A Reader on Reading

The most influential of all the early versions of the legend, in that it lent the Wandering Jew a tangible contemporary presence, was a small German pamphlet published in 1602 under the title ????? Beschreibung und Erzehlung [sic] von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus (Short Description and Narrative of a Jew Called Ahasuerus). It tells how the bishop of Schleswig, in his youth, had visited Hamburg in the year 1542 and there had seen in church one Sunday “a man who was a very tall person, with long hair reaching down over his shoulders, standing barefoot by the chancel.” The soles of his feet were hard as horn, and so thick that one could measure them with two fingers held across. The stranger turned out to be Ahasuerus, the Jew who drove Christ away from his door. He told the bishop that at the time of Christ’s Passion he was a shoemaker, and after he was cursed he had wandered without respite through the world. To the bishop’s astonishment, Ahasuerus was able to describe in detail “the lives, sufferings, and deaths of the holy apostles.” Years later, in 1575, the Schleswig ambassadors to Spain reported back to the bishop that they had seen a stranger with similar traits in Madrid, and he spoke good Spanish. (Later versions lend him the power to speak all the languages that sprang up in Babel.) “What are we to think of this man?” concludes the pamphlet. “One may be free in his judgment. The works of God are wonderful and inscrutable, and as time goes on they will be more so, and more things hitherto hidden will be revealed, particularly … on the approaching Day of Judgment and end of the world.”

The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I did not feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly, to visit every country in the world and to meet all sorts of extraordinary people; above all, to be able to read any book that fell into my hands. Until the age of eight, my only languages were English and German. I had enviously scrutinized the Hebrew letters in my father’s coffee-table Haggadah, and the Arabic inscriptions on the boxes of Egyptian dates that my mother ordered from Cairo, and the Spanish words in the storybooks sent to me from Buenos Aires by an enterprising aunt who hoped they would encourage me to learn my native language. All these scripts were as tantalizing and mysterious as the secret codes that appeared in the Sherlock Holmes stories. I envied the Wandering Jew’s ability to read in the universal library.

Because behind every idea of universality lies that of the knowledge of that universality. Behind every overwhelming nightmare of an almost infinite universe lies the mad dream of Babel, to reach its unattainable limit, and the mad dream of Alexandria, to hold under one roof all that can be known of its mysterious nature. A blend of Babel and Alexandria, every library, however small, is a universal library in potentia, since every book declares its lineage of all other books, and every shelf must admit its helplessness to contain them. The essence of a library is that it humbly and magnificently proclaims at the same time its ambitions and its shortcomings. Every time a reader opens a book on the first page, he is opening the countless series of books that line our shelves from the morning on which writing was invented to the last afternoon of the future. It is all there, every story, every experience, every terrible and glorious secret: we lack only the perspicacity, the patience, the strength, the space, the time. All of us, except the Wandering Jew.

To see the Wandering Jew’s fate not as a curse but as a blessing may be less odd than we might think. Two conflicting impulses rule our short time on earth: one draws us forward, towards the distant horizon, curious to find out what awaits beyond; the other roots us to one place and weds us to one sky. Both impulses are ours, define us as human beings as much as self-consciousness and its corollary, language. The impulse to move on and the impulse to stand still shape our sense of place; the urge to know who we are and the urge to question that knowledge define our sense of time.

Stateless wanderers and city dwellers, cattle herders and crop farmers, explorers and householders (or, in literary terms, Enkidu and Gilgamesh, Cain and Abel, Odysseus and Penelope) have, throughout time, embodied these two longings, one for what lies outside, the other for what lies within. And two moments in Christ’s Passion, two stations in his via Crucis, symbolize, I think, these opposing forces. The moving and the questioning are acted out in the ninth station, when the meeting with Ahasuerus takes place; the standing still and the mirroring of self occur in the sixth station, when Veronica places a cloth on Christ’s agonized face and finds his traits miraculously embedded in the fabric.