become slaves of the Christians. The 
 hate of this inflexible believer in Jehovah increases. 
 By a vast leap the poet brings Ahasuerus to Canossa, 
 where, full of astonishment, he sees the emperor, bare- 
 footed and in tears, standing before the Vicar of 
 Christ. Before such evidence of the Majesty of Chris- 
 tendom, Ahasuerus, too, stands with bended head. 
 He cannot escape this new kingdom, for he is in the 
 closed yard of the world which it fills. " The emperor 
 stood for nights ; my nights are millenniums !" 
 
 And now for the first time the idea rises in him 
 that he is not only the Opposing Jew, but that he 
 represents everything earthly in conflict with the 
 divine. 
 
 The time of the Crusades comes. From all parts of 
 the world the nations rush to Jerusalem, where once 
 the altar of Jehovah stood. They are impelled by 
 many selfish motives : no single thought or aim unites 
 the warriors, and so they struggle in vain. Ahasuerus 
 now learns to doubt the progress of mankind. In 
 vain a master-builder beside his work instructs him 
 that in the structure of the world God is the builder. 
 " He does not die ; each century is a stone block 
 added to the rest : so mankind gradually ascends." 
 
190 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 " But," Ahasuerus says, " often the work stands still." 
 " It does," answers the stonemason, "but only to gather 
 new strength." To this Ahasuerus answers that all the 
 blood that has been shed in the Crusades was of no 
 use to Europe ; but the guildmaster replies that they 
 formed a vast step in human progress, because they 
 brought the different nations closer together, and 
 brought " liberty " into the world. Many knights sold 
 their estates, which passed into the hands of the com- 
 mons; the supremacy of nobles was destroyed, new 
 life sprang up in sciences and art Then suddenly 
 the cry of battle rings through the air, robber knights 
 menace the peaceful citizens ; the tocsin sounds ; the 
 workmen rush to the battlefield ; the building stops. 
 Full of mockery and derision at this new retrograda- 
 tion in place of the vaunted human evolution, Ahasu- 
 erus walks on. 
 
 The errors of the age, the doings in the convents, 
 the excesses of the Hussites, the mad demeanour of 
 King Wenceslas, only increase Ahasuerus' disbelief in 
 the progress of mankind. An angel leads him to 
 Mayence, where Gutenberg's printing-press is seen. 
 Ahasuerus does not believe in the importance of this 
 invention. He also thinks Columbus a fool, but, 
 nevertheless, follows him to the deep whirlpools of the 
 sea, which he hopes will swallow him. But Columbus 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 191 
 
 is spared by the waves, he reaches land — the New 
 World is discovered. There the god of the primeval 
 forest complains like Ahasuerus, because he has been 
 roused from his rest and deep silence and is dragged 
 into the history of men. The all-pervading Spirit of 
 the Universe addresses him, "Oh, might the discovery 
 of this new hemisphere come also to thee, that thou 
 mightst see the divine wisdom, take comfort, and 
 know that in the future of Humanity there shall be 
 One people, One mind, Unity and Reason !" 
 
 Amid the New World, and with this vision over it, 
 Ahasuerus gains Belief. He now sees that " it was 
 the ruin of Israel, once as rich a land as America, to 
 reject the New, which comes from God." In human 
 evolution the Old always denies the New : " God is 
 born, crucified, and — lives." The wave of each cen- 
 tury brings the accumulated treasures of the Past 
 nearer to the shores. of Perfection. 
 
 Then Ahasuerus stretches out his hands towards 
 the endless Ocean, and in the chaos of his mind he 
 begins to understand what once he was and what has 
 become of him. In his own life he sees the progress 
 of mankind, and so the wings grow that bring him 
 back to Heaven. But the time has not yet come, 
 only a day of Eternity has elapsed ; and Andersen's 
 Muse tells us in the last words of her song that " the 
 
192 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 myth of Ahasuerus is only an echo of the endless tide 
 of Time ; a better Scald will come and tell the mean- 
 ing of that other pilgrimage." 
 
 HELLER imitates Andersen in his poem, The 
 Wanderings of Ahasuerus. In his introduction he 
 says that Ahasuerus shall lead us through all nations 
 to the modern world : from God becoming human to 
 Humanity becoming God. In the first edition (1865) 
 the poet did not bring his theme to its end. But in a 
 later edition (1868) he continued his work, and leads 
 his hero on to the days of Goethe. The conception 
 and execution of his poem are exactly like those of 
 Andersen, but Heller presents more historical details, 
 and his ideas and suggestions are full of interest. 
 His Ahasuerus is an adversary of Jesus, as one who 
 does not comprehend his high mission and his own 
 doctrine. A wealthy shoemaker, his workshop full of 
 workmen, he is ugly and deformed ; his wife, how- 
 ever, is beautiful. He is an old schoolfellow of the 
 new prophet, who in former days has often been pro- 
 tected by him when people asked him tauntingly his 
 father's name. Ahasuerus's own son bears the name of 
 Jesus. But now Ahasuerus calls Jesus an adventurer, 
 who had always been a favourite of women, on account 
 of his fine looks. He says Jesus has learned the black 
 art in Egypt, which enables him to win the multitude 
 
THE NEW AHASUERVS IN GERMANY. 193 
 
 with miracles ; that he misleads poor fishermen to 
 leave their work and homes ; that he poisons the pure 
 fountain of the Bible, deriving from it that he is the Son 
 of Man. He, Ahasuerus, will unmask this dangerous 
 impostor. So, when he is told by some children that 
 a fine-looking man much like Jesus has sat down to 
 take some rest at his door, he scornfully bids him 
 move on, and not bring a curse upon his house by 
 touching his threshold. Peter intervenes, but Ahasuerus 
 laughs at him. Then Jesus rising, he answers, " Un- 
 happy man ! the feelings that so violently move thy 
 heart come from a misled but believing mind. Sincere 
 as is thy anger, even now thy heart is kind. If thou 
 couldst only understand me, no one would shed his 
 blood for me like thou. The time will come when 
 thou shalt know me. Until the day when all the 
 world shall have accepted Christianity thou shalt 
 wander through the earth with thy people, spared by 
 Death. Nations shall come and go, but ye shall 
 remain until the day of the last trumpet." 
 
 Ahasuerus re-enters his house speechless. On the 
 day of the Passover, Saul comes to him, and is told 
 what happened. He declares Jesus one of those 
 fanatics who rise everywhere and disappear like 
 meteors ; the streets of Rome are crowded with them. 
 " Men," says Saul, " are bending under the burthen of 
 
 13 
 
194 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 their sins and long for forgiveness, which they do not 
 find in their Ancient Law. Love, the only thing that 
 brings release, must be delivered from the chains of 
 the old institutions." Unconsciously, Saul is already 
 of the new belief, and is soon after formally converted. 
 Peter and James try to convert Ahasuerus also, but 
 they succeed only in engaging him to hear Saul, now 
 Paul, who preaches in Athens of Christ's resurrection. 
 Ahasuerus finds out that this doctrine is not in the 
 Scriptures : Paul must be deceived. He returns to 
 Jerusalem, in his old disbelief. Jerusalem is con- 
 quered, destroyed ; Ahasuerus joins in the combat ; at 
 length all whom he has loved are buried, he leaves the 
 ancient city in ruins : his wanderings begin. 
 
 We find him again, with other fugitive Jews, in a 
 cavern, gathered about an old Rabbi. They mourn 
 for Jerusalem, but their master reminds them of the 
 Law ; he exhorts them to adhere firmly to that — it is 
 stronger than that of Christ's apostles, which is sealed 
 only by a man, not by God. As Jewish apostles they 
 go forth into the world. The war begins between 
 Paganism, Christianity, and Judaism. Ahasuerus tries 
 to win over the pagans, to bring back those that turn 
 apostate. The wild movements and anomalies of the 
 world gradually lead Ahasuerus to the hope of a 
 kingdom not of this world. He is now seen longing 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 195 
 
 for Jesus ; he flies the noisy world and arrives at the 
 Lake of Tiberias. There Christ appears to him, and 
 Ahasuerus implores forgiveness. He has already lost 
 something of his rigid Jewish faith. When Con- 
 stantine has become a Christian, and when Rome falls, 
 he believes that his new idea will be realised : but no, 
 straightway begin the disputes of Christian sects. 
 Ahasuerus turns his back on the contending Gnostics, 
 Simonians, Arians, and the rest, and comes to the 
 desert, where he finds Anthony, the hermit. Anthony 
 has delivered himself from the world and its con- 
 troversies to find peace amid nature. The}' exchange 
 their experiences and thoughts. Ahasuerus acknow- 
 ledges that Christ's doctrine has spread a kingdom of 
 love over the earth, but that his great work has been 
 degraded to a mere fable. " I did not find the king- 
 dom of God, but of men. Here I will rest until some 
 Angel wakes me from my dream to begin once more 
 my earthly pilgrimage." Anthony has the same faith ; 
 he will struggle on patiently and imitate the life that 
 was so full of suffering and love. Henceforth the two 
 live together in a long brotherhood. 
 
 This was the end of Heller's first edition. In the 
 second he enlarged and transformed the entire poem. 
 He separates the whole in three different wanderings. 
 He calls the first, which we have already described, 
 
 13—2 
 
196 THE IVAA'DERIXG JEW. 
 
 Ahasuerus' s Error of Faith ; the second, Picture of 
 tlie Universe; the third, Humanity. During his 
 first pilgrimage, Ahasuerus moves still in the restricted 
 horizon of a Pharisee, but he loses much of that in his 
 intellectual intercourse with Anthony. In his second 
 pilgrimage, although the whole scene of history lies 
 open before him, he persists still in his hope of a com- 
 ing Messias. At last he doubts that his hope will 
 ever be realised ; he frees himself from his rigid belief. 
 The discovery of the New World, the invention of 
 typography, and the Reformation, he now regards as 
 contributing to a free evolution of mankind, leading to 
 the only true religion : Humanity. Ahasuerus, like 
 Faust, sees in this the high destiny of mankind. 
 History unfolds itself before Man ; he moves after it, 
 observing, investigating, looking forward to the fulfil- 
 ment of his desire. The movement of mankind over 
 the Old World goes on ; new gods replace the old ; 
 contrasts of all kinds meet together — nowhere is room 
 for God's empire of peace. Mohammed, too, is not 
 the right prophet. Under Charlemagne and Leo the 
 empire of God's majesty on earth is founded, but this 
 is not the real empire of God for which Ahasuerus 
 looks. Besides, it does not prove to be everlasting. 
 Priesthood, to which all nations blindly submit, de- 
 generates ; whilst in Germany, under the Saxon 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 197 
 
 emperors strong conventional worldly power arises. 
 Then a new Messias seems to appear in Hildebrand, 
 this monk so possessed of worldly wisdom ; but his 
 empire is only maintained by the strong reins of 
 obedience, not by love. The Crusades do not satisfy 
 Ahasuerus. New persons come before us, one form- 
 ing a contrast to the other. Jehuda Levita, who 
 praises the sublime inheritance of Adam against 
 the " original sin " of Christendom ; then the pious 
 buffoon, Francis d'Assisi, contrasting with Tannhauser, 
 whom Ahasuerus meets in Rome, and whose longing 
 for the fresh and natural world of his heathen land, 
 amid the helpless ossification of the Christian priest- 
 hood, he can well understand ; Dante, who tries at 
 least to harmonise the contrasts in poetry ; Rienzi, a 
 political fool, who makes a step backwards into the old 
 Roman time ; Huss, who, a second saviour, a martyr 
 of the old pure Christian doctrine, expires on the 
 pyre. 
 
 Then Ahasuerus begins to doubt of the duration of 
 God's empire. When he sees how Christ is always 
 vanquished, and has now been crucified so often, 
 a deep melancholy overcomes him ; he longs for 
 death, he is disgusted with seeing the world any 
 longer. Then Faust appears to him, his congenial 
 brother ; Faust, the realist, who enjoys the life and 
 
198 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 liberty given to him, who, though a true friend of 
 Christendom, does not join the theological disputes, 
 but with a happy mind prefers the fresh hearts of the 
 people to the musty churches with their endless 
 supplications. With Faust's appearance a change 
 of mind comes over Ahasuerus. Both have still a 
 third mythical brother, the Spaniard, Don Juan. 
 Ahasuerus, the first-born, is continually occupied with 
 the highest problems ; he takes no notice of life, and 
 awaits the day when his faith will be one with that 
 of Jesus. In sharp contrast with this, the Spaniard 
 enjoys life and its pleasures, with all his natural 
 enthusiasm. Between these two, as a mediator, stands 
 Faust, susceptible of high and noble things as of the 
 pleasures of the world. He opens Ahasuerus' heart 
 to the love of humanity ; he teaches his dim eyes to 
 look around him in the world ; he shows him all the 
 productions of industry and art. In his house he 
 shows him the wonders and first performances of 
 typography ; he leads him to magnificent Florence, 
 residence of the Medicis ; and, escaping the Spanish 
 Inquisition, they voyage with Columbus to America. 
 Ahasuerus, who until now thought the earth to be 
 miserable and small, wishes to remain on it. 
 
 In the third part of the poem, Ahasuerus leaves 
 the New World and returns to the Old, to follow there 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 199 
 
 the evolution of human thought. He goes to Rome, 
 and rejoices to see the flourishing state of sciences and 
 arts ; he finds there the great master, Raphael, who 
 exalts Christianity into Humanity. There also he 
 meets Luther, who, beholding the corruptions of the 
 Church, conceives the idea of the Reformation. 
 
 Robert Hamerling is the last German poet 
 who has paid his respects to our myth. The hero of 
 his poem, Ahasuerus in Rome (1867), however, is 
 Nero, and not Ahasuerus. The latter is only, as by 
 Klingemann and Horn, a kind of Nemesis in the 
 piece, a supernatural power intervening in human 
 actions. He presents a sharp contrast with Nero, 
 who resembles Faust in his immense love of life, 
 whilst Ahasuerus has come to Rome longing for 
 death. He intends to accomplish Nero's fate, for in 
 spite of their different natures, their mission is the 
 same ; both are fulfilling and advancing the evolution 
 of mankind. Especially in a place where the decayed 
 past struggles with new forms of life, history needs 
 such Titans of destruction as Nero, in order to hasten 
 the crisis of events and advance human progress. 
 Ahasuerus therefore makes Nero his unconscious 
 instrument ; he pushes him on and on in his 
 monstrous attempts. The supposed god, who can 
 only operate by destruction, Ahasuerus treats as the 
 
2oo THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 indestructible, and by this very faith prepares the way 
 of Nero's humiliation. Ahasuerus animates Nero to 
 burn Rome, and swings the first torch ; but he comes 
 himself unharmed out of the flames, spared by the 
 fire, to show Nero that there is still something on 
 earth which to destroy is beyond his power ; some- 
 thing like a phoenix rising out of ashes — the immortal 
 humanity. For a moment Nero thinks himself equal 
 to this new adversary. " I, too," he cries, " am indes- 
 tructible : life in me is firmly anchored : nothing can 
 ever change me ! I am I ! I cope with you : our 
 combat will show if my intellectual indestructibility 
 balances not thy bodily indestructibility !" 
 
 Ahasuerus accepts the combat with the certainty 
 that the hour of death has come for Nero. It arrives 
 in the curse of satiety and disgust which overcomes 
 Nero. He has enjo3'ed the pleasures of earth, and 
 Olympus ; they have no more for him ; only one 
 thing further remains for him — Hades. By force of 
 magic he summons the dead ; his own victims start 
 up before him, and, smitten with horror, he falls. 
 Now, forsaken by his favourites and subjects, Nero 
 escapes at the hand of the only one remaining — a 
 devoted German — under the secret guidance of 
 Ahasuerus, into the catacombs. He there finds a 
 congregation of Christians, his mortal enemies. He 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 201 
 
 offers his head to their revenge, and is told that they 
 do not know such a sensation, that their hearts obey 
 the law of love, a law which did not exist for him, 
 because he did not feel anything above him, whither 
 he could look with a longing eye. For the first time 
 Nero finds a God who, instead of being worshipped 
 and feared is beloved. He also understands that not 
 pleasure but pain saves the world, and cries : " I see 
 that the ever-creating womb of the human Mind is 
 not exhausted ! The outworn world falls to dust : the 
 human heart ever brings it forth anew." Thus Nero 
 pronounces the inner secret of the Ahasuerus-myth 
 (according to this poem). And although unable to 
 submit to the new doctrine, he consecrates himself 
 to the god of the infernal world, exchanging his 
 longing for life with the ardent longing for death, 
 according to Ahasuerus' prophecy. Ahasuerus himself 
 appears in the hour of his adversary's death among 
 the Christians, and the poet, in an original conception, 
 makes him assume towards the end of his poem a 
 gigantic shape. 
 
 According to this, Ahasuerus, who once despised 
 Jesus, was already on earth since time immemorial. 
 For he is the first-born of the unborn, the first of the 
 created beings ; he is the first child of man, the first 
 rebel, Cain, the murderer of his brother. Ahasuerus 
 
202 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 first brought Death into the world, who now at the 
 same time rewards and punishes him by sparing 
 him. 
 
 It is greatly to be regretted that the great brain 
 which carried the legend of Faust to such noble fruit 
 did not fulfil its design of giving poetic expression to 
 that of the Wandering Jew. In his Dichtung tend 
 Wahrheit, GOETHE has sketched the design of this 
 unwritten poem. A clever shoemaker with whom he 
 once lodged in Dresden was to be a model for 
 Ahasuerus. The shoemaker of Jerusalem was to be a 
 character ; in his open workshop he talks with passers- 
 by, and, after the Socratic fashion, touches up every- 
 one in his own way. Even Pharisees and Sadducees 
 like to talk with him, and Jesus with his disciples often 
 stop there. The shoemaker is a firm secularist, but 
 he feels a special affection for Jesus, whom he tries to 
 persuade to give up his visions, and leave oft" drawing 
 people away from their work into the wilderness. 
 Jesus, on the other hand, tries to persuade his friend 
 to his way of thinking. When Jesus has become a 
 public character, Ahasuerus warns him that tumult 
 will follow, and that he (Jesus) will have to place 
 himself at the head of a party. Finally, when things 
 have gone their course, Judas rushes into the shoe- 
 maker's shop, in despair, declaring that in endeavour- 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY. 
 
 203 
 
 ing to hasten his master's triumph he had only 
 ruined him. Ahasuerus is in great excitement about 
 his friend, and when he sees him passing his door 
 reminds him of his warnings. Jesus does not answer, 
 but just then the loving Veronica covers his face with 
 a napkin, on which, as she raises it, Ahasuerus sees 
 depicted the features of Christ, not as a sufferer, but 
 transfigured and radiant. As he turns he hears the 
 words : ' Over the earth shalt thou wander till thou 
 shalt once more see me in this form !' When the 
 shoemaker comes to himself he finds that everyone 
 has gone to the execution. Through the empty 
 streets he moves, and begins his wanderings. 
 
 The way in which Goethe would have dealt with 
 the theme is indicated by the fact he elsewhere 
 mentions, that he had meant to bring Ahasuerus to a 
 meeting with Spinoza. It will be seen, however, in 
 this chapter, that a number of the best pens which 
 have dealt with this subject have been spiritually 
 moved by Goethe. 
 
XVI. 
 
 THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 
 
 In the year 1833 Edgar Quinet published his " Mys- 
 tery " entitled Ahasuerus. It seems an amazing fact 
 that a work of this importance should never have been 
 translated into English. It was well appreciated in 
 France, and was the subject of the excellent review 
 {Revue des Deux Mondes, Dec, 1833) which has already 
 been referred to in this work. It is an epic in prose. 
 Amid the stately Miltonic forms of Biblical and other 
 mythology, and through a mist of mysticism, may be 
 seen Edgar Quinet himself bent under the doom of 
 turning the faith of his childhood, the illusions of 
 all he loved, into mere conventionalised foliations of 
 a frame around the reality of a creature moving 
 about amid worlds for ever dead. 
 
 His early faith having suffered what he fondly 
 hoped might prove to be transient eclipse, he started 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS TN FRANCE. 205 
 
 upon those restless journeyings through Europe and 
 the East, which were still less restless than his spiritual 
 wanderings ; but at no point could he see any faintest 
 arc of a sun returning from its eclipse. The old light 
 had for ever gone down. As he wandered there arose 
 before him this other self, this doomed Ahasuerus. 
 Through ten years he was writing it ; it was written, 
 he has told us, on foot, on horseback, in the gondola, 
 at sea ; in cathedrals of Germany, basilicas of Rome, 
 in the convent of Bron, in the villas of Naples, and 
 the almshouses of Morea. " Its aim is to reproduce some 
 scenes of the universal tragedy played between God, 
 Man, and the World." In the end Quinet married a 
 German lady, Rachel by name, who appears in his 
 dramatic epic also as the saviour of Ahasuerus. 
 
 The work is divided into four " Days," with three 
 interludes, a prologue, and an epilogue. The first day 
 is " The Creation ;" the second, " The Passion," dis- 
 cussed by the devils as a rather poor comedy. 
 Ahasuerus appears in this second "Day." He is 
 seated on his bench in an open door as Jesus passes 
 with his cross, followed by a crowd which praises 
 Barabbas and Pilate. Ahasuerus believes Jesus a 
 magician, and when he says, " Is it thou, Ahasuerus?" 
 the latter says, " I know thee not." " I thirst ; give 
 me a little water from thy spring." "My well is 
 
2o6 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 empty." " Reach thy cup— thou wilt find it full." 
 " It is broken." " Help me to bear my cross along 
 this hard path ?" " I am not thy cross-porter ; call a 
 griffin from the desert." " Let me sit on thy bench at 
 thy house door ?" " My bench is full ; there is no 
 room for another." "On thy threshold?" "It is 
 empty, but the door is shut and bolted." " Touch it, 
 and you can enter to get a stool." " Go thy way !" " If 
 thou wilt, thy bench may become a golden seat in the 
 house of my Father." " Go, blaspheme where thou 
 wilt ! Thou hast already withered with thy footsteps 
 my vine and fig-tree ; do not set foot on my stairway, 
 it will crumble under thy speech. Thou wouldst be- 
 witch me." " I wish to save thee." " Diviner, leave 
 my shadow ! Thy road is before thee. March, 
 march !" " Why hast thou said that, Ahasuerus ? It 
 is thou who shalt march, even till the Last Judgment, 
 more than a thousand years. Go take thy sandals 
 and travelling raiment ; wherever thou passest thou 
 shalt be known as the Wandering Jew. It is thou 
 who shalt find no seat whereon to rest, no mountain - 
 spring to slake thy thirst. In my place thou shalt 
 bear the burthen which I leave on the cross. For thy 
 thirst thou shalt drink what I have left at the bottom 
 of my cup. Others shall take my coat, thou shalt 
 inherit my eternal pain. Hyssop shall germinate in 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 207 
 
 thy staff, wormwood increase in thy leather bottle ; 
 despair shall cling as the leather girdle about thy 
 loins. Thou shalt be the man that dies not. Thy age 
 shall be mine. To see thee pass the eagles shall perch 
 on their barn. The little birds shall half hide them- 
 selves under the crest of the rocks. The star shall 
 bend beneath the cloud to watch thy tears falling drop 
 by drop in the abyss. I go to Golgotha ; thou shalt 
 journey on from ruins to ruins, from kingdoms to 
 kingdoms, without finding thy Calvary." 
 
 This is about half of the sentence pronounced upon 
 Ahasuerus. A hand had written on his house, " The 
 Wandering Jew." Ahasuerus finds himself alone, and 
 calls for Jesus to return ; he would speak only one 
 word more ! After his sad soliloquy the angel 
 Michael appears, and bids him travel onward. 
 Ahasuerus enters his house once more and attempts 
 to rest and eat with his father and children, but he 
 cannot ; he must go, despite their pleadings. 
 
 After a long and pathetic farewell to his family and 
 his home, Ahasuerus passes out to the Valley of 
 Jehoshaphat. Here, he says, he would build his hut 
 upon the rock could he only find some water. The 
 Valley bids him journey on : "I have neither well 
 nor cistern ; those who dwell in my vale never thirst." 
 " Where are thy date-trees planted ?" " I have none. 
 
2o8 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 They who sojourn in my hill never hunger." " Find 
 in thy brushwood some herb to heal this wound in my 
 heart, which is like a point of iron ?" " My simples 
 heal all pains, but not that of the heart in which a 
 thorn rests." 
 
 After much converse the Valley bids him adieu. 
 " Talk no more where the dead sleep. I am silent." 
 After that, whatever Ahasuerus says, Echo alone 
 replies. His requests are successively in the words 
 Jesus had addressed to him at his door, and Echo 
 repeats his own refusals. 
 
 The third "Day" is called DEATH. Death is 
 represented under the name of Mob. And now a 
 human spirit comes upon the scene — Rachel. As we 
 have seen the tender Jesus passing out of life to blend 
 with the remorseless elements, uttering the curses 
 which find their echo in the heartless hills, and the 
 winds whistling in the Valley of Death ; so now, on 
 the other hand, we see a heart leaving the heavenly 
 realm that smiles above human agony to share the 
 earthly sorrow. In the presence of God and Christ, 
 and the heavenly host, one angel has forgotten the 
 wrongs of Christ so far as to shed a tear for Ahasuerus. 
 For that she is cast out of heaven, banished to the 
 earth, and made to dwell in the house of Mob (Death). 
 Rachel and Ahasuerus meet, neither knowing any- 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 209 
 
 thing of the other for a long time ; they are in love 
 with each other ; and for a time the drama somewhat 
 resembles that of Margaret and Faust, Mob taking 
 the part of Mephistopheles. There is a very beautiful 
 scene in which the Angel of Death (Mob) leads 
 Ahasuerus and Rachel into the cathedral at Strasburg. 
 There the mighty shades, royal and papal, demand of 
 Ahasuerus his name. He will not utter it ; but 
 Christ speaks from the stained window and declares 
 him to be the Wandering Jew. The dead curse 
 Ahasuerus, the cathedral curses him ; but Rachel 
 pleads for him. While demons flash their flames 
 around, Rachel cries : " Be blessed, Ahasuerus ! 
 Mercy for him, Lord ; open Thy heaven ! Are these 
 the angels that watch at the gate of Paradise ? 
 Angels, angels, open for me the gate ; there is also a 
 place for Ahasuerus, is there not ? Oh, how flaming 
 are their swords ! Oh, how heavy their bolts ! Come, 
 come, Ahasuerus : the stars of Paradise are rising 
 beyond the threshold !" 
 
 Another motif from Goethe's Faust rises in the 
 fourth " Day," the Day of Judgment, where Rachel 
 and Ahasuerus (whom she calls Joseph) are seen in a 
 desert, beside a waste ocean in the distance, and a 
 ruin emblematic of the world now in ruins. Ahasuerus 
 has exhausted every experience, except that of being 
 
 14 
 
2io THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 loved by Heaven. Rachel tells him that her Christ 
 is a divine sea of love, into which they may together 
 plunge and lose all memories and all longings. As 
 Faust's contract with Mephistopheles holds the latter 
 to bring him to an hour when he shall desire nothing 
 beyond, an hour to which he shall say, " Stay, thou 
 art fair !" so Ahasuerus is moved only by the pledge 
 of his angel Rachel that no desire can arise beyond 
 the divine Love. There is no water near ; so there 
 in the desert Ahasuerus kneels, and Rachel baptizes 
 him with her tears. 
 
 As the world comes up before the seat of Judg- 
 ment — cities, ages, continents, islands — curses fall on 
 Ahasuerus. Rome, Babylon, Athens, the Highway, 
 repeat the sentences of his doom in Jerusalem ; the 
 Mountain offers to be his Calvary ; the Forest proffers 
 him a Cross, and the Rivers would give him gall. 
 But Christ speaks more kindly. Of all the universe 
 Ahasuerus and Rachel now only remain. Christ 
 offers now to give him his home in the East ; but 
 Ahasuerus says he does not desire it. " I ask life, not 
 repose. Instead of the steps of my house of Calvary, 
 I wish to ascend without pause the stairway of the 
 Universe." "Art thou not weary from thy first 
 journey ?" " Thy hand, rising over me, has already 
 dried my sweat. With thy benediction, I depart 
 
THE NE W AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 2 1 1 
 
 this evening towards those future summits where 
 thou already dwellest." " But who will follow thee ?" 
 A voice of the Universe breaks in, " Not we ! If 
 thou wilt, we will return on our steps ; but we cannot 
 mount higher. Our wild steeds, our waves, our 
 tempests are weary." Rachel says, " I ! I will follow 
 him ; my heart is not weary." Whereon the Universe 
 cries, " A woman has lost me, a woman has saved 
 me I" " Yes," declares Christ, " this voice has saved 
 thee, Ahasuerus. I bless thee, the pilgrim of coming 
 worlds, and the second Adam. Return me the burden 
 
 of the Earth's pains Journey thou from life to 
 
 life, world to world, from one divine city to another ; 
 and when, after eternity, thou shalt have arrived at 
 circle on circle of the infinite summit whither all 
 things move, whither tend the souls and the years, the 
 peoples and the stars, thou shalt cry to star, to people 
 and universe, if they would pause, Climb on, climb 
 for ever : it is here /" 
 
 The epic closes with an impressive Epilogue. Christ 
 is alone in the vault of the firmament. " Since the 
 hour when Ahasuerus returned my Cup, the wound has 
 come again to my side ; my tears fall into the abyss. . . 
 The heavens are empty ; in the firmament I am alone. 
 One after another the angels have all folded their wings, 
 like the eagle when it is old. My mother Mary is 
 
 14 — 2 
 
212 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 dead : my father Jehovah has said from his couch, 
 ' Christ, my age is on me. I have lived enough of the 
 ages ; the worlds burthen me to lift ... I am cold 
 ... I am weary ... I thirst My age is too great ; 
 I see no more the light of thy aureole. Go ! thy father 
 is dead.' . . . The firmament has cast its god from 
 its branch, as the fig-tree its leaves. . . . Farewell, 
 worlds, stars, dews of the morning and evening, which 
 have saluted me by name when I was a child ... Is 
 it true ? in the night, in the day, afar, near, is there no 
 one ?' Echo answers, ' None.' ' Life, truth, falsehood, 
 love, hate, gall and vinegar mingled in my pyx — yes, the 
 universe was I. I am a shadow ; a shadow that for 
 ever passes ; I am the tear that ever trickles, the sigh 
 ever renewed, the death that ever agonises ; I am the 
 Nothing that ever doubts of its doubt, the Negation 
 that ever re-denies itself.' " Eternity alone hears the 
 sorrow of Christ, but it cannot aid him to weep, its 
 eyes are dry ; it cannot promise love to the orphan- 
 worlds he is leaving, for in its breast is neither love 
 nor hate. ' All is finished !' cries the universe- 
 wanderer, who has no Rachel's tear to baptize him. 
 ' Lay me in the tomb of my Father. Be it so !' 
 Eternity speaks : ' For the Father and the Son I 
 have digged a grave in a frozen star which rolls 
 companionless, without light. The Night, beholding 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 213 
 
 that pale star, shall say, ' This is the tomb of some 
 god.'" 
 
 Then Eternity crumbles the worlds, the sphinx, and 
 even the void, ending with a triumphant Moi. 
 
 Irj) Jfinit le mgatere li'Jlhaefu&u©. 
 $riez pout cdui qui I'utibit 
 
 The romance of The Wandering yew, by Eugene 
 Sue (1844), from which the majority of people have 
 derived what impressions they may have of the legend, 
 is so " sensational " that its value as an illustration of 
 the myth is concealed. Whether intentionally or not, 
 this novel, so far as the Jew appears in it, reproduces 
 very nearly the spirit of an Arabian legend which 
 belongs to the class discussed in this work. The story 
 of Al Khedr will be found in the Koran (xviii.). It 
 is said that Moses, having boasted of his knowledge, 
 was told by God of one wiser than himself; and 
 having found out this man (Al Khedr), he (Moses) 
 journeyed with him. But the aged man had exacted 
 from Moses a promise that he would not ask any 
 question, whatever he might see. Al Khedr commits 
 various crimes, and Moses cannot contain his indigna- 
 tion. Al Khedr then reveals to him that each apparent 
 wrong he had done was a retribution, or a blessing in 
 disguise, telling him the story of each person who had 
 
214 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 apparently suffered injustice. The Arabs have identi- 
 fied Al Khedr with both Elias and St. George (who 
 they say, recovered life after being thrice slain). The 
 wisdom of Al Khedr therefore lies in his continuity of 
 existence. He represents the primitive conception 
 of a particular providence, seeing the end of events 
 from the beginning. They who have perused the 
 history of a single family whose records have been 
 preserved for several generations, may sometimes feel, 
 with Browning's Luria, 
 
 " The only fault's with time : 
 All men become good creatures — but so slow !" 
 
 It takes the life of a family to round out and com- 
 plete the events and incidents which its individual 
 members often find so out of joint, and which have 
 baffled the efforts of this or that generation to set 
 them right. And since the general pressure of the 
 aggregate members of the family, in all its genera- 
 tions, is toward the better conditions, the tendency is 
 such as to suggest a providential guidance by the 
 Sleepless and Eternal. This is reflected in Al Khedr ; 
 and the Eternal Jew of Eugene Sue is related to him. 
 In the drama built of this novel, which I saw well per- 
 formed recently as "All for Gold" in the Surrey 
 Theatre, the tableaus of the Wanderer were quite im- 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 215 
 
 pressive. He appears on a peak of Arctic snow, with 
 the Northern Light behind him ; his doom, as that of 
 his race, was recalled in a certain reddish hue of beard 
 and raiment, and he speaks of the children — who, seem- 
 ing so helpless, are struggling successfully as uncon- 
 sciously for their bequest with the hidden powers of 
 Jesuitism — as representatives of a family which repre- 
 sents the history of humanity. 
 
 Wherever Ahasuerus moves he leaves the sign of 
 the cross on his track — the last departing glimpse of 
 the mark of Cain. Herodias, his fellow-sufferer, 
 comes up to the Arctic region on the American side 
 — a notable incident when it is remembered (see IX.), 
 that her myth is mainly Spanish and survives 
 chiefly in Spanish America. Eugene Sue brings both 
 of the Wanderers to rest. Herodias enters the Abbey 
 of " St. John the Beheaded ;" exhausted she sinks 
 before his image. Weary, footsore, as she had never 
 felt before, even when passing over fiery lava, sandy 
 desert, or Arctic icefields, athirst, and in pain, she 
 looks into a fountain and observes the traces of age 
 in her features. Her youth, which had seemed end- 
 less, has passed. Her expiation ends at the feet of 
 the image of him her guilt had destroyed. She im- 
 plores the forgiveness of God for Ahasuerus also. 
 The Wandering Jew, meanwhile, has climbed Calvary 
 
2i6 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 and sits down at the feet of an image of Jesus there. 
 Suddenly he perceives that the face looks upon him 
 as if it were alive, with gentleness and compassion. 
 Ahasuerus prays and is pardoned. Ahasuerus and 
 Herodias are finally seen together, under a shelter, 
 at peace, awaiting longed-for and approaching 
 death. 
 
 In Ahasuerus, Sue represents the Workingman, an 
 outcast from heaven under sentence of drudgery, 
 finding at last release from oppression. Herodias is 
 Woman, delivered at last from her political slavery. 
 
 So, in their widely differing spheres, have Quinet 
 and Eugene Sue given a nineteenth-century refrain to 
 the seventeenth century song : 
 
 " Mais toujours le soleil se \bve, 
 Toujours, toujours. 
 Tourne la terre ou moi je cours, 
 Toujours, toujours, toujours, toujours !" 
 
 M. Pierre Dupont has written a poetical version 
 of our legend to accompany G. Dore's designs (pub- 
 lished by Michel Levy in 1856). But, as Champfleury 
 says, the imaginatively created Jew of M. Dore, and 
 the modernised narrative of M. Dupont, are very 
 uninteresting compared with the rude pictures of the 
 folk-books, and the quaint simplicity of the folk 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 217 
 
 ballads. The figure of the Wandering Jew which 
 Kaulbach introduced into his picture of the siege of 
 Jerusalem might, as a painting, be regarded as some- 
 what related to the New Ahasuerus of the poets, but 
 it is a subject that still invites artistic treatment. 
 And how suggestive of artistic effects the legend is 
 may be judged by the next and last French work to 
 be considered here : La Mort du Jnif-Errant. Par 
 Edouard Grenier. 
 
 This poem was first published, separately, in 1857, 
 but afterwards included in its author's Petits Poemes, 
 of which the fourth edition is before me. It is a 
 beautiful and pathetic poem, and treats the story 
 subjectively. The poet describes himself as having 
 escaped from the haunts of men, and built a little 
 hermitage far away in the mountain solitudes. One 
 evening, when he had been watching the fading 
 splendours of sunset, the signs of a storm appeared. 
 The labourers had hastened homeward, the herds 
 sought their shelter, the birds their nests. He then 
 beheld a solitary wayfarer moving on, and asked him 
 to enter, informing him that, in the direction he was 
 going, he could reach no house until morning, and 
 pointing to the increasing menaces of the storm. 
 The traveller turned upon him a burning eye and said, 
 "Thou knowest not the wayfarer whose steps thou 
 
218 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 wouldst stay. Why, detained by thy request, should 
 I enter with thee thy hospitable door, if my name, 
 when pronounced, must freeze thy welcome, and 
 force me to repass thy threshold ?" " Whatever thy 
 name or lot, yet must this roof shelter thee this 
 night." The Wanderer accepts. The poet draws a 
 striking picture of his guest's strange and noble 
 appearance. The traveller is shown a fountain where 
 he may bathe ; a repast is then spread before him. 
 Afterwards the poet inquires the name and country of 
 his guest, who turns pale, and with a sigh answers, 
 " I am called Ahasuerus ; I am the Wandering Jew." 
 Seeing the poet's shudder, the Wanderer rises, thanks 
 him for his hospitality, and says, " The cursed one 
 blesses thee," then starts up to resume his journey. 
 But the poet holds him. " It is not I who am charged 
 with thy punishment." He forbids Ahasuerus to go 
 out into the storm. The Wanderer says, " The beasts 
 of the field and the birds of the air have their retreats 
 from the rain and lightning, but the Proscribed One 
 hath not where to lay his head." He heeds not the 
 storm, but the voice which above it cries, " Still 
 march! For thee alone neither repose nor death. 
 March for ever ! The justice of God has not had its 
 full course." But when the poet has detained him, 
 and as they sit together, this harsh voice for the first 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 219 
 
 time is not heard. He asks if the divine justice can 
 have become weary ? The poet bids him hope. The 
 lamp is lit, and the poet entreats Ahasuerus to 
 instruct his youth. He who has explored so many 
 regions, seen so many peoples, traversed the earth — 
 what a sublime destiny ! — can tell much to him who, 
 bound to one little spot, can only dream of such far 
 realms, which he has longed to see. Ahasuerus tells 
 him the earth is so small, his desire would soon be 
 calmed, could he explore it. Each corner of nature 
 offers the universe as in miniature. With the blue 
 heaven above, and a soul within, he may unite the 
 image of the real with the infinite dream. Earth, air, 
 heaven, man, are everywhere the same. But, the poet 
 says, life is so short ; man does but begin to peruse 
 the universe when death closes his eyes ; while for 
 him — the Wanderer — length of days have opened the 
 treasures of knowledge ; man, time, lands and ages, 
 have no secrets for him. Ahasuerus bids the poet 
 undeceive himself: each man receives in his mind 
 what his forerunners have traced. " Step by step, 
 day by day, century by century, along with humanity, 
 I have wearily climbed the painful ladder on whose 
 last rung God has placed thee." They have journeyed 
 the same road, but he — the Wanderer— as a pioneer, 
 has had to travel for ages on foot, over stones, the 
 
22o THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 course which the man of the present passes in his 
 chariot in a day. 
 
 In the third canto the Wanderer gives the poet an 
 account of his wanderings. At first he had not be- 
 lieved in his doom ; then, when he began to contem- 
 plate the possibility of it, he entered into all manner 
 of dissipation to forget himself. Finally, in the 
 mournful'Valley of Jehoshaphat, he turned upon the 
 pursuing phantom and faced it. " Is it then such a 
 terrible thing to live for ever? What have I lost? 
 Death. What everybody is trying to do ! Are not 
 all aiming to live eternally as God in heaven ?" He is 
 elated at his prospect ; he will have glory, gold, bend 
 nations under his sceptre. Perhaps he will be the 
 Messiah himself ! 
 
 But the Wanderer's wife, passionately loved, slowly 
 parts from his heart, withers of age, and dies in his 
 young arms. The torture of that gradual decay of 
 the one he loved is portrayed. His sons, as they 
 grow in years, dread him, hate him, try to poison him ; 
 and then leave him in horror or remorse for other 
 lands. Of his family one alone remains, a beloved 
 son. But this last child's heart even grows cold to 
 him. Its life sinks ; its colour departs ; its face be- 
 comes thin, corpse-like. O horror ! he sees before 
 him, in the dying child, the very face of Jesus, whom 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 221 
 
 he had insulted ! The child dies on the day and hour 
 of the anniversary of Christ's death. 
 
 After many wanderings Ahasuerus finds himself in 
 the Colosseum at Rome, there seated in the moon- 
 light. He had seen that great edifice built by Jews, 
 stone by stone, while their own beloved Jerusalem fell 
 to dust. As in the great Roman ruin he is medi- 
 tating upon the vicissitudes he has witnessed, the 
 Angelus sounds forth ; the stars, the dew, all nature 
 started in chorus, and said, " Repent !" He looks 
 upon the crucifix amid that circle — triumphantly 
 raised there, where he had seen Christians torn by 
 lions. As he was looking upon that figure a well- 
 remembered voice came to him from it, "Why fly 
 from me ? Thy sole refuge is in my love." Then he 
 there knelt, crying, " O Christ ! thou hast conquered 
 me !" Then his first relief came in tears, and an in- 
 effable peace descended in his heart. From that time 
 he did not suffer as one disinherited ; he even felt a 
 delicious pain in his expiation ; he lived, suffered and 
 loved along with humanity. He now comprehended 
 the enormity of his crime, which God had pursued so 
 relentlessly : it was not his insult to Divinity, but his 
 lese-humanity. He now felt that he might hope that 
 his expiation would be complete, and in the last day 
 he would find repose in the love of Christ. 
 
222 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 In the fifth and last Canto the poet entreats the 
 Wanderer to give him a description of Jesus person- 
 ally, of whom he has so long dreamed — his look, 
 manner, voice. When he has ended this appeal there 
 is a knock at his door, and a stranger enters. Ahasu- 
 erus at once recognises him, and kneels, clasping his 
 feet and bathing them with his tears. Jesus says to 
 him, " Friend ! weep no more ! Since thy touched 
 heart comprehends its sin and washes it away in 
 tears ; since the man outraged by thee as much as 
 the God is now thy brother ; since thy heart loves, I 
 bring pardon, the reward of repentance. Be happy ! 
 Now, thou canst at last die." 
 
 In the morning a shepherd coming to the poet's 
 hermitage found two forms lying prostrate, both appa- 
 rently dead. The poet was slowly brought to life, 
 but Ahasuerus was dead. On his face was a smile of 
 celestial sweetness and calm felicity. On a bier made 
 of larches the poet and the shepherd bore the dead 
 body of the Wanderer to its place of rest. They 
 bore it to the summit of the highest mountain. Be- 
 yond the trees they passed, beyond the bushes, and 
 where the grass became scant. Into a cloud they 
 entered, upward and onward bore him, till they came 
 to the blue foot of a glacier. On a little couch of 
 moss they laid the body while they dug a grave ; as 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN FRANCE. 223 
 
 they covered the Wanderer's form their last vision 
 was of the smile still shining, or even happier, upon 
 his face. 
 
 " Ce vieux corps, fatigue" par vingt siecles d'effort, 
 Goutait encore mieux le bienfait de la mort. 
 Et c'est la qu'il repose, inconnu, solitaire, 
 Perdu dans la nude au-dessus de la terre ! 
 Nul monument funebre attirant le regard, 
 Ne reVele sa tombe au pas du montagnard. 
 Le glacier qui deTend cette gorge isolde 
 En est le seul gardien et le seul mausole'e. 
 Nulle epouse, nul fils n'y sanglote sur lui, 
 Et la seul rosee y vient pleurer la nuit. 
 Nul mortel ne connait sademeure derniere, 
 Personne, excepte" moi, n'y versa de priere, 
 Et seul l'aigle se pose a la cime ou ses os 
 Savourent dans mort un e"ternel repos. 
 
 It is interesting to contrast this peaceful end of 
 Grenier's Ahasuerus with the invincible Wanderer of 
 Shelley. Nevertheless, the Ahasuerus of this poem 
 yields only to a tender appeal from Christ — himself 
 the bound victim of an eternal curse. Another poem 
 may yet be written which shall show Jesus not to 
 have pronounced the doom upon the poor shoemaker, 
 but to have known so much of Jahve's vindictive dis- 
 position as to foretell it, and ultimately coming to an 
 understanding with Ahasuerus as the fellow-victim of 
 an eternal curse. They might be shown buried to- 
 
224 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 gether by the compassionate poet and shepherd where 
 the foiled eagle of Jove, surviving from its feast on 
 Prometheus, could not reach them, and the glacier- 
 heart of deified power could freeze and crush them no 
 more. This, for one of the two, would be a happier 
 fate than survival in the satirical song still sung in 
 France — 
 
 " Je*sus la bonte" meme 
 
 Lui dit en soupirant, 
 
 Tu marcheras toi-meme 
 
 Au moins pour trois milles ans, 
 
 Tu finiras tes peines 
 
 Au dernier jugement." 
 
XVII. 
 
 THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 
 
 The old Ahasuerus had his day in England. While 
 he was personally wandering about the world, how- 
 ever, in the guise of the pious -pretender, pouring his 
 cant into every long ear he could find, clever English 
 writers began to utilise him. The earliest work (1640), 
 The Wandering Jezv telling Fortunes to Englishmen, 
 was a fair satire upon some features of London in 
 that time. The name of the Jew is Gad Ben-Arod 
 Ben-Balaam Ben-Alimoth Ben-Baal Ben-Gog Ben- 
 Magog. The next work that followed (1797) was an 
 amusing drama. It is entitled The Wandering Jetu, 
 or Love's Masquerade, by Andrew Franklin. A surly 
 old guardian, disgusted with the young beaux seeking 
 his ward's hand, has vowed that he will give her to 
 the most aged man to be found in England. The 
 lover most favoured by the young lady conspires with 
 
 IS 
 
225 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 her to have an announcement of the presence of the 
 Wandering Jew in London, and then presents himself 
 in that disguise as Mr. Mathusalem. He is attended 
 by his equally aged servant, Juba, in whose anachron- 
 isms the fun mainly consists. Juba, despite all 
 efforts on Mr. Mathusalem's part to make him more 
 reticent, is voluminous in his reminiscences ; among 
 other things, he tells about Romulus and Remus, and 
 relates that, when he was at the baptism of the twins, 
 their mother threw a basin of tea at him for saying 
 that Remus was the prettier of the two. 
 
 In 1799 appeared the novel St. Leon, by William 
 Godwin. It is not a very interesting work now, what- 
 ever it may have been at the time. The plot of it is, 
 that a gentleman, who, through gambling, has sunk 
 into poverty and plunged his family in distress, 
 obtains from an uncanny old man the secret of re- 
 covering youth and obtaining money whenever he 
 needs it. But he has vowed secrecy. He returns to 
 his family, but is not recognised. He is cut off from 
 the old sympathies. The novel speedily carries 
 interest away from St. Leon to other persons, and 
 ends without any account of his end, nor does it even 
 carry St. Leon beyond the lives of his children. The 
 romance might have been suggested by any traditional 
 type of longevity, such as the Hindu Dnyaneshvar, 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 227 
 
 found in his tomb reading his Commentaries 300 
 3'ears after apparent death ; or Artesius, the Arabian 
 alchemist, said to have, by his art, prolonged his life 
 1025 years, or Alkazwini, who also lived praeter- 
 naturally long. The preface, however, contains an 
 interesting citation, which gives its actual origin : — 
 "The following passage from a work, Said to be 
 written by the late Dr. John Campbel, and entitled 
 Hermippus Rcdivivtcs, suggested the first hint of the 
 present performance : ' There happened in the year 
 1687 an odd accident at Venice, that made a very 
 great stir then, and which I think deserves to be 
 rescued from oblivion. The great freedom and ease 
 with which all persons who make a good appearance 
 live in that city is known sufficiently to all who are 
 acquainted with it ; such will not, therefore, be sur- 
 prised that a stranger, who went by the name of 
 Signor Gualdi, and who made a considerable figure 
 there, was admitted into the best company, though 
 nobody knew who or what he was. He remained at 
 Venice for some months, and three things were re- 
 marked in his conduct. The first was, that he had a 
 small collection of fine pictures, which he readily 
 showed to anybody that desired it ; the next, that he 
 was perfectly versed in all arts and sciences, and spoke 
 on every subject with such readiness and sagacity as 
 
 15— 2 
 
228 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 astonished all who heard him ; and it was, in the third 
 place, observed that he never wrote or received any 
 letter, never desired any credit, or made use of bills of 
 exchange ; but paid for everything in ready money, 
 and lived decently, though not in splendour. 
 
 " ' This gentleman met one day at the coffee-house 
 with a Venetian nobleman, who was an extraordinary 
 good judge of pictures ; he had heard of Signor 
 Gualdi's collection, and in a very polite manner de- 
 sired to see them, to which the other very readily 
 consented. After the Venetian had viewed Signor 
 Gualdi's collection, and expressed his satisfaction by 
 telling him he had never seen a finer, considering the 
 number of pieces of which it consisted — he cast his 
 eye by chance over the chamber-door, where hung a 
 picture of this stranger. The Venetian looked upon 
 it, and then upon him. " This picture was drawn for 
 you, sir," says he to Signor Gualdi, to which the other 
 made no answer but by a low bow. " You look," con- 
 tinued the Venetian, " like a man of fifty, and yet I 
 know this picture to be of the hand of Titian, who has 
 been dead one hundred and thirty years. How is this 
 possible?" "It is not easy," said Signor Gualdi 
 gravely, " to know all things that are possible ; but 
 there is certainly no crime in my being like a picture 
 drawn by Titian." The Venetian easily perceived, by 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 229 
 
 his manner of speaking, that he had given the stranger 
 offence, and therefore took his leave. He could not 
 forbear speaking of this in the evening to some of his 
 friends, who resolved to satisfy themselves by looking 
 upon the picture the next day. In order to have an 
 opportunity of doing so, they went to the coffee-house 
 about the time that Signor Gualdi was wont to come 
 thither ; and not meeting him, one of them, who had 
 often conversed with him, went to his lodgings to in- 
 quire after him, when he heard that he had set out 
 an hour before for Vienna. This affair made a great 
 noise, and found a place in all the newspapers of that 
 time.' " 
 
 It is probable that not only St. Leon, but the 
 Bassevilliana of Vincenzo Monti had influence in 
 exciting the English imagination with legends of this 
 character. A translation of this Italian poem, by the 
 Rev. Henry Boyd, was published in London in 1805. 
 It is the story of a " Soul's Doom," founded on the 
 murder of the French minister, Basseville, in Rome, 
 near the end of the last century. The soul of Basse- 
 ville is condemned to wander over the French pro- 
 vinces, and behold the desolations caused by the 
 revolution and its retributions. The Spirit of the 
 Abyss is forbidden to clutch Basseville. An angel 
 says to the soul : 
 
230 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 " Fear not ; thou art not doomed to sip the wave 
 Of black Avernus, which who tastes, resigned 
 
 All hope of change, becomes the demon's slave ; 
 But Heaven's high justice, nor in mercy blind, 
 
 Nor in security scrupulous to guage 
 Each blot, each wrinkle, of the human mind, 
 
 Has written on the adamantine page, 
 That thou no joys of paradise mayst know, 
 Till punished be of France the guilty rage." 
 
 Both St. Leon and " The Soul's Doom " might have 
 been read by those comrades in distress, Shelley and 
 Medwin, for whom seventy years ago Oxford Christi- 
 anity, and homes inspired by it, had nothing better 
 than wanderings about London under a curse. They 
 took up the subject, Medwin says, when Shelley 
 was fifteen. Of the poem, as it now stands, in the 
 edition of Chatto and Windus, Shelley wrote but a 
 few lines ; but I think that amidst its rhapsodical 
 rubbish a scholarly expression or illustration may 
 here and there be found traceable to Shelley. There 
 is evidence of Shelley's divining-rod in the allusions 
 to some of the more significant legends concerning 
 Ahasuerus which had attracted the attention of 
 several German poets. There is in the opening some 
 resemblance to the scene in Southey's Curse of 
 Kehama. Where, in the latter, the young Hindu 
 woman is brought forward to perish on the funeral- 
 pyre, in Shelley's poem a sinning novice is dragged to 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 
 
 = 31 
 
 the " fatal shrine," from which she is rescued by the 
 mysterious traveller. This horseman, hastening to 
 Padua, 
 
 " Wraps his mantle around his brow, 
 As if to hide his woes." 
 
 In his tale, he says : 
 
 " A burning cross illumed my brow, 
 I hid it with a fillet grey." 
 
 This Cross enables him to command fiends. To 
 Paulo, who has rescued her, Rosa the novice has 
 given herself. Victorio, her lover, summons a witch- 
 demon, and to her consigns his soul to obtain a philtre 
 which will secure Rosa's love. But when he has 
 administered it she dies. 
 
 Is the resemblance mentioned between this 
 Wandering Jezv and the Curse of Kehama accidental ? 
 The Medwin-Shelley poem was unable to reach the 
 light for which it struggled in 1810. It was pub- 
 lished in Fraser's Magazine in 183 1. But soon after 
 it was written, Shelley shows great eagerness to get 
 Southey's poem, which had been announced, and 
 twice writes to the bookseller, Stockdale, for it in 
 December, 18 10. In 18 12, while at Keswick with his 
 young wife, Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, 
 
232 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 if not before. In the poem of Southey, the young 
 Indian casts down the idol before which the woman 
 is about to be burned, which corresponds to the blow 
 given to Christ by Ahasuerus. The curse is artificially 
 modified, and may have been suggested by the 
 sentence on Cain, " Behold now art thou cursed from 
 the earth." The doom on the iconoclast is that on 
 him shall fall neither the rain nor the sunshine, nor 
 any of the influences of nature. 
 
 There would seem to be little doubt that St. Leon 
 inspired Shelley's St. Irvyne,tlie Rosier ucian, or rather 
 Ginotti, with his elixir of life, whose only " survival " 
 is in Bulvver's Zanoni. The " gigantic Ginotti " dies 
 through the wicked Wolfstein ; but Shelley was 
 particular in pointing out that " he did not die by 
 Wolfstein's hand, but by the influence of that natural 
 magic which, when the secret was imparted to the 
 latter, destroyed him." The longevity is here not a 
 doom. But once, as Shelley was walking through 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields, he picked up a " dirty and torn " 
 work, which contained Schubart's " Rhapsody " of 
 Ahasuerus, elsewhere mentioned. Hogg was quite 
 mistaken in affirming that Shelley's account was an 
 invention. Full information on this point may be 
 found in Rossetti's Shelley (vol. i. p. 434). The German 
 poem had appeared in a magazine called the German 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 233 
 
 Museum, in 1802. The Wandering Jew thus became 
 a type in Shelley's mind, and repeatedly appears in 
 his works. In Alastor he uses the Wanderer as an 
 illustration. 
 
 " Oh that God, 
 Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice 
 Which but one living man has drained, who now, 
 Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels 
 No proud exemption in the blighting curse 
 He bears, over the world wanders for ever, 
 Lone as incarnate death !" 
 
 It is, however, in Queen Mab that we find the real 
 form which arose before Shelley out of Schubart's 
 small casket, fished up from the muddy ocean of 
 London. Schubart's Ahasuerus whines and is par- 
 doned. Shelley's Ahasuerus is a Titan, who prefers 
 the sharp vulture-beak and the chain to any surrender 
 to the Christian Jove. Believing as I do that Cain 
 was originally a Semitic Prometheus, — as first of those 
 who began removal of Jahve's curse on the earth by 
 agriculture and working in metals, — I find it remark- 
 able that Shelley, outcast from college and home in 
 early youth because of his atheism, should recognise 
 this feature in the distant successor of Cain. 
 
 " A strange and woe-worn wight, 
 Arose beside the battlements, 
 
 And stood unmoving there : 
 His inessential figure cast no shade 
 
234 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Upon the golden floor ; 
 His port and mien bore mark of many years, 
 
 And chronicles of untold ancientness 
 
 Were legible within his beamless eye : 
 Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth ; 
 Freshness and vigour knit his manly frame ; 
 The wisdom of old age was mingled there 
 
 With youth's primeval dauntlessness ; 
 And inexpressible woe, 
 C hastened by fearless resignation, gave 
 An awful grace to his all-speaking brow. 
 
 Spirit. — Is there a God ? 
 
 Ahasuerus. — Is there a God ! — ay, an Almighty God, 
 And vengeful as almighty ! Once his voice 
 Was heard on earth : earth shudder'd at the sound ; 
 The fiery-visaged firmament expressed 
 Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawn'd, 
 To swallow all the dauntless and the good, 
 That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, 
 Girt as it was with power. None but slaves 
 Survived — cold-blooded slaves, who did the work 
 Of tyrannous Omnipotence ; whose souls 
 No honest indignation ever urged 
 To elevated daring, to one deed 
 Which gross and sensual self did not pollute. 
 These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend, 
 Gorgeous and vast : the costly altars smoked 
 With human blood, and hideous pagans rang, 
 Through ail the long-drawn aisles. 
 
 * if if * * 
 
 " Spirit ! centuries have set their seal, 
 
 On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain, 
 
 Since the Incarnate came : humbly he came, 
 
 Veiling his horrible godhead 
 
 In the shape of man ; scora'd by the world, his name unheard, 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Save by the rabble of his native town, 
 
 Even as a parish demagogue. He led 
 
 The crowd ; he taught them justice, truth, and peace, 
 
 In semblance ; but he lit within their souls 
 
 The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword 
 
 He brought on earth, to satiate with the blood 
 
 Of truth and freedom his malignant soul 
 
 At length his mortal frame was led to death. 
 
 I stood beside him : on the torturing cross 
 
 No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense ; 
 
 And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summ'd 
 
 The massacres and miseries which his name 
 
 Had sanction'd in my country, and I cried, 
 
 ' Go ! go !' in mockery. 
 
 A smile of godlike malice reillumined 
 
 His fading lineaments, — ' I go,' he cried, 
 
 ' But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth, 
 
 Eternally.' — The dampness of the grave, 
 
 Bathed my imperishable front. I fell, 
 
 And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil. 
 
 When I awoke hell burned within my brain, 
 
 Which stagger'd on its seat ; for all around 
 
 The mouldering relics of my kindred lay, 
 
 Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them, 
 
 And in their various attitudes of death, 
 
 My murder'd children's mute and eyeless skulls, 
 
 Glared ghastlily upon me. 
 
 But my soul, 
 From sight and sense of the polluting woe 
 Of tyranny, had long learn'd to prefer 
 Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven. 
 Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began 
 My lonely and unending pilgrimage, 
 Resolved to wage unweariable war 
 With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl 
 
2 3 o THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 --s 
 
 Defiance at his impotence to harm, 
 Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand 
 That barr'd my passage to the peaceful grave 
 Has crush'd the earth to misery, and given 
 Its empire to the chosen of his slaves. 
 
 * * % * * 
 
 " Thus have I stood — through a wild waste of years 
 
 Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, 
 
 Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined, 
 
 Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse 
 
 With stubborn and unalterable will ; 
 
 Even as the giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame 
 
 Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand 
 
 A monument of fadeless ruin there ; 
 
 Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves 
 
 The midnight conflict of the wintry storm, 
 
 As in the sunlight's calm it spreads 
 
 Its worn and wither'd arms on high, 
 
 To meet the quiet of a summer's morn. 
 
 The Fairy waved her hand : 
 
 Ahasuerus fled 
 Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist, 
 That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, 
 
 Flee from the morning beam : 
 The matter of which dreams are made 
 Not more endowed with actual life 
 Than this phantasmal portraiture 
 Of wandering human thought." 
 
 This Ahasuerus is not only the fellow Titan of Pro- 
 metheus, but he is the New Ahasuerus-Prometheus 
 who had his fire to bring and his doom to suffer in 
 England. The events of Shelley's life between 1812, 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 237 
 
 when he probably wrote this part of Queen Mad, and 
 the latter part of 1814, added new curses to the 
 eternal wanderings of the Jew. These appear in that 
 sufficiently wild fragment entitled The Assassins, 
 written in Switzerland, i8i4,from which the subjoined 
 passage is selected : 
 
 " A young man named Albedir, wandering in the 
 woods, was startled by the screaming of a bird of prey, 
 and, looking up, saw blood fall, drop by drop, from 
 among the intertwined boughs of a cedar. Having 
 climbed the tree, he beheld a terrible and dismaying 
 spectacle. A naked human body was impaled on the 
 broken branch. It was maimed and mangled horribly 
 — every limb bent and bruised into frightful distortion, 
 and exhibiting a breathing image of the most sicken- 
 ing mockery of life. A monstrous snake had scented 
 its prey from among the mountains — and above 
 hovered a hungry vulture. From amidst the mass of 
 desolated humanity two eyes, black and excessively 
 brilliant, shone with an unearthly lustre. Beneath the 
 blood-stained eyebrows their steady rays manifested 
 the serenity of an immortal power, the collected 
 energy of a deathless mind, spell-secured from dis- 
 solution. A bitter smile of mingled abhorrence 
 and scorn distorted his wounded lip — he appeared 
 calmly to observe and measure all around — self- 
 
23S THE V/ANDERING JEW. 
 
 possession had not deserted the shattered mass of 
 life. 
 
 " The youth approached the bough on which the 
 breathing corpse was hung. As he approached, the 
 serpent reluctantly unwreathed his glittering coils, 
 and crept towards his dark and loathsome cave. The 
 vulture, impatient of his meal, fled to the mountain, 
 that re-echoed with his hoarse screams. The cedar- 
 branches creaked with their agitating weight, faintly, 
 as the dismal wind arose. All else was deadly 
 silent. 
 
 " At length a voice issued from the mangled man. 
 It rattled in hoarse murmurs from his throat and lungs 
 — his words were the conclusion of some strange, 
 mysterious soliloquy. They were broken and without 
 apparent connection, completing wide intervals of 
 inexpressible conceptions. 
 
 " ' The great tyrant is baffled, even in success. Joy, 
 joy to his tortured foe ! Triumph to the worm which 
 he tramples under his feet ! Ha ! his suicidal hand 
 might dare as well abolish the mighty frame of things ! 
 Delight and exultation sit before the closed gates of 
 death ! I fear not to dwell beneath their black and 
 ghastly shadow. Here thy power may not avail ! 
 Thou createst — 'tis mine to ruin and destroy. I was 
 thy slave — I am thy equal, and thy foe. Thousands 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 239 
 
 tremble before thy throne, who, at my voice, shall dare 
 to pluck the golden crown from thy unholy head.' 
 He ceased. The silence of noon swallowed up his 
 words. Albedir clung tighter to the tree — he dared 
 not for dismay remove his eyes. He remained mute 
 in the perturbation of mute and creeping horror. 
 
 "'Albedir,' said the same voice — 'Albedir, in the 
 name of God, approach ! He that suffered me to fall 
 watches thee. The gentle and merciful spirits of sweet 
 human love delight not in agony and horror. For 
 pity's sake, approach ! In the name of thy good God, 
 approach, Albedir !' The tones were mild and clear 
 as the responses of ^Eolian music. They floated to 
 Albedir's ear like the warm breath of June that lingers 
 in the lawny groves, subduing all to softness. Tears 
 of tender affection started into his eyes." 
 
 The " Assassins " are something like Schiller's 
 " Robbers," outlaws better than the laws that have 
 branded them. In Hellas, Ahasuerus, though still 
 appropriately responding to a summons from the 
 Moslem Antichrist, is an impersonation of human 
 thought as raised by long experience to a prophetic 
 power. The idea is substantially the same as that 
 which we have seen underlying the myths of Enoch 
 and Teiresias, while it goes beyond them in its sug- 
 gestion that knowledge, living over the ages past, and 
 
240 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 imagination attaining to the farthest outcome of pre- 
 sent tendencies, can make for the being of a day an 
 eternal existence. Ahasuerus says to Mahmud : 
 
 "All is contained in each. 
 Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup 
 Is that which has been, or will be, to that 
 Which is — the absent to the present. Thought 
 Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, 
 Reason, Imagination, cannot die ; 
 They are, what that which they regard appears, 
 The stuff whence mutability can weave 
 All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms, 
 Empires, and superstitions." 
 
 With true Shelleyan felicity Hassan describes this 
 
 Jew — 
 
 " From his eye looks forth 
 A life of unconsumed thought which pierces 
 The present, and the past, and the to come . . . 
 Some feign that he is Enoch." 
 
 In the year 1820 appeared the novel in four- 
 volumes, Melmoth, the Wanderer, by the Rev. Robert 
 Charles Maturin, author also of Bertram, a respect- 
 able play, and several novels. Melmoth is a man 
 who has sold himself to Satan for the advantage of 
 a vast length of life, to which is added a power of 
 passing instantaneously, at will, from place to place. 
 The terms of his bond are that he may escape the 
 final doom of his soul, which is to pay for these 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 241 
 
 advantages, provided he can find anyone willing to 
 take the contract, with its benefits and penalty, off 
 his hands. The author's purpose appears to be to 
 show that no one would deliberately damn himself to 
 all eternity for any temporal advantage ; though this 
 would seem to be rather " Irish," since his hero is just 
 that man. However, the hero is an exception that 
 proves the rule, for he goes about the world vainly 
 tempting the poor and needy to take his place. 
 Even a beautiful Indian maiden, who has fallen 
 desperately in love with him, will not surrender her 
 soul. Failing with all, he is carried off by the Devil. 
 The supposed date of this catastrophe is toward the 
 close of the eighteenth century. 
 
 The next work to be noticed at this point, and one 
 which the perusal of Shelley may have suggested, is 
 more distinctly based upon the legend of the 
 Wandering Jew ; this is the Rev. George Croly's 
 Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the 
 Future. This novel, in three volumes, appeared 
 anonymously in 1828. The spirit in which the 
 legend is treated in this work will sufficiently appear 
 by the following passages : 
 
 " Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature 
 was to rule in successive tyranny over my soul. 
 
 " Fearfully was the decree fulfilled. 
 
 16 
 
242 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 " In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed 
 the country to seek out an enemy of Rome. I found 
 in the Northern snows a man of blood : I stirred up 
 the soul of Alaric and led him to the sack of Rome. 
 
 " In revenge for the insults heaped upon the Jew 
 by the dotards and dastards of the city of Con- 
 stantine, I sought out an^ instrument of compendious 
 ruin : I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured 
 ambition into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca. 
 
 " In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the 
 Temple, I roused the iron tribes of the West, and at 
 the head of the Crusaders, expelled the Saracens. I 
 fed full on revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge ! 
 
 " A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. 
 I talked with the Alchemist. I wore away years in 
 the perplexities of the schoolmen ; and I felt the 
 guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge. 
 
 " A passion for human fame seized me. A passion 
 for gold ! . . . 
 
 " I found a bold Genoese. I led him to discover 
 the New World ; with its metals I inundated the 
 Old ; and to my own misery added the misery of two 
 hemispheres." 
 
 At length the eternal World-wanderer stands be- 
 side the newly discovered Printing Press ; again he 
 pays homage to Luther at his rise, and he attains a 
 
faith in the progress of mankind. " At this hour 
 I see the dawn of things to whose glory the glory of 
 the Past is but a dream !" 
 
 Quite another Ahasuerus than Shelley's is repre- 
 sented in Wordsworth's " Song of the Wandering 
 Jeiu," which somewhat resembles the idea of Miiller, 
 already quoted, as indeed both do the old saying, 
 " The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, 
 but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." 
 
 " Though the torrents from their fountains 
 Roar down many a craggy steep, 
 Yet they find among the mountains 
 Resting-places calm and deep. 
 
 " Clouds that love through air to hasten, 
 Ere the storm its fury stills, 
 Helmet-like themselves will fasten 
 On the heads of towering hills. 
 
 " What if through the frozen centre 
 Of the Alps the chamois bound, 
 Yet he has a home to enter 
 
 In some nook of chosen ground. 
 
 " If on windy days the raven 
 Gambol like a dancing skiff, 
 Not the less she loves her haven 
 In the bosom of the cliff. 
 
 " Though the sea-horse in the ocean 
 Own no dear domestic cave, 
 Yet he slumbers — by the motion 
 Rocked of many a gentle wave. 
 
 1 6 — 2 
 
244 7 HE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 " The fleet ostrich, till day closes, 
 
 Vagrant over desert sands, 
 
 Brooding on her eggs reposes 
 
 When chill night that care demands. 
 
 " Day and night my toils redouble, 
 Never nearer to the goal ; 
 Night and day, I feel the trouble 
 Of the Wanderer in my soul." 
 
 It would be interesting to know at just what period 
 of his life, or in which of his two lives, Wordsworth 
 wrote this " Song." Was it a memory of his dead 
 self, the radical that fell in the French Revolution ? 
 Or did he write it when the sceptical wanderings of 
 other minds around him had become to his peaceful 
 soul, with no doom heavier than the liturgical round 
 of Grasmere Church, as imaginary as the " seven 
 whistlers on their nightly rounds," which his peasant- 
 friend heard, while overhead were heard those 
 " Gabriel's hounds" by ears that little knew they too 
 were fabled of Jews doomed by the Crucified ? All 
 around Wordsworth in his home amid the Lakes 
 were the real wanderers. Before nearly every fine 
 mind living at the beginning of the last generation, 
 this Ahasuerus had risen as a spiritual type. Seven 
 times did Shelley evoke this form, and it was with 
 him when he wandered unrecognised past Rydal 
 Mount. Southey had known the meaning of it. 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 245 
 
 Byron had taken the side of Cain against him who in 
 Paradise permitted "the Serpent to creep in," and 
 seen in Prometheus, with " the wretched gift Eternity," 
 the symbol of man's fate and force. De Quincey 
 had made acquaintance with such doomed wanderers 
 of rabbinical legend as " The Widow of Hebron." 
 From afar the sighings of " L. E. L." were heard in 
 fitful dreams of " The Undying One." 
 
 There came a terrible day when the children of the 
 Revolution recognised the inexorable Mother of 
 whom they were born. The old beliefs and ideas 
 in which good and honest people had lived so com- 
 fortably were shrivelled up. It was not the half-way 
 heresy of the earlier time which believed it was 
 attaining a purer Christianity and a more glorious 
 immortality. These children of the Revolution 
 found the whole fabric of faith fallen to black 
 ruins. The youth went off light-hearted to college : 
 he came back heavy-hearted. Beside the old fire- 
 side he sat once more, with the dear faces around 
 him and exile in his heart. He listened to the old 
 Bible, and knelt; but his mind was far away, and 
 had left him amid the innocent, a guilty, kneeling, 
 assenting phantasm. Then there began this Age of 
 Wandering ; for the new mind could not yet get a 
 new heart, and could only wander about like the night- 
 
246 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 raven, of folk-lore, that ever seeks the Holy Sepulchre 
 for rest. Their voices may be heard in most of the 
 literature, of the last generation, pathetic as the 
 appeal of deserted brides going about the street asking, 
 " Saw ye my Beloved ?" — the only answer being end- 
 less echoes of the question. Intellect seemed to them 
 a curse. By it they were at one stroke deprived alike 
 of faith in future and hope of present joys. Unfit for 
 usual avocations, unable to enter pulpits and pro- 
 fessions tainted with the discredited superstitions, 
 how well could they understand the doom of even- 
 wanderer ! 
 
 In the same year (1833) that Edgar Quinet — after 
 ten years of wandering in the effort to find some point 
 where he could catch a least ray of the old faith 
 that made his early home so sweet, only to discover 
 that his faith was gone out, not eclipsed — published 
 his Ahasuertts, Carlyle also, after like wanderings, 
 published his Sartor Resartus, with its story of 
 the " Sorrows of Teufelsdrockh." It was in that 
 same year, too, that Ralph Waldo Emerson, un- 
 able to rest even in his Unitarian pulpit, escaping 
 from the clinging arms of his devoted congregation, 
 came across the ocean to converse with Carlyle, Cole- 
 ridge, and Wordsworth, and find if they could show 
 him any light on the great problems. Coleridge had 
 
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND. 247 
 
 taken refuge with opium and orthodoxy. Words- 
 worth entertained the young American Wanderer 
 with lamentations over the excess of intellectual 
 above moral culture in the modern world. But it was 
 in the far solitude of Nithsdale that he hoped to find 
 what he sought ; for Carlyle had written an essay in 
 which he spoke of standing amid night, yet seeing 
 the faint signs of a new day-spring. " Here, straight 
 uprose that lone wayfaring man," wrote Carlyle after- 
 wards ; but, alas, it was only to find at Craigenput- 
 toch (Hawk Hill) one preyed upon by the same 
 remorseless doubts. The personal hospitality was 
 beautiful. But when the young American, just be- 
 reaved of his wife, sought some vision beyond the 
 grave, there was no help for him. He asked Carlyle 
 to what religious development those sentences about 
 a new day-spring pointed ? The answer was that he 
 could not state that even to himself. Everyone, he 
 said, must find out his own path, and walk in it. 
 
 When Emerson parted from Carlyle and returned to 
 the New World, he found in its new life more than 
 his vanished faith : to emancipate slaves, and human 
 minds, and the moral genius of woman, and give the 
 People their opportunity to build the New World into 
 beauty and happiness— this he found was a religion 
 with eternal vistas opening from it, hopes fairer than 
 
248 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 his faded heaven, a providence better than the Syrian 
 deity who had led the Old World into Red Seas, but 
 never through them to any Promised Land. But 
 Carlyle remained to wander to the last amid the 
 wrecks of his lost worlds. 
 
 " Poor Teufelsdrockh ! Flying with Hunger always 
 parallel to him, and a whole Infernal Chase in his 
 rear ; so that the countenance of Hunger is compara- 
 tively a friend's ! Thus must he, in the temper of 
 ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew, save 
 only that he feels himself not guilty and but suffering 
 the pains of guilt — wend to and fro with aimless 
 speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the 
 earth (by footprints) write his Sorrows of Teufels- 
 drockh ; even as the great Goethe, in passionate words, 
 must write his Sorrows of Wertlier, before the spirit 
 freed itself and he could become a Man. Vain, truly, 
 is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from 
 his own shadow !" 
 
 Among all the Wanderers only one seemed to have 
 found a new heart atwin with his new intellect — he 
 alone loved and welcomed the new, and preferred the 
 vulture-beak that tears Prometheus, the loneliness of 
 Ahasuerus, to the favour of Jove, Jahve or Jesus. 
 Shelley alone was heard singing his matin of the 
 lark above ruins sadder than all the rest. 
 
XVIII. 
 
 AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 
 
 Here before me is a formidable array of large — one 
 might almost say fat — volumes, which I have hardly 
 known whether to assign to England or Germany, but 
 conclude that they belong to both, and also to America, 
 and to the night-side of Protestantism everywhere. 
 They are entitled : Chronicles, selected from the 
 originals, of Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, em- 
 bracing a period of nearly XIX. centuries. Now first 
 revealed to and edited by David Hoffman, Hon. J. U. D. 
 of Gottingen. In two series, each of three volumes. 
 London: Thomas Bosworth, 18 53. This book contains 
 a dedication, dated March 10, 1851, Upper Brook 
 Street, Grosvenor Square, to the author's brother, 
 Samuel Hoffman, Esq., of Baltimore, U. S. A. It 
 contains also a dedication, dated September, 1852, 
 Austin Friars, London, from Cartaphilus himself: 
 " To the Children of the Dispersion — Jehovah's 
 
250 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 favoured people during so many ages, Christ's scat- 
 tered flock during so many more — these chronicles 
 are affectionately inscribed," etc. 
 
 There is nothing in these volumes which bear upon 
 the legendary Wandering Jew, except a tradition, in- 
 cidentally mentioned, that in 1539 he visited Cornelius 
 Agrippa, and was shown the face of Rebecca, whom 
 he had loved fifteen centuries before, in a magic mirror. 
 But the existence of such a book, embodying the 
 vulgar Protestant superstitions about the " dispersion " 
 and the gathering of the " chosen people ;" the fact 
 that so much labour can be expended on these 
 notions by a man othenvise educated, the author 
 apparently of several legal works, are phenomena to 
 excite reflections. There is a good deal of suggestive- 
 ness, too, in the link between Austin Friars and Gros- 
 venor Square. Cartaphilus, going his eternal round 
 with cry of " O' clo' !" has finally, it would appear, dis- 
 covered that he need only have his Judaism baptized 
 to be one of " Christ's flock," pastured as richly in the 
 fashionable Square. 
 
 But even more significant just now is the fact that 
 Germany is ready to supply the hand that can write 
 of the Jews as for ages " Jehovah's favoured people," 
 and in the next moment be clenched to smite them as 
 an accursed race. So much this union of Cartaphilus 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 2 t,i 
 
 and Austin Friars with the Hon. Mr. Hoffman and 
 Grosvenor Square may mean for us, as we bid them 
 farewell, finding nothing further in their voluminous 
 sermons pertinent to our present inquiry or pur- 
 pose. 
 
 Here are two pregnant facts. In various parts of 
 the East Jews manifest a superstitious dread of a 
 Christian's curse. On the other hand, for a long time 
 there prevailed among Christians a belief that an oath 
 taken in a Jewish synagogue was more binding and 
 efficient than one taken elsewhere.* Add these two 
 facts together, and their sum is in the following third 
 fact: on Wednesday, April 13, 1881, a petition 
 against the Jews was presented to the German Chan- 
 cellor, in twenty-six volumes, 14,000 sheets, and with 
 255,000 signatures. 
 
 Every signature to that most shameful document 
 which the nineteenth century has witnessed was set 
 there by — Judaism itself. It was Israel that taught 
 Christendom its black art of cursing. The Christian 
 idea of a Chosen People of Christ, commissioned to 
 make war upon other peoples as heathen, infidels, 
 hosts of Antichrist, is a precise transcript of the Judaic 
 idea of a Chosen People of Jahve, with commission to 
 
 * Superstition and Force. By Henry C. Lea, p. 26. Phila- 
 delphia, 1S78. 
 
252 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 put Gentiles to the edge of the sword. In the darkest 
 ages, when holocausts of Jews were offered in sacrifice 
 to a deified member of their race, the Christian might 
 have addressed his victim with a paraphrase of Shy- 
 lock's words, " If a Baalite disagreed with a Jew, what 
 was his humility ? Slaughter. If a Jew disagree with 
 a Christian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish 
 example? Why, slaughter. The intolerance your 
 Testament teaches me I will execute, and it shall go 
 hard but, with the aid of my Testament, I will better 
 the instruction !" 
 
 When Moses Mendelssohn was asked, " When will 
 the Jews become Christians ?" he answered, " When 
 the Christians cease to be Jews." 
 
 After Shakspeare had startled the world with a 
 suspicion that the Jew is a man, it still required a 
 hundred and fifty years, or thereabout, to awaken the 
 further suspicion that a Jew might be a good, even a 
 religious man. This revelation came through Lessing. 
 When he was coming of age, Lessing recognised the 
 injustice done to the Jews of Germany. Every Jew 
 entering Berlin was compelled to pay toll at Branden- 
 burg Gate. The meanest Christian might gain credit 
 by insulting or assaulting a Jew. Frederick the Great 
 could write, "Jesus was a Jew, yet we persecute the 
 Jews," but his wide toleration left that people unpro- 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 253 
 
 tected. Lessing wrote an early drama, Die Judeu, 
 which touched gently on the matter. In it a wealthy 
 Jew of high character saves the life of a Christian 
 baron and his daughter. The baron desires the youth 
 to marry his daughter, but finding to what race and 
 religion he belongs, that, of course, is impossible. So 
 the drama ends. Why impossible ? The answer to 
 that question had to be postponed. There are some 
 evils in this world which are like the birth-mark in 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne's story : the chemist succeeded 
 in extracting the birth-mark from his wife's face, but 
 the wife lay dead. When the mark of the cross dis- 
 appears from the Wanderer's brow, so that the 
 Christian who has branded him shall no longer say 
 as he passes, " He is a Jew," nor for that part from 
 his daughter's lover, Christianity will be dead. The 
 flower of Lessing's great heart and mind was Nathan 
 the Wise. The apologue of " The Three Rings," in 
 which the Jew, the Moslem, the Christian Templar, 
 raised above their bigotry by mutual human service 
 are seen in a tableau of charity, shone like the star of 
 a new religion over Germany. It is the " Ideal of 
 Religious Libert)'," said Schwartz, Historian of 
 Modern Theology at Halle ; " Truly can Deity be 
 said to pervade every line of Nathan," said Kuno 
 Fischer, of Jena University ; while in it Strauss sees 
 
254 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 one advancing the " Kingdom of God on earth."* Yet 
 even Lessing was still not equal to the idea of having 
 the Jewess marry the Christian. Just as we are 
 listening to hear the marriage-bells ring out for the 
 lovers, lo, they turn out to be brother and sister ! So, 
 the religious equality having been proclaimed a 
 hundred and fifty years after Shakspeare had pro- 
 claimed the human equality, Lessing leaves it to a 
 like time to establish the social equality of Jew and 
 Christian. 
 
 But was this line drawn altogether by the Christian? 
 Lessing's friendship with Moses Mendelssohn had 
 taughthim otherwise. When Michaelis, the theologian, 
 read his early play, " The Jews," he wrote a criticism 
 in which he expressed a doubt whether an oppressed 
 and despised race could produce such a man as the 
 hero. Mendelssohn replied, and Lessing, enclosing 
 this reply to Michaelis, wrote concerning its author : 
 " He really is a Jew, a man of five-and-twenty, who, 
 without any instruction, has acquired great attain- 
 ments in languages, in mathematics, in philosophy, 
 in poetry. I foresee in him an honour to our nation, 
 if he is allowed to come to maturity by his co- 
 religionists, who have always displayed an unfortunate 
 
 * Nathan the Wise. From the German, with an introduction, 
 by R. Willis, M.D. London : Williams and Norgate. 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 255 
 
 spirit of persecution towards men like him." The 
 confirmation of this apprehension on the part of the 
 Jews' earliest champion in Germany may be found in 
 the enthusiasm which the next eminent Mendelssohn 
 put into his oratorio of " St. Paul." 
 
 Goethe tells us that he had intended to bring his 
 Wandering Jew to a meeting with Spinoza. The 
 great German had met with two illustrations of the 
 legend he did deal with, of Faust carried off by 
 demons. One was in the case of Lessing, who, for 
 his defence of Jews and his attack on historic 
 Christianity, had been piously impaled by a rumour 
 that Satan had appeared at his death-bed. The 
 other was in a tract he picked up in which Spinoza 
 was denounced as an infidel, and upon which was a 
 picture of the noble man, giving him diabolical 
 features. But, alas ! Spinoza had been more a martyr 
 among his own people than among Christians. 
 Ahasuerus with the red cross on his brow would have 
 found Spinoza also a lonely wanderer, outcast from his 
 people, but not under any Christian doom. 
 
 Were Goethe alive, he would find Spinoza still in 
 Europe, and still a lonely wanderer amid the scowling 
 hatred of both Jew and Christian. He would find in 
 England, certainly, a steady tendency of synagogue- 
 Judaism to find its ally and support in the Chris- 
 
256 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 tianity which alone represents its ancient superstition 
 and bigotry. It is the orthodox Jew who on Satur- 
 day sets the model of a Sabbath for the Christian to 
 copy on Sunday. When the parliamentary oath — 
 half Romish, half Jewish — is questioned, Jew and 
 Christian stand side by side in its defence, and 
 together seek to impose upon Englishmen of the 
 nineteenth century the theological test of belief in an 
 oath-bound and oath-guaranteeing deity in which no 
 educated man can possibly believe. The orthodox 
 male Jew thanks Jahve in his liturgy that he was not 
 made a woman ; and the male Christian responds by 
 excluding women from political rights. While in 
 Germany the Christian persecutes the Jew as Anti- 
 christ, in England the Jew persecutes the Antichris- 
 tian as Armillus. The Jew recognises a believer in 
 the Trinity as a true theist, and the Christian accepts 
 the Jewish worshipper of Jahve as a theist ; and they 
 make common cause against the disbeliever in both 
 as a " miscreant," an " atheist." Some influential 
 Jews recently made an effort to " Boycott " the Jewish 
 World newspaper for its criticisms on Christianity. 
 From another " Jewish " quarter there came a sharp 
 cry of distress and anger because a scholar attempted 
 to prove that Jesus was not of the Jewish race ! 
 
 It is a significant fact that the man of whom the 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 
 
 257 
 
 Jews of recent times have been proudest, the states- 
 man whom every Israelite in Europe was glad to aid 
 with his information and his wealth, was a Jew whose 
 circumcision had been subordinated to Christian 
 baptism. This combination of auspices — the heart of 
 an ancient Jew with the political advantages of a 
 Christian — made Lord Beaconsfield a symbolical 
 figure. It is only in its Christianised form that 
 Judaism can ever behold even a partial fulfilment of 
 its ancient dreams of worldly power. The theocracy 
 of Jahve is henceforth dependent for every shred of 
 its authority upon the golden sceptre of Christ. 
 
 Christ is for the present a monarch — in England the 
 last surviving sovereign whose rule is at all theocratic. 
 The Jews, as we have seen, were really saved from ex- 
 termination by powerful rulers who only hungered for 
 their money while the mob thirsted for their blood. 
 Fear of the populace was part of the heritage of the 
 Jew, transmitted by heredity. However bravely the 
 modern Jew — at least up to this generation — might 
 begin with the radicalism of his prophets, he was 
 pretty sure to develop into a supporter of strong 
 government ; and there has hitherto, in most countries, 
 been always sufficient Christian intolerance to enable 
 that evolution to pass its embryonic phases without 
 arrest. Heine begins with revolutionism and atheism ; 
 
 17 
 
258 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 ends with worshipping Napoleon I. (whom he sees 
 protecting Jews along the Rhine), and God (of whose 
 existence he was convinced by the sense of smell while 
 mingling with the atheistical ouvriers in their Paris 
 clubs), Benjamin Disraeli begins with poetical eulogy 
 of regicide, and ends with turning a queen into an 
 empress. So far as this ancient reactionism can 
 survive into the immediate future, it must necessarily 
 be the ally of Christianity. The English Jews who 
 paid so large a sum to bring back Charles II. to his 
 throne, were represented by those who gathered to 
 the support of the Christian Lord Beaconsfield. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield was for the Jews a triumph for 
 their race, but a humiliation for their religion. They 
 must needs find their leader in a family of apostates ! 
 But the orthodox Jews knew well thatthis humiliation 
 was more than compensated to them in the new 
 resource which their christened leader opened for them 
 against their party of progress. Disraeli the Elder had 
 fled from the dry bones of Judaism to find intellectual 
 freedom. Disraeli the Younger, sent by his father into 
 the Christian Church, found there the dry bones all 
 turned into armed men. 
 
 Isaac Disraeli made an earnest effort to be at once 
 a man of letters and a member of the synagogue. 
 When his effort had proved vain, and he must 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 
 
 259 
 
 follow Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the path of exile, 
 he wrote to the wardens of Bevis Marks synagogue : 
 " Many of your members are already lost ; many you 
 are losing ! Even those whose tempers and feelings 
 would still cling to you are gradually seceding. But 
 against all this you are perpetually pleading your 
 existing laws, which you would enforce on all the 
 brethren alike. It is of these obsolete laws so many 
 complain. They were adapted by fugitives to their 
 peculiar situation, quite distinct from their own, and 
 as foreign to us as the language in which they were 
 written. For the new circumstances which have arisen 
 you are without laws." 
 
 Soon after his separation from the synagogue he 
 wrote his work Tlie Genius of Judaism. In it is the 
 following passage : " The religious Judaism of the 
 Theocracy degenerated into Rabbinical Judaism by 
 fabulous traditions and enslaving customs. Dictators 
 of the human intellect, the Rabbins, like their succes- 
 sors, the papal Christians, attempted to raise a 
 spurious Theocracy of their own. A race of dreaming 
 schoolmen contrived to place an avowed collection of 
 mere human decisions among the hallowed verities 
 and the duties of devotion, to graft opinions of men 
 on the scion of divine institutions ; nay, even to prefer 
 the gloss in direct opposition to the divine precept, 
 
 17 — 2 
 
260 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 whenever, as they express it, ' the tradition is not 
 favoured f that is, when the oral tradition absolutely 
 contradicts the written law. The Jews live according 
 to their laws, and according to their traditions and 
 customs ; for their traditions have become an integral 
 part of their written law, and their customs have been 
 converted into rites. The Judaic superstitions have 
 been substituted for the code of Revelation. We may 
 ask, by what enthralling witchcraft, by what perverse 
 ingenuity, has such a revolution been brought 
 about ?" 
 
 In reading this I am reminded of the Russian 
 folk-tale of " The Devouring Sister." The Vampire 
 born into a family devours each member of it succes- 
 sively, to the last — a brother who slays her. After 
 she is dead, he hears her voice gently entreating him 
 to think with compassion on her hard doom, and to 
 preserve some bit of her remains. Moved by this 
 appeal, the brother folds one drop of her blood in a 
 leaf and carries it in his bosom. When he reaches 
 home he falls dead ; the one drop of Vampire blood 
 had devoured his heart. The fatal drop which Isaac 
 Disraeli carried away from his dead Judaism was 
 folded in the fine passage just quoted, as in a green 
 leaf: it is in the phrase, " scion of divine institutions." 
 
 There is enough in that brief creed to sustain every 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 261 
 
 persecution of reason and conscience the world ever 
 saw. The Sanhedrim is in it ; the Inquisition is in it. 
 The belief that the God of the universe established 
 the institutions of ancient Judea is enough to eat the 
 human heart out of every generation that presses it, 
 with whatever sentiment, to its breast. 
 
 It was perfectly logical for Isaac Disraeli to have 
 his son baptized a Christian. Seeing in the so-called 
 " religion " of his race a " scion of divine institutions," 
 he rightly saw in Christianity the natural expansion 
 and historic development of that "scion." He had 
 said to the synagogue, " For the new circumstances 
 which have arisen you are without laws." Christianity 
 supplied those laws. The same voice spake again 
 when, thirty-seven years ago, his son reminded 
 Christendom that it was obeying the laws and 
 saturated in the literature of the Jewish race ; when 
 he claimed that Moses was summoned by Jahve " to 
 be the organ of an eternal revelation of the divine will." 
 
 The freethinker owes a certain debt to Lord Bea- 
 consfield for his logical treatment of Christianity. 
 That unanswerable argument of his in " A Political 
 Biography," that the Jews deserved gratitude for pre- 
 vailing on the Romans to crucify Jesus, so securing 
 the Atonement; that it was a sublime act and 
 sacrifice, Jews being the ordained immolators, securing 
 
262 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the salvation of the world ; that no one has ever been 
 permitted to write under the inspiration of the Holy- 
 Ghost but a Jew ; that all Christians acknowledge 
 that the only medium of communication between 
 themselves and God is the Jewish race ; that the 
 Mother of God was a Jewess ; that, indeed, is a reductio 
 ad absurdum, which cannot be unwelcome to the age 
 of common sense. But every nail he thus drove into 
 the coffin of Christianity was one which had pierced the 
 hands and feet of humanity from Canaan to Calvary, 
 and from Calvary to Smithfield. 
 
 The devotion of Lord Beaconsfield to the Jewish 
 people was a fearful retribution on the synagogue 
 that drove out his father. His kiss was as fatal as it 
 was sincere. He taught the Jewish youth that the 
 path to power and glory, not merely for themselves 
 but for their race, lay in the direction of Christianity. 
 His spirit may yet survive as the Moses of a journey 
 through the baptismal sea to the Promised Land. 
 He confirmed them in every error — in all their race- 
 egoism, in all their indifference to the progressive 
 enlightenment of the world, and gave their bigotry a 
 new lease of life by a Christian confirmation. The 
 most eloquent passage he ever wrote is in Tancred> 
 in the " Feast of Tabernacles," which the Jewish 
 World, in quoting it after his death, said might 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 263 
 
 have been uttered by a Chasid in a moment of 
 inspiration : " The vineyards of Israel have ceased 
 to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of 
 Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that 
 persist in celebrating their vintage, although they 
 have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards. 
 What sublime inexorability in the law ! But what 
 indomitable spirit in the people ! It is easy for the 
 happier Sephardim, the Hebrews who have never 
 quitted the sunny regions that are laved by the Mid- 
 land Ocean ; it is easy for them, though they have 
 lost their heritage, to sympathise in their beautiful 
 Asian cities or in their Moorish and Arabian gardens, 
 with the graceful rites that are, at least, an homage 
 to a benignant nature. But picture to yourself the 
 child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid 
 quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is 
 never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet 
 he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine ! 
 The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy 
 clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower, 
 and that he must build it of the boughs of thick 
 trees ; and the Rabbins have told him that these thick 
 trees are the palm, the myrtle, and the weeping 
 willow. Even Sarmatia may furnish a weeping 
 willow. The law has told him that he must pluck 
 
264 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the fruit of goodly trees, and the Rabbins have 
 explained that goodly fruit on this occasion is con- 
 fined to the citron. Perhaps, in his despair, he is 
 obliged to fly to the candied delicacies of the grocer. 
 His mercantile connections will enable him, often at 
 considerable cost, to procure some palm-leaves from 
 Canaan, which he may wave in his synagogue while 
 he exclaims, as the crowd did when the divine 
 descendant of David entered Jerusalem, ' Hosannah 
 in the highest !' There is something profoundly 
 interesting in this devoted observance of Oriental 
 customs in the heart of our Saxon and Sclavonian 
 cities; in these ■ descendants of the Bedoueens, who 
 conquered Canaan more than three thousand years 
 ago, still celebrating that success which secured their 
 forefathers, for the first time, grapes and wine. Con- 
 ceive a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of 
 Hamburg or Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of 
 our Houndsditch or Minories, born to hereditary 
 insult, without any education, apparently without a 
 circumstance that can develop the slightest taste, or 
 cherish the least sentiment for the beautiful, living 
 amid fogs and filth, never treated with kindness, 
 seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest, if not 
 the vilest, toil — bargaining for frippery, speculating 
 in usury, existing for ever under the concurrent 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 265 
 
 influence of degrading causes which would have worn 
 out, long ago, any race that was not of the unmixed 
 blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the law of 
 Moses ; conceive such a being, an object to you of 
 prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred. The 
 season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being 
 are filled with images and passions that have been 
 ranked in all ages among the most beautiful and the 
 most genial of human experience ; filled with a sub- 
 ject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most 
 joyous, and the most exuberant ; a subject which 
 has inspired poets, and which has made gods — the 
 harvest of the grape in the native regions of the vine. 
 He rises in the morning, goes early to some White- 
 chapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for 
 which he has previously given a commission, and 
 which are brought, probably, from one of the neigh- 
 bouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the 
 yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, 
 decks it, even profusely, with the finest flowers and 
 fruits he can procure, the myrtle and the citron never 
 forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. 
 After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with 
 his wife and his children in the open air, as if he 
 were in the pleasant villages of Galilee, beneath its 
 sweet and starry sky." 
 
266 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 " What sublime inexorability in the law !" Nay, 
 what binding, paralysing, mercilessness in the self- 
 imposed law that holds the eyes of a race for ever at 
 the back of its head instead of in the forehead ! 
 In the great and grievous error of those words is 
 repeated once more the doom of the Wandering 
 Race. In them Jesus says again to Ahasuerus, " As 
 thou hast refused to go out in the general vineyard 
 of humanity, to toil and gather with the true and 
 earnest of all races and religions, be this thy sentence : 
 Keep thy small province of mouldered faith ; go on, 
 and on, and for ever, celebrating vineyards that do not 
 exist, pressing dead grapes that yield no wine, waving 
 dead palm-leaves before a Messiah that can never 
 arrive, bound in thine everlasting Houndsditch round 
 by dreams of myrtle-bowers in a barbarian paradise 
 long ago turned to a Valley of Jehoshaphat ! ; ' 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield also dealt his blow to Spinoza. 
 He defended the rights of the Jews in Parliament on 
 the ground that they were all Jews, all believers in 
 Moses and the Prophets ; and that the alternative of 
 this was belief in Hume and Gibbon. The day of his 
 burial was solemnised by the party he had led with 
 an effort to drive out of Parliament an Englishman 
 who preferred Hume and Gibbon to Moses and the 
 Prophets. 
 
AHASUERUS VINCTUS. 267 
 
 This is the doom of Judaism. This is Ahasuerus 
 bound. There is a nobility in the Ahasuerus that 
 Shelley evokes in Queen Mab, a Semitic Prometheus 
 bound for ever on Time and its desolations, as a rock, 
 with bigotry and intolerance feeding vulture-like upon 
 his heart because he will not bend to tyrannical Jove, 
 either in the form of Jahve or of Jesus ; suffering 
 as the friend of a Humanity also groaning beneath a 
 celestial despotism, but cringing as he will not. 
 But there is nothing Promethean in the mere prefer- 
 ence for the chains of one tyrant over those of another. 
 There is nothing noble in a sect accepting its rock and 
 vulture through servility to a deity of whose indiffe- 
 rence or impotence or non-existence the history of his 
 worshippers is a sufficient proof. There is no majesty 
 in martyrdom unless it is endured for the deliverance 
 and welfare of all mankind. There was a time when 
 the Jews suffered nobly ; they stood almost alone in 
 preserving the protest of the human mind against 
 priestly impostures, which could not be maintained by 
 the thinking Greeks and Romans — who no doubt 
 knew the facts as well as Lucian and Celsus — against 
 imperial decrees. But that time passed when thought 
 became free. The emancipation of the Jews politi- 
 cally brought to their side Herakles — a human-hearted 
 deliverer — who cut their outward cords. Judaism, 
 
268 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 remaining on its Caucasus, apart from the evolution 
 of humanity, is bound only by inward chains. Its 
 doom, in free countries, comes only from within. 
 
 It is forbidden that any man or race shall find 
 strength and happiness in isolation, and this race is 
 withheld by its traditional system and its dogmas 
 from co-operation with mankind in its nobler aims 
 and tendencies. Their fundamental error is to regard 
 the God of Israel as different from the Gods of other 
 people. Upon that rests the wild superstition that 
 the Jews, in some sense or other, are "a chosen people" 
 or "a peculiar people." It is the doctrine alike of 
 Christianity and Judaism ; but as in the dreary past 
 it has been the dogma most fatal to the Jews — 
 their accepted supernatural eminence logically lead- 
 ing to their supernatural doom — it must be equally 
 fatal in their future of freedom, in an intellectual sense. 
 So long as they are marked off in the human world in 
 this way they will not find rest ; for that can be found 
 only when their genius — earning such wreaths as 
 adorn the brow of Spinoza and Heine, or those which 
 came from every capital to lie on the grave of Offen- 
 bach — is identified with the general work and play of 
 the world, and their religious aims such as are 
 common to all who acknowledge allegiance to reason 
 and pursue the equal welfare of mankind. 
 
XIX. 
 
 AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 
 
 There are certain races of mankind whose history or 
 whose character has made them the tests of civilisa- 
 tion. In one direction the negro has been such. In 
 the development of English self-government, on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, there came a time when its fine 
 theories of liberty were put to the test. In America 
 the poor ignorant negro knelt chained before the 
 genius of the Republic. His slavery represented 
 many millions of money, his freedom must cost many 
 thousands of lives ; but Justice said, "There is that 
 lowly man — helpless, of alien race from you, too poor 
 to pay you anything : if you can do justice to him, 
 can make him a citizen, the world will know that you 
 are really a republic." 
 
 In another direction the Jewish race has been the 
 rest and register of civilisation. It was the one visible 
 embodiment of Antichrist in Christendom. While 
 
270 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 missionaries were going through the world to convert 
 the world, the Jew also went through the world — 
 moral, religious, learned — a compulsory wanderer and 
 missionary, in whose scars might always be read the 
 spirit of the Church he opposed, and the meaning of a 
 vicarious atonement, whose corollary was the unend- 
 ing crucifixion of a race for the offence of three or four 
 of their ancestors. This Wandering Jew knocked at 
 the doors of law-courts. "Who art thou?" said the 
 judges. " I am Antichrist." " Come in and be burnt," 
 said they. He came in and was burnt. But ever 
 rising from his ashes, the Wanderer marched on. 
 Again, after some centuries, he knocked at the door 
 marked Justice. " Who art thou ?" asked the judges. 
 " I am Antichrist," he said. " Stay out and be 
 mobbed," said they. And so he wandered until he 
 reached the century when England opened the door 
 and said, " Enter and receive thy right." Even Judge 
 Jeffreys, in the time of James II., would not accept 
 the old law which disabled a Jew from prosecuting a 
 Christian. " Pay him his money," he cried to the 
 defendant. " His action is not against a Christian : 
 you are more a Jew than he is ! " At many doors this 
 unconquerable Antichrist had to knock in this land : 
 slowly, against frantic attempts to bar them, they 
 swung open, one after the other ; and it was proved 
 
AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 
 
 271 
 
 that English justice, confronting what Christendom 
 called a devil, was ultimately equal to giving that 
 devil his due — in society, in the law-court, in the 
 Parliament. 
 
 The English have managed to hold superstition 
 more in order in their smaller territory than it is held in 
 Eastern Europe, yet they must not take for their own 
 race all the credit for the equality that has been ac- 
 corded the Jew in England. The credit is mainly due 
 to himself. Some forty years ago, when wild stories 
 reached Great Britain from Damascus and Rhodes of 
 how Jews were suffering horrible outrages on account 
 of absurd accusations — such as sacrificing Christian 
 priests and children — the entire English community 
 joined to support Sir Moses Montefiore in his mission 
 to repress that fanaticism. But when England had sent 
 Sir Moses on his noble mission, it turned to consider 
 its own relation to the Jews, and found on its statute- 
 book laws which still bore witness of the ages when 
 Jewish blood had mingled with Christian sacrifices. 
 The laws were even then — forty years ago — not all 
 obsolete. But some of them were, and others 
 have since become so, largely through the fact 
 that the Jews had made themselves useful to the 
 country. 
 
 Just now England is again called to look abroad 
 
272 THE WANDERING JEW 
 
 though nearer home, and consider the outbreak of 
 fanaticism in Germany. 
 
 Dr. Carl Vogt, the naturalist, recently expressed 
 his belief that the present persecution of Jews in 
 Germany is a recurrence of ancient Teutonic 
 barbarism. He explains Judenhetze scientifically, 
 on the principles of Atavism. Ever}- now and then 
 there must be a recrudescence of suppressed barbarism. 
 Those who have read, in A Tramp Abroad, those 
 accounts of the duels witnessed by imperturbable 
 Mark Twain in that country — duels in which students 
 cut and slash each other in a friendly way, in the 
 intervals of drinking beer together, and flaunt their 
 facial gashes upon the street with pride, will suspect 
 that the barbarism in coming back had not far to 
 travel. Nevertheless, we must remember that Ger- 
 many has not yet completed that revolution which 
 shall bring the people under the influence of their best 
 heads ; its great science, art, and literature are still 
 carried on as it were in cloisters. The throne of 
 Germany's noble Reason is usurped by heartless 
 pretenders in politics and hypocrites in religion. 
 Barbarossa will awake presently, and when he comes 
 forth from his cave it will not be in the guise of 
 Emperor William or Prince Bismarck, nor yet as the 
 priest-ridden Jew-hater, but as a cultured and 
 
AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 273 
 
 courageous People, with their feet alike on titled 
 despotism and parochial barbarism. 
 
 As, however, in the outrages on Jews at Damascus 
 and Rhodes, in the last generation, England caught 
 a glimpse, as in a mirror, of certain features from her 
 own hideous past still surviving in her laws, so one 
 can hardly turn from the Judenhetze of Germany 
 without a consciousness that there are still certain 
 scandals in the attitude of English Christianity 
 towards the Jews. The chief scandal is that there 
 should be an organised society for converting them — 
 as if they were savages. 
 
 The existence of such a society in London will one 
 
 day be quoted to show how much pious preadamitism 
 
 survived amid our telegraphs and telephones. It is 
 
 . not civilised for men to suppose that a good Jew is 
 
 inferior to a good Christian. It is scandal that the 
 
 learned clergy should permit the people to suppose 
 
 that Christian churches and sects have any moral or 
 
 spiritual advantage over those who attend the 
 
 synagogue. How many mothers who teach their 
 
 children the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, or 
 
 rehearse to them the parables of the New Testament, 
 
 pity the children of Jewish mothers as knowing 
 
 nothing of those beautiful and tender sayings ? How 
 
 many of them even realise that the Golden Rule is in 
 
 iS 
 
274 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the Pentateuch ; and that every Jewish child learns 
 those sweet sayings and parables where Jesus learned 
 them — at his Jewish mother's knee ? 
 
 It is a great misfortune that religious liberalism, in 
 its revolt from the primitive Judaism which Protest- 
 antism and Puritanism restored,and which survives now 
 chiefly among Sabbatarian and dogmatic Christians, 
 has kept before the world only that ancient Jahvism 
 under which Canaanites were exterminated. It 
 has thus indirectly fostered the fallacy which regards 
 as Judaism much that even strict Jews have long ago 
 outgrown. The Jews themselves, however, as we have 
 seen, are largely to blame for the persistence of this 
 vulgar delusion ; indeed, even many of their liberal 
 thinkers have obstinately preserved their new wine in 
 ceremonial bottles, with the ancient labels, and helped 
 to convey the popular impression that their religion 
 is unchanged. But it is changed. Even the strictest 
 Jews are to-day less Sabbatarian, and more emanci- 
 pated from the barbarism of sacrificial superstitions, 
 than Christians. When Moses Mendelssohn said that 
 the Jews would become Christians " when the 
 Christians cease to be Jews," he no doubt recognised 
 that Christians are preserving as dogma the Judaism 
 which Jews keep as a shell, but inwardly have out- 
 grown ; and that a conversion of the Jews to 
 
AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 275 
 
 Christianity would really carry them back to Levitical 
 beliefs long replaced by the modern ideas prevailing 
 inside the hereditary and patriotic walls from which 
 they fear to venture. 
 
 Spinoza was as representative a Jew as ever lived, 
 and never more than when the synagogue disowned him. 
 The history of his race for a thousand years had been 
 to him an instruction in fidelityand independence. That 
 there is a vigorous Left among the Jews is apparent 
 in every direction ; not only in Jewish scholarship, 
 which is assisting in the work of detaching from their 
 Bible and other sacred books a Hebrew Mythology, 
 but also in the political and social influence of Jews. 
 The outbreak of Judenhetze in Germany is a bad 
 enough symptom for the Teutons, but a hopeful sign 
 for the Jews. Socially they have excited jealousy by 
 the extent to which, having become men and women 
 of the world, they are able to support that character 
 by their wealth. Politically, they would appear to 
 have so completely entered into those liberal and 
 popular movements which they so long eschewed, 
 that the Imperial Power is under the necessity of 
 reminding them that, as in the past they suffered 
 from the mob, and were protected by princes, so it 
 may be again. The retention of the Rev. Mr. Stoecker 
 as Court Chaplain, while he is leading this agitation so 
 
 18—2 
 
276 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 unscrupulously, is a confession that the anti-Semitic 
 movement has the encouragement of the Emperor 
 and his Chancellor. To awaken Teutonic jealousy of 
 Jewish wealth, just beginning to be displayed in the 
 enjoyment of Gentile luxuries; to arouse Christian 
 fanaticism against the growing freethought of a race 
 ceasing to expect any Messiah : such are the obvious 
 methods by which the German Government hope to 
 separate Jewish means and radicalism from the 
 masses, and drive Jews to their ancient refuge — the 
 strong central power always purchasable by money 
 and servility. What success will crown this imperial 
 effort remains to be seen. But that there should be a 
 necessity for it is a confirmation of what the late Lord 
 Beaconsfield asserted, and such good judges as Herr 
 Eydmann and Karl Blind attest, that the Jews are very 
 extensively concerned in popular movements on the 
 Continent. 
 
 That these liberal tendencies might be expected 
 among the Jews generally when and where they feel 
 assured of freedom and security, is suggested by the 
 history of their race in America. It is certain that 
 the leading Rabbins of that country would be 
 regarded as perilously latitudinarian by their strict 
 co-religionists of Europe. It is a significant unique 
 fact that the high family of Adlers has produced a 
 
AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 277 
 
 President of the Free Religious Association, which is 
 made up of theists and agnostics developed out of 
 Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. But, further- 
 more, the leading Rabbins, Lilienthal, Wise, and 
 Sonnenschein, are instances of the advanced 
 Rationalism which pervades the Jewish body in 
 America. These scholarly and eloquent Rabbins 
 freely fraternise with the anti-supernaturalistic 
 teachers of other antecedents than their own. It is 
 pretty certain that they do not look for the advent of 
 any personal Messiah, and never dream of any res- 
 toration of their race to power in Palestine. They 
 are not theocratic in politics, but republican, and 
 regard America as the real Jerusalem of their race. 
 Such is my conviction, based not only upon the works 
 of the gentlemen I have mentioned, but upon personal 
 acquaintance with them ; and I cannot doubt that, 
 whatever may be their dissent from much that is 
 written in these pages, they would confirm my opinion 
 as to the tendency of the people of Jewish origin in 
 America. Jews of the Old World are somewhat in 
 the condition of the rich man who, when reproached 
 for a stinted charity, said that he began life poor, and 
 had never got the chill of poverty out of his bones ; 
 these Jews have vivid traditions of persecution, and 
 have not yet got the chill of fear out of their bones. 
 
278 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Recent events in Germany and Russia may even pro- 
 long this timidity ; the ferocious reply to their 
 attempt to mingle in the society and politics of the 
 world may set back for a little their liberation. But 
 the free heart and mind of Europe is with them, and 
 will be felt not only in England but on the Continent. 
 The unbinding of Ahasuerus is part of the civilised 
 revolution which can never really go backward. 
 
 Shakspeare was the first to show the Jew to be 
 a man. Lessing was the first to show that a Jew 
 might be as good a man as a Christian, the indispens- 
 ability of Christ to excellence being quite ignored. 
 Thus the seventeenth century had its gospel for the 
 Jew, and the eighteenth century had its gospel. But 
 in essence the gospel according to Lessing was not so 
 high as that of the master at whose feet he learned it. 
 Shakspeare had raised up the standard of Manhood, 
 and in its light Judaism and Christianism are seen to 
 be comparatively small things, and their contentious 
 tempers proof that they are no longer religious in 
 any pure sense. Lessing, even in his famous apologue 
 of the Three Rings which a father gave to his equally 
 beloved sons — similitudes of the Jewish, Moslem and 
 Christian religions — makes the wise judge end the 
 dispute as to which is the true ring by consecrating 
 all three. The true ring, which the fond father had 
 
AHASUERUS DELIVERED. 279 
 
 caused to be copied in two others, so that neither son 
 might be disappointed, had the power to draw the 
 love of all on its owner. But it also carried the 
 right to sovereignty ; and this advantage so overbore 
 the former virtue that each son, with his ring, was 
 found to love himself alone. The Judge advises them 
 to be each content with his ring : 
 
 " Let each of you comport him in such wise 
 As love unbribed commands ; let each resolve 
 To show the world that in the ring he wears 
 He holds the prize, its virtues being shown 
 To Man in acts of justice, meekness, mercy, 
 To God in thoughts of love and heartfelt trust." 
 
 But the nineteenth century should transmit to the 
 twentieth a nobler gospel for Jew, Moslem, and Chris- 
 tian than that. Let each of them see that his ring is 
 a survival from the ancient chain that fettered him to 
 his several rock of superstition ; that so long as he 
 holds faith in it, no transmutation of it into gold, no 
 decoration with opal, can make it other than a talis- 
 man to bind him, and isolate him from the real work 
 of creating a Man able to be the providence of this 
 world. Let the rings, not only of Israel, but of 
 Christianity, and of all sects, be thrown into the flames 
 of human love, that there may be formed a coronet 
 for the Mother whose patient all-loving face poetry 
 and science are revealing. " In this principle," said 
 
280 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 Clifford, of the evolution of organic from inorganic 
 things, " we must recognise the mother of life, and 
 especially of human life, powerful enough to subdue 
 the elements, and yet always working gently against 
 them ; biding her time in the whole expanse of heaven, 
 to make the highest cosmos out of inorganic chaos ; 
 the actor, not of all the actions of living things, but 
 only of the good actions ; for a bad action is one by 
 which the organism tends to be less organic, and 
 acts for a time as if inorganic. To this mother of 
 life, personifying herself in the good works of humanity, 
 it seems to me we may fitly address a splendid hymn 
 of Mr. Swinburne's : 
 
 " Mother of man's time-travelling generations, 
 Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart, 
 God above all Gods worshipped of all nations, 
 Light above light, law beyond law, thou art. 
 " Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder 
 
 Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things ; 
 The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder 
 Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings. 
 ***** 
 
 " All old grey histories hiding thy clear features, 
 O secret spirit and sovereign, all men's tales, 
 Creeds woven of men thy children and thy creatures, 
 They have woven for vestures of thee and for veils. 
 
 "Thine hands, without election or exemption, 
 
 Feed all men fainting from false peace or strife, 
 O thou, the resurrection and redemption, 
 The godhead, and the manhood, and the life !'' 
 
XX. 
 
 THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 In Prague there is an ancient Synagogue, the interior 
 of which is black with the mould and dust of seven 
 centuries. There is a tradition that at some unknown 
 point in it the holy name of Jahve is written, and, for 
 fear of its obliteration, no cleansing or sweeping, 
 however slight, has been permitted, until now the 
 Synagogue has "become a show-place of accumulated 
 dirt, which tourists pass through with torches. This 
 ancient structure is but a too faithful symbol of 
 temples which preserve the superstitions of ages 
 through fear that, if some holy name or creed be 
 touched, religion and morality will suffer. 
 
 Early in the last generation three Jewish boys — 
 Israel, Jacob, and Henoch — were seated together in 
 this Synagogue on a Saturday morning, awaiting the 
 beginning of service. They were of different families, 
 but playmates. No person was near them, and, 
 
2S2 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 oblivious of the traditional prohibitions, they began 
 to amuse themselves by scraping off with their knives 
 an inch of the black mould, here and there, to see 
 what wood or stone was beneath. The Rabbi, hap- 
 pening to pass at the time, cried out with horror at 
 the sacrilege, and said, " The curse of Heaven may fall 
 on you for that act !" 
 
 The terrified lads put up their knives. Some neigh- 
 bours who heard the voice of the angry Rabbi, but not 
 his exact words, reported that he had said, " May the 
 curse of Heaven fall on you for that act !" And this 
 was the form in which the story was whispered about. 
 Gradually a small saga grew up among the Jews of 
 Prague about these three boys. They were regarded 
 with an evil eye, under which their prospects suffered 
 blight ; they were supposed to be under some mysteri- 
 ous doom, they were avoided, and their families 
 suffered much distress. The venerable Rabbi, repent- 
 ing of his hasty words, tried to disabuse the minds of 
 his congregation as to what he had said; but he was 
 unable to undo what had been done. As the three 
 advanced towards youth, the prejudices against them, 
 and the belief that a doom overhung them, made their 
 lives so miserable, that they desired to leave Prague 
 altogether, and their parents thought this the best 
 course. The families were in good circumstances, and 
 
THREE WITNESSES. 283 
 
 the young men went off fairly well educated and with 
 some means. They resolved to emigrate to different 
 regions. 
 
 Jacob went to Northern Germany. He entered a 
 university there and succeeded in his studies. Ani- 
 mated by the hope of doing so well in life that his 
 parents might ultimately have the happiness of seeing 
 the prejudices of their neighbours disappear, he pre- 
 sently excelled all other students. He became a 
 favourite with the professors. But this excited the 
 jealousy of other students. These conspired against 
 him, and one of their best swordsmen was appointed 
 to pick a quarrel with him. The quarrel came ; Jacob 
 was challenged ; in . the duel he received an ugly 
 wound, which deprived him of one eye, disfigured 
 him, and injured his health. These troubles gradually 
 affected his nerves to such an extent that his mind 
 was partially affected. He began to suspect that 
 there might be some truth in the belief of the neigh- 
 bours in Prague, that he had fallen under a divine 
 curse for having cleaned an inch of the old Syna- 
 gogue-wall. This dread grew upon him to such an 
 extent that, from having been a courageous youth, he 
 became timid. Whenever he went out at night he 
 seemed to be confronted by the student with whom 
 he had fought the duel. He began to be looked upon 
 
2S4 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 as an uncanny person by the common people in the 
 city where he dwelt. Some even hustled him on the 
 street, and the Christian boys sometimes threw refuse 
 at the miserable man. He was one evening pur- 
 posely tripped by some one and suffered a severe fall, 
 which lamed him. Amid the shadows that darkened 
 his room, which had gradually become dingy through 
 poverty, he imagined that, like the patriarch after 
 whom he was named, he had wrestled with a dark 
 phantom, which, however, had prevailed against him. 
 The curse seemed to be fixed upon him irremissibly. 
 The accumulated filth of the old Synagogue of 
 Prague had carried with it the accumulated supersti- 
 tions of ages ; his childish attempt to clear away a 
 little of that visible mould had been vain, and he was 
 now equally helpless to free any smallest space of his 
 own mind from hereditary beliefs in dooms, spectres, 
 spells. Thus he wandered, limping, miserable, amid 
 Christian scoffs and Jewish suspicions, and so he 
 wanders this day. 
 
 The second of the lads that left Prague, Israel, came 
 to England, where he was well educated. He thought 
 over this Prague incident carefully, and came to feel 
 a certain contempt for a Synagogue which so jealously 
 cherished all its dirt. He found it written in the 
 Talmud that " next to godliness is cleanliness," and 
 
THREE WITNESSES. 285 
 
 began to perceive that the filth he had tried to scrape 
 off was a type of the irrational usages and petty 
 exactions which had overlaid the religion of his race. 
 He had united himself to a Synagogue in London 
 which was kept fair and beautiful ; but, as time wore 
 on, he found that around the good hearts and fine 
 minds of the English Jews there were walls on which 
 had gathered the repulsive dust and dirt of ages 
 transmitted from ancient Syria. So Israel resolved 
 that he would make good the promise of his boyish 
 knife, and clear away some of the spiritual mould 
 from English Judaism. His attempts at reform 
 awakened the ire of Wardens, the hostility of 
 Rabbins, and the opposition of a wealthy Semitic 
 caste. Israel still believed in Jahve, and in the 
 fundamental doctrines of the Jewish faith; he believed 
 that if Judaism could be freed from its antiquarian 
 walls it must lead the world. But he struggled in 
 vain for years to secure from the chiefs of the 
 Synagogues any modification of their usages. Further- 
 more, his efforts in this direction began to tell seriously 
 upon his personal prospects. He had studied law, 
 been admitted to the bar, and for a time found some 
 employment from his co-religionists ; but after it was 
 discovered that he was endeavouring to interfere with 
 the traditional usages of the Synagogue, he soon 
 
286 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 found himself without clients, and with but a few 
 friends — these being of Christian families. 
 
 One evening Israel went to a theatre in London to 
 witness the performance of the Merchant of Venice. 
 He was much impressed by an incident of the Bible 
 used by Shylock as a parable, wherein Jacob stuck 
 wands before the ewes in breeding-time, and secured 
 parti-coloured lambs, which, according to Laban's 
 agreement, were all to fall to his (Jacob's) part. 
 Shylock says : 
 
 " This was a way to thrive, and he was blest ; 
 And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not." 
 
 The Christian Antonio must needs accept the 
 " holy witness " of a book infallible to him and Shylock 
 alike, and says that the result so good for Jacob was 
 "sway'd and fashioned by the hand of Heaven." 
 Israel went away from the theatre to his poor room, 
 and bethought him that, great as was the wealth and 
 power of a few Jews, the parti-coloured lambs had 
 somehow fallen to the Christian lot. Was the " hand 
 of Heaven " in this ? If the declaration of Jahve of 
 old that his approval should be manifest in blessings, 
 his disapproval in cursings, were faithful, could there be 
 any doubt where the divine approbation rested in Eng- 
 land ? Was Houndsditch the seal of Jahve's benedic- 
 
THREE WITNESSES. 287 
 
 tion on his people ? or was not Belgravia rather the 
 expression of his smile ? Houndsditch and Belgravia 
 alike appealed to Jahve ; to which had he sent the 
 multitude of spring lambs and the plenteous wool ? 
 
 The germ that fell into Israel's mind at the theatre 
 gradually grew. He presently found that the 
 traditions of Judaism attained their real power and 
 glory in Christianity. In the end he was baptized ; 
 he was speedily surrounded by troops of friends. He 
 possessed brilliant powers, and became eminent in 
 literary and political life. Even his former co- 
 religionists were inclined to utilise him, now that he 
 no longer attempted to use his pen-knife on their 
 mouldy customs. He was able to serve them in many 
 ways, they were willing to repay his services ; and, 
 thus, assisted by the race which gained prestige 
 through his genius without the danger of it, and by 
 the Christian community which saw in him a triumph 
 of Christ, he became a great minister of State and a 
 favourite in Palaces. And such he is to this day. 
 
 The third of the three youths who left Prague, 
 Henoch, wandered restlessly through Asia and Europe 
 
 then came to France. He also was a man of brilliant 
 
 powers, and for some time kept up his friendship with 
 young Israel in London. In the course of their cor- 
 respondence, the idea arose in him also of trying to 
 
288 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 reform the Synagogue to which he had attached him- 
 self in Paris. He failed in the same way, but the 
 effect on his mind was different. He could not recog- 
 nise a direction from Jahve in the superior thrift of 
 Christendom. He had heard that in America the 
 Jews were in every way more liberal and progressive, 
 and he resolved to emigrate thither. For this purpose 
 he engaged a passage, and repaired to Havre to take 
 his steamer. 
 
 On his way. to the wharf in Havre, Henoch was 
 passing a small book-stall, when his attention was 
 arrested by the appearance of the bookseller. This 
 was an extremely aged Jew, with long white beard, 
 deep-set eyes, and a queer, antique figure. He sat 
 beside his little stand of dingy fourth-hand books, 
 holding a small volume in his bony fingers, which he 
 perused attentively. Henoch approached him and, 
 speaking in Hebrew, asked him what books he had 
 suitable for a traveller. The old man asked him 
 whither he was travelling, and having received the 
 reply, said : " Ah, that, too, was my dream ; but I never 
 got farther than this. I am too old now — too old and 
 too poor — and must leave the New World hope for our 
 younger men. But I sit here, and read about that 
 land of promise, and my dim old eyes follow every 
 ship that sails that way." Henoch asked to look at 
 
THREE WITNESSES. 289 
 
 the book the aged Jew had been reading. It was an 
 old Spanish book — Herrera's History of tlie Indies. 
 Israel knew the language, and proposed to buy the 
 book. The aged bookseller was somewhat reluctant 
 but finally said : ' It is the story of the discovery of 
 the New World to which you are going ; take it, with 
 an old man's good will; and may you carry to America 
 something better than those Spaniards did, who tried to 
 plant there every evil the Old World had produced !" 
 
 On board the steamer Henoch read this book, and 
 one narrative in it haunted his memory. It related 
 that when the Spaniards had taken possession of the 
 newly-discovered island they called Hispaniola — now 
 Cuba — they began to trade in the Indians, who were 
 shipped off as slaves to various regions. The island 
 found itself in want of Indians, and having heard that 
 the neighbouring Lucayan Isles were full of them, 
 asked permission of King Ferdinand to allow them to 
 bring these Lucayans over to Hispaniola, " that they 
 might enjoy the preaching and political customs" 
 which they (the Spaniards) had introduced. Having 
 received this permission, the Spaniards went over to 
 the Lucayans and told those simple islanders that they 
 had come from the paradise of their ancestors ; they 
 said that all whom they (the Lucayans) had loved and 
 lost by death were now in a happy abode, enjoying 
 
 19 
 
290 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 perfect repose and every felicity ; and that their ships 
 were ready to bear them to that happy land. The 
 poor Lucayans crowded with laughter and joy to the 
 Spanish ships ; the light of the Blessed Isle shone 
 upon their faces. They sailed away from their island . 
 home, where they had known only peace and friend- 
 ship, and were soon all working in dark mines under 
 the slave-driver's scourge. The kid was seethed in 
 its mother's milk. 
 
 Henoch read and re-read this tragic history, and 
 looked out over the sea westward. What a fearful 
 fate was that of hearts that followed a dream of para- 
 dise which led them into slavery and despair ! But 
 slavery, what is it ? Is it only the subjection of one 
 will to another ? or bondage of the body to toil for 
 others ? May there not be islanders, even amid 
 continents, following dreams of paradise, and of 
 clasping their ancestral dead, into spiritual slavery, 
 into a living entombment among skeletons and 
 simulacra of things for ever turned to dust ? 
 
 In the vision of Henoch there arose a memory of 
 the ancient Synagogue at Prague. His eyes filled 
 with tears as he recalled the dear and tender faces that 
 he had seen there. His kind father, his gentle mother, 
 the good-hearted neighbours, the once happy circle of 
 playmates — how fair and peaceful that Lucaya had 
 
THREE WITNESSES. 291 
 
 been ! But it was all at the mercy of a bit of dirt 
 come down from the thirteenth century, consecrated 
 by awe of four letters of a dead language. Under 
 that spell kindly hearts had turned to stone, suspicions 
 arisen, fear and dread, and from the ruin of a happy 
 home he had been sent to wander through the world. 
 The dream of an ancestral paradise had made that 
 blackened Synagogue as dark a mine as any in which 
 the discoverers of the New World set the islanders to 
 toil ; it had imprisoned the Jewish genius and chained 
 the Jewish heart. 
 
 One morning, when his thought was full of these 
 reflections, and the book received from the ancient 
 Jew at Havre was open before him, Henoch caught 
 his first sight of the New World, radiant in the sun- 
 shine. He resolved that into that land of fresh oppor- 
 tunity he would carry no dogma or custom which 
 rested upon tradition or authority. In that land he 
 saw the human race given a fresh opportunity, and he 
 also would begin again. The Old World had followed 
 its dreams of heaven through massacres and martyr- 
 doms into a dreary and endless routine of wrong, 
 which found its fit symbol in that fable his experience 
 could well interpret, of an eternal Wanderer. 
 
 His own race had been mainly responsible for that 
 fatal misdirection of the energies and enthusiasm of 
 
 19 — 2 
 
292 THE WANDERING JEW. 
 
 the Old World which, had it not sought a Paradise 
 among the dead, might have made the earth a para- 
 dise for the living. Now he would consecrate his 
 powers to persuade the people of the human race, to 
 which in America he might belong, to burn behind 
 them all these holy ships of Zion in which the Past 
 might be imported, and to receive the Past only as it 
 might be able to minister to science, or might come in 
 confessions of the moral ruin it had wrought, as a 
 warning for the new Age. 
 
 In the New World, Henoch began his work of 
 founding societies whose religion is to perform divine 
 service for mankind, to make every day eternal, and 
 to steadily transfigure man with the shining light of 
 science and pure raiment of a renovated world. The 
 wanderings of Henoch have changed to unhasting, un- 
 resting progressions, traceable in fair transformations. 
 His eloquence, which has learned every sweet and 
 subtle tone of the Past, and caught the brave accents 
 of hope, wins the Christian from his cross and the 
 Jew from his altar. He is still a welcome Voice in the 
 cities, sierras, savannas, eldorados, crying The King- 
 dom of Man is at hand. 
 
 THE END.