A Reader on Reading

WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, my family spent a summer in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a postcard Alpine village with geranium-filled balconies, heart-shaped openings in the shutters, and orange cows that waddled through the little streets at dusk, sounding their copper bells. In those days, I had no sense of my social or cultural identity: I didn’t know that my family was Jewish, and therefore I had no notion of how strange it was for a Jewish family to choose, as a holiday destination less than a decade after the war, a village that had been one of Hitler’s favorite haunts. Deep-blue woods rose on the surrounding slopes, and often we trekked up the shaded paths to one of the hilltops for a picnic. One of these paths was a via Crucis, each station sculpted in wood and set high up on a pole: fourteen little scenes that led, as through a comic strip, from Christ’s trial and sentencing to the laying out of his body in the tomb. My nurse (a Czech Jew who had escaped the Nazis, and who possessed little imagination and less humor) knew the story of the Passion only vaguely, and her explanation of the various images never quite satisfied me. One scene, however, that of Christ’s third fall, she seemed to know well. Christ, having stumbled twice under the weight of the Cross, stumbles once more, this time by the door of a Jewish cobbler called Ahasuerus. The cobbler pitilessly pushes Christ away, telling him to move on. “I will move on,” Christ answers, “but you will tarry till I come!” From that day onwards, Ahasuerus is condemned to wander the earth and is only allowed to stop here and there for short respites. His shoes and his clothes never wear out completely, and every hundred years he is miraculously rejuvenated. His beard hangs down to his feet, he carries five coins in his pocket that match the five wounds of the man he offended, and he is able to speak every language in the world. Since he is a little over two thousand years old, he has witnessed countless events of historical importance and knows every story there is to tell.

Though the Eternal Wanderer, condemned because of a sin committed or a promise not kept, has a few precursors in Jewish, Islamic, and early Christian and even Buddhist literature, the story as we know it first makes its appearance some time in the thirteenth century. The earliest datable telling is Italian, tucked away in a Bolognese chronicle spanning the years 781 to 1228. In 1223, according to the chronicle, a group of pilgrims arrived at the abbey of Ferrara and informed the abbot that when traveling in Armenia, they had met a certain Jew who had revealed to them that he had been present at the Passion and had driven Christ from his door, and was thus cursed till the Second Coming. “This Jew,” the chronicle explains, “is said, every hundred years, to be made young to the age of thirty, and he cannot die until the Lord returns.”

Five years after the Italian chronicle, Roger of Wendover, an Englishman staying at the monastery of Saint Albans, northwest of London, described a similar encounter in his Flores historiarum. Obviously based on the Bolognese account, Wendover’s story, told in much greater detail, was considered for centuries to be the authentic one, though the name of the man and the circumstances of his curse differ from the version we know today. According to Wendover, in 1228 an Armenian bishop visiting Saint Albans told his hosts that back in Armenia, a very pious man named Joseph (nothing is said of his being Jewish) had often eaten at the bishop’s table. This Joseph had been present at the trial of Christ, and when, after Pilate’s judgment, Christ was dragged away to be crucified, one of Pilate’s porters, a certain Cartaphilus, struck him on the back with his hand and said mockingly: “Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker; why do you loiter?” And Jesus, looking on him with severity, replied, “I’m going, and you will wait till I return.” After Christ’s death, Cartaphilus was baptized by Ananias (who also baptized the apostle Paul) and was called Joseph. He lives mainly in Armenia, preaches the word of the Lord, and places his hope of salvation on the fact that he sinned through ignorance.

Roger of Wendover’s chronicle gave rise to a number of variant versions. In the Mediterranean countries, Cartaphilus became Buttadeus (He Who Beats or Pushes God); in French, Boutedieu; in Italian, Botadeo, which in turn became Votadeo (Devoted to God), translated into Spanish as Juan Espera en Dios, into Portuguese as João Espera em Dios, and again into Italian, this time as Giovanni Servo di Dio. Under these various names, the Wandering Jew appears in the work of many major Western writers, from Chaucer to Cervantes, from Francisco Rodrigues Lobo to Mark Twain, from Eugène Sue to Fruttero & Lucentini.