The Wandering Jew

In every Christian country the legend of the Wandering Jew survives. In Italy, France, England, Germany, Austria, and Spain, there is scarcely a land in which the tale has not been handed down. It has accordingly furnished the subject of many works of art since ancient times. Besides Gustave Doré's pictures, Eugène Sue and Dr. Croly both made novels of it. If I remember correctly, the Wandering Jew appears in Monk Lewis's celebrated novel too, beside Lucifer and the Bleeding Nun. More recently William Sharp, writing under the name Fiona Macleod, used the legend for a short story whose title I do not recall.

Who, then, is the Wandering Jew? He is a Jew condemned by Jesus Christ to roam forever while awaiting the Day of Judgment. The records do not agree upon his name. He is called now Cartaphilus, now Ahasuerus, now Buttadeus, and elsewhere Isaac Laquedem. Nor do the accounts agree about his occupation. Some say he was the porter at the gate of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem; others, an underling of Pilate; still others, a shoemaker. Yet the cause of his curse is substantially the same in every version. As Christ was being led to Golgotha, He stopped at this man's doorway to rest for a moment; the man heartlessly reviled Him and even beat Him cruelly. The curse Christ then laid upon him was: “If you bid me go, go I shall; but you, in return, must wait until I come back.” Afterward he was baptized by the same Ananias who baptized Paul and received the name Joseph. But a curse once incurred cannot be lifted until the day the world is destroyed. Indeed, Hormayr's Taschenbuch records that he appeared in the city of Munich on June 22, 1721.—

That is a comparatively recent occurrence, but if we trace the literature farther back, records of him may be found everywhere. The oldest is probably the passage in the chronicle of St. Albans Abbey compiled by Matthew Paris. According to it, when the Archbishop of Greater Armenia visited St. Albans, the knight who served as his interpreter said that the archbishop had often shared a table with the Wandering Jew in Armenia. A similar account appears next in a rhymed chronicle written in 1242 by the Flemish historian Philippe Mouskes. Before the thirteenth century, then, he seems not to have wandered about Europe conspicuously enough to excite public attention. By 1505, however, a Bohemian weaver named Kokot was able, with his help, to unearth treasure that the weaver's grandfather had buried sixty years before. Nor was that all. In 1547 Paul von Eitzen, Bishop of Schleswig, encountered him praying in a church in Hamburg. From then until the beginning of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary number of records tell of his appearances in both northern and southern Europe. To cite only the clearest cases: he appeared in Madrid in 1575, in Vienna in 1599, and in Lübeck, Reval, and Kraków in 1601. According to Rodolphus Botoreus, he seems also to have appeared in Paris around 1604. He then passed through Naumburg and Brussels and visited Leipzig; in 1658, he is said to have taught Samuel Wallis of Stamford, a consumptive, the secret remedy of drinking two leaves of red sage and one leaf of bloodwort mixed with beer. Next, after passing through Munich as mentioned above, he entered England once more. Having answered questions put to him by professors at Cambridge and Oxford, he traveled from Denmark to Sweden, where all trace of him was finally lost. From that time to this, nothing whatever has been heard of him.

I believe the foregoing has made clear in outline what manner of being the Wandering Jew is and what history he has had in the past. But merely to relate that history is by no means my purpose. I wish to state two questions that I once entertained about this legendary person, and to announce that both have been resolved by an old manuscript which I happened to discover not long ago. At the same time, I wish to make the contents of that manuscript public here. First of all, then, what were the two questions I had entertained?—

The first was purely a question of fact. The Wandering Jew appeared in almost every Christian country. If so, might he not have come to Japan as well? Leaving modern Japan aside, during the latter half of the sixteenth century most of southwestern Japan professed the Catholic faith. D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale says that early in that century, when Arab cavalry led by Fadilah captured the city of Erivan, the Wandering Jew appeared in their camp and joined Fadilah in the prayer “Allah akbar” (“God is great”). Thus he had already left his footprints even in the “East.” It was inconceivable that he should not have visited a Japan where the feudal nobles called daimyo wore golden crosses upon their breasts and uttered the Pater Noster—a Japan where noblewomen fingered rosaries of coral and knelt before the Blessed Virgin Mary. To put it more simply, I wondered whether the legend concerning him had not already been imported among the Japanese of that age, along with glassware and the rebeck.—

My second question was of a somewhat different nature. For behaving insolently toward Jesus Christ, the Wandering Jew was made to bear the fate of roaming the earth forever. Yet when Christ was crucified, this Jew was hardly the only person who tormented Him. One man set a crown of thorns upon His head; another clothed Him in purple; yet another nailed the tablet marked I.N.R.I. above Him on the cross. Those who threw stones and spat upon Him must surely have been beyond counting. Why, then, did this man alone incur Christ's curse? Or what interpretation has been given to this “why”?—That was my second question.

For several years I searched the ancient documents of East and West in vain, without finding any clue to either question. But the literature dealing with the Wandering Jew is immense. For me to read it all was utterly impossible, at least so long as I remained in Japan. At last I began to think that my questions were destined never to be answered. Then, just as I was sinking into that despair, in the autumn of last year, I made one final attempt. I traveled through Hizen and Higo and among the islands of Hirado and Amakusa, collecting old documents; and in a manuscript from the Bunroku era which came into my hands by chance, I at last discovered a legend concerning the Wandering Jew. I have no room here to discuss the authentication of the manuscript or related matters. It will suffice to say that it is a brief memorandum in which one of the Christians of that day set down, in the spoken language of the time, a story that had reached him by word of mouth.

According to this memorandum, the Wandering Jew encountered Francis Xavier aboard a ship crossing from Hirado to the main island of Kyushu. Xavier at the time “was attended only by Brother Simeon.” Through Simeon, what happened was related among the faithful; from them it gradually spread in every direction, until, several decades later, it finally reached the ears of the writer of the record. If we take the writer at his word, “The Colloquy of the Reverend Francis with the Wandering Jew” was one of the celebrated tales among the Christians of that age and was often used as material for sermons. I now propose to give a general account of the memorandum's contents, quoting two or three passages from the original, so that my readers may share my delight at seeing the questions above dispelled.—

First, the record says that the ship was “laden with divers fruits as gifts.” The season was therefore probably autumn, a conclusion also made clear by the later mention of figs. There seem to have been no other passengers. The hour was precisely noon.—These are the only details the writer supplies before entering upon the main story. Thus, if readers wish to picture the scene of that time, they have no choice but to fashion it in their own imaginations from these few particulars preserved in the record: the surface of the sea flashing back the sunlight like the scales of a fish; the figs and pomegranates loaded aboard; and, seated among them, three red-haired foreigners deep in earnest conversation. For the vivid description of such things is quite beyond the powers of a mere scholar like myself.

If readers find that task somewhat difficult, however, it may aid their imagination if I give a general description of the Wandering Jew's clothing as recorded by Peck in his History of Stamford. Peck writes: “His coat was purple and buttoned down to the waist. His breeches were of the same colour and likewise did not appear old. His stockings were perfectly white, though it could not be determined whether they were linen or wool. Both his beard and his hair were white, and in his hand he carried a white staff.” This was Samuel Wallis, the consumptive mentioned earlier, whom Peck recorded as having seen the man with his own eyes. When Francis Xavier met him, therefore, he was probably dressed in much the same manner.

How, then, did they know he was the Wandering Jew? We are told that “when the holy man offered his prayers, the fellow too prayed with due reverence,” and so Francis addressed him first. Once they began to speak, however, it became apparent that he was no ordinary man. Both in what he said and in his manner of saying it, he was plainly unlike the adventurers and travelers then drifting into the East. He spoke “of the past and present of India and the southern barbarian lands as though pointing them out upon his palm,” so that “not only Brother Simeon, but the holy man himself, it is said, was struck speechless with wonder.” Then, “when he was asked, ‘Whence come you?’ he replied, ‘I am a Jew with no abiding place.’” At first the holy man must nevertheless have harbored some doubt about the fellow's truthfulness. He asked, “Will you swear it upon the Paradise to come?” The other replied, “I do so swear”; and the record continues, “Thereupon the holy man too grew familiar with him and questioned him on divers matters.” Judging from their colloquy, its first part concerned only events of former times and scarcely touched upon a single religious question.

From the martyrdom “in the service of God” of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgin maidens, and the story of Saint Patrick's Purgatory, the conversation gradually reached events related in the Acts of the Apostles; finally it came to the time when Our Lord Jesus Christ bore the cross at Golgotha. Just before the talk turned to this subject, the record says that the holy man had a sailor give him some of the figs in the cargo and ate them with the Wandering Jew. I mention this only because I cited the passage earlier when discussing the season; it has, of course, no great significance.—Now their exchange ran approximately as follows.

The holy man: “Were you in Jerusalem at the time of Our Lord's Passion?”

The Wandering Jew: “Indeed I was, and with my own eyes beheld His Passion. I was then a shoemaker named Joseph, dwelling in Jerusalem. On that day, as soon as Our Lord had been judged by Lord Pilate, I called all my household to the doorway and, shamefully enough, watched Our Lord's agony with laughter and merriment.”

According to the record, Christ came staggering on foot “through a crowd as though gone mad,” guarded by Pharisees and priests and following behind a peasant who bore the cross upon his back. A purple robe hung from His shoulders. A crown of thorns rested on His brow. On His hands and feet, the marks of the lash and open wounds remained red as roses. His eyes alone were wholly unchanged. “His eyes, blue and clear as ever,” held a strange expression beyond either sorrow or joy.—Even upon Joseph, who did not believe in the teachings of “the carpenter's son of Nazareth,” this made an extraordinary impression. In his own words: “Even in those days, whenever I looked into Our Lord's eyes I felt, I knew not why, a certain tenderness. Perhaps it was because they were so like the eyes of my dead elder brother.”

Presently Christ, covered with dust and sweat, stopped at Joseph's doorway as He passed and tried to rest for a moment. There may have been Pharisees there, wearing belts of bast fiber and deliberately growing their nails long; there may have been prostitutes with blue powder in their hair, smelling of oil of nard. Perhaps the shields carried by Roman soldiers on either side flashed back the dazzling light of the hot sun. The record says only “many people.” Before those “many people,” Joseph “wished to display his loyalty to the priests”; and when he saw Christ halt, he held a child in one arm, seized the shoulder of the “Son of Man” with his other hand, and deliberately shoved Him about with violence.—“I reviled Him, saying, ‘You will have ample leisure to rest when they hang you upon the cross,’ and moreover raised my hand and struck Him.”

Christ then quietly raised His head and looked at Joseph as though in rebuke. With the eyes Joseph thought resembled his dead brother's, He fixed him in a grave, unwavering gaze. “If you bid me go, go I shall; but you, in return, must wait until I come back.”—As he looked into Christ's eyes, Joseph felt these words sear themselves upon his heart in an instant, fiercer than a hot wind. Whether Christ truly spoke them, Joseph himself could not clearly tell. But “the curse remained within the ear of his heart and made it impossible for him to stay still.” His raised hand dropped of its own accord, and the hatred in his mind vanished by itself. Still holding the child, he involuntarily sank to his knees in the street and timidly tried to touch his lips to Christ's feet, from which the nails were peeling away. But it was already too late. Driven onward by the soldiers, Christ was five or six paces beyond Joseph's doorway. Stunned, Joseph watched the purple robe of Our Lord as it threatened at every moment to disappear into the crowd. At the same time, he felt an inexpressible remorse stir from the bottom of his heart. Yet not one person sympathized with him. Even his wife and children interpreted what he did as one more mockery of Christ, like crowning Him with thorns. It was only natural that the people in the street should laugh and make merry more heartily than ever.—Beneath the Jerusalem sun, fierce enough to scorch the stones, Joseph remained kneeling and motionless, his eyes filled with tears as clouds of dust billowed over him. He did not even notice when his wife took the child from his arms.... “Thus, vast though Jerusalem may be, I alone perhaps knew the sin of having dishonored Our Lord. It was because I knew my sin that the curse fell upon me. Heaven's punishment cannot descend upon one who does not regard sin as sin. One may say that I alone assumed the guilt of fastening Our Lord upon the cross. Yet because there is punishment, there is also redemption; therefore it is equally certain that I alone shall in time receive Our Lord's deliverance. For all who know sin to be sin, punishment and redemption descend together from Heaven.”—Thus, at the end of the record, the Wandering Jew answers my second question. For the present, there is no need to inquire too closely whether his answer is right or wrong. The mere fact that I have obtained an answer is already enough to satisfy me.

If anyone has discovered, in the ancient documents of East or West, answers to my questions concerning the Wandering Jew, I earnestly hope that he will not begrudge me the benefit of his learning. I too should like to furnish a bibliography for the account above and so give this little essay a somewhat more complete scholarly form, but unfortunately no space remains for me to do so. I shall therefore lay down my pen for the time being, mentioning only Baring-Gould's theory that the biography of the Wandering Jew had its origin in Matthew 16:28 and Mark 9:1.

(May 10, 1917)