Wandering Jew

In 1929 French journalist Albert Londres (Inspiration for the cartoon character Tintin) set out to document the lives of Jews. In the East End of London, he is moved by their unswerving faith. In eastern Europe he is astounded by their miserable plight. With gentle humor and a sharp eye he draws unforgettable portraits of the exotic individuals he encounters along the way. He vividly depicts the birth of Zionism and the wave of anti-semitic pogroms that propelled Jewish Immigration to Palestine. There he discovers the proud "new Jew" while his on-site reporting of the horrific Arab massacres of the Jews of Hebron and Safed exposes an age-old animosity still very much alive today. Presciently, Londres foresees that the Jews, despite their small numbers, will pay the Arabs 'back in kind' and ultimately regain their homeland. This literary masterpiece transports readers back to a pivotal moment in history and offers invaluable insights on Jewish life in the early twentieth century, on the formative years that preceded the State of Israel, and on the strife that has engulfed the region ever since. The Wandering Jew Has Arrived is as relevant today as when first penned. Book jacket.

Joseph Roth, best known as the author of the novel The Radetzky March and the nonfiction work The Wandering Jews, was one of the most seductive, disturbing, and enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1894 in the Habsburg Empire in what is now Ukraine and dying in Paris in 1939, he was a perpetually displaced person, a traveler, a prophet, a compulsive liar, and a man who covered his tracks. Throughout the eastern borderlands of Europe, Dennis Marks explores the spiritual geography of a still-neglected master and uncovers the truth about Roth’s lost world.

Based on a medieval extrabiblical Christian legend, the figure of the Wandering Jew has long served as a negative representation of all Jews. Condemned by Christ to endless wandering and everlasting life, the Wandering Jew has lived on ever since in literature and criticism as a legendary and symbolic paradigm, ranging from anti-Jewish stereotype to the generalized cultural Other. While Romanticism took him outside of the Jewish context, nineteenth-century antisemitic racism again adopted the figure in an evolving discourse that culminated in his image in Nazi propaganda as the despicable, racialized cultural Other who needed to be exterminated. The present work takes up this trope in all its complex, intersecting facets and shifts the focus of the inquiry from the perspective of the dominant culture to that of the Jewish Other. Starting with nineteenth-century American popular and mainstream writers, it explores the responses to, and the subversions and reinventions of, the paradigmatic figure in works by a variety of European, Canadian, and American Jewish writers and thinkers. It also opens the discussion to the broader issues of contemporary society and politics, such as pervasive uprootedness, transborder migration, the plight of refugees, and states’ rights versus human rights.

"Beginning at the Beginning, Heym introduces both Ahasverus and Lucifer as angels in free fall, cast out of heaven for their opinions of God's order. The story follows their respective oppositions through the rest of time: Ahasverus defiant through protest rooted in love and a faith in progress, and Lucifer rebellious by means of his biblically familiar methods.