Wandering Jew

“ Travelling without any end in view, the places they reach are always those they sought. The story of the Wandering Jew, who is for ever a wanderer, is exactly realised in these Lamas. They seem influenced by some secret power, which makes them wander unceasingly from place to place. God seems to have infused into the blood which flows in their veins, something of that motive power which propels them on their way, without allowing them to stop. ”

“ This combination of eternal punishment with restless wandering has attracted the imagination of innumerable writers in almost all European tongues. The Wandering Jew has been regarded as a symbolic figure representing the wanderings and sufferings of his race. The Germans have been especially attracted by the legend, which has been made the subject of poems by Schubart, Schreiber, W. Müller, Lenau, Chamisso, Schlegel, Mosen and Koehler, from which enumeration it will be seen that it was a particularly favourite subject with the Romantic school. ”

“ The historical evidence on which the tale rests is, however, too slender for us to admit for it more than the barest claim to be more than myth. The names and the circumstances connected with the Jew and his doom vary in every account, and the only point upon which all coincide is, that such an individual exists in an undying condition, wandering over the face of the earth, seeking rest and finding none. ”

“ Yet, fallen as he is, the physiognomy of the Jew retains a share of its original beauty, sufficient to establish the claim of the people to have been the handsomest race on earth. Individuals of superior comeliness may often be found [36] among the multitudes of mankind. But no nation, nor distinct part of any nation, can rival an equal number of the unhappy exiles of Israel in the original impress of that hand which made man only a little lower than the angels. ”

“ Since the Jew has had his life extended, he has become silent and reserved, and only answers direct questions. When invited to become any one’s guest, he eats little, and drinks in great moderation; then hurries on, never remaining long in one place. When at Hamburg, Dantzig, and elsewhere, money has been offered him, he never took more than two skillings (41⁄4d.) ”

“ But the real gipsy there is no mistaking—their dark piercing eyes and Asiatic countenance mark them as distinctly as do the eyes and peculiar features of a Jew. (By the by, I wonder that no searcher after the marvellous has endeavoured to prove them to be a remnant of the lost tribes of Israel.) Like the Jews, they are scattered over the whole earth—like them, they are found in every land; and in every land they remain a distinct people. ”

“ Yearning ever after the holy land of his forefathers, the Jew, as life begins to wear out, often collects together his earnings, and rouses up his sinking strength to carry him hither, that he may die in Jerusalem, and have his bones laid beneath the mountain of the ancient temple. They are not permitted to set foot within the enclosure of Mount Moriah, but in pleasant weather they may be seen just without the outer wall, seated on the ground, and reading in their devotional books; and even for this privilege they have to pay the Turkish governor. ”

“ THE JEWS AND JUDAISM The opening years of the nineteenth century found the Jew blinded by the light of a new sun, the rays of which were beating upon the Ghetto and were forcing him to take off, one by one, the many garments with which he had clothed himself during the hostile Middle Ages. ”

“ Imaginative by nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. ”

“ What does Judaism mean, and why are we Jews? Will the maintenance of Judaism be of benefit to the countries in which we live and to humanity at large? How can Judaism be maintained, since now we not only live among the nations of the world, but the individual Jew has become a part of these nations? ”

“ Most of us could not renounce Judaism because deep down in our consciousness, aside from reason or logic, we know we are not as other men; we know we are Jews. We hear the cry of the suffering in Belgium and we answer to that cry because we are men and nothing human is alien to us,—but when we hear the cry of the suffering Jew in Poland and Palestine, then the true Jew answers that cry as the cry not only of a fellow human being, but as the cry of a brother. ”

“ Having brought our story to the close of an epoch, we will pause and glance at the status of the Jew in other lands. The dispersion of Israel in a voluntary way had already begun, though Judea was still the centre of gravity. So the sway of the High Priest reached not only to the Palestinian provinces—Phœnicia, Samaria, Galilee, Gilead, Edom and Philistia—but extended through parts of Asia Minor and to lands on both banks of the Mediterranean Sea. These lands of Jewish settlement outside of Palestine are called the Diaspora. ”

“ And his blood is on their children at the present day; for while he is acknowledged by three hundred millions of mankind as their Lord and Master, the Jew teaches his children to regard him as an impostor, and spit at the very mention of his name. How great must be the infatuation of the poor Jew, how dark the mind, how thick the veil that hangs over his heart, how terrible the curse that rests upon his head! But the Jew is to be pitied, not distressed; he should be personally treated, in ordinary life, as his conduct merits. ”

“ The great bulk of the Jews were still gathered in Jerusalem as heretofore, and there were on one hand the intellectuals and on the other the parasitic or pauperized Jew, what would ordinarily be regarded as the very best and the very worst. Life in the colonies was often very sweet and very lovely, a wholesome, normal family life, and an exhibition in peace and prosperity of what religious Judaism at its best may be. ”

“ The Jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the Jew: proscribed, persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined, as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without and beyond the despised and hated Gentile. And this intense and conservative nationality springs essentially out of the central conception of Judaism, “God is one.” ”

“ If you do not receive this letter on time know that it is because I am learning about the Jew; how he is everywhere proving the truth of prophecy by becoming a resident of every country. And yet while he is a Jew he has faces of all colors. In the plains of the Ganges, he is black; in Syria, lighter and yet dusky; in Poland his complexion is ruddy and his hair as light as yours. There was a little Jewess boarding around here last summer as olive as I imagine Rebekah and Sarah, and another as fair and rosy as a Dane. ”

“ These who are not even in a position to protect their co-religionists against a miser- able rabble of Arabs, Moors, or Persians, who thirst for their blood ! These Jews, the personification of Mam- mon, of whom by far the greater number own not even a stone whereon to lay their head, or rag to cover their nakedness ! This is the mockery which drops poison into the wound which hatred has struck. True, there are some few Jews superfluously rich whose rumoured millions attract attention far and wide, but what has Israel to do with these? ”

“ The race has remained all these centuries separate and distinct from other nations. In America there are all kinds of nationalities. Take an Irishman, and in a generation he will have forgotten his nationality. So, too, with the Germans, Italians, and French; but the Jew is as much a Jew as he was when he came over one hundred years ago. See how the race has been persecuted, yet the Jews control the finances of the world and can not be kept down. Egypt, Edom, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome, and all the leading nations of the earth have sought to crush out the Jews. ”

“ The Jew was—he still is—a problem of our slum.
And yet, if ever there was material for citizenship, this Jew is such material. Alone of all our immigrants he comes to us without a past. He has no country to renounce, no ties to forget. Within him there burns a passionate longing for a home to call his, a country which will own him, that waits only for the spark of such another love to spring into flame which nothing can quench. ”

“ Think what it is to be a Jew—an outcast, a thing that the lowest may spurn and spit at, one beyond the law, one who can be hunted from land to land like a mad wolf, and tortured to death, when caught, for the sport of gentle Christians, who first have stripped him of his gains and very garments. ”

“ But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities—let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. ”

“ The Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the night, destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was taken by an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews, based on their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which it brought into being. ”

“ The name Jew was a stigma in itself, and this word the people howled round the tumbril which bore the erstwhile gorgeous favourite to a death of ignominy. A few women in the crowd sighed and shed a tear when they saw the godlike beauty of the man, broken to pathetic ruin by adversity, white-haired, vilified, aged by his degradation; but chiefly the crowd howled and reviled, and the men spat in the Jew's face and covered him with a load of horse-dung and foul ordure. They hung him finally after unspeakable tortures. Then his body was left to rot in Stuttgart's market-place in the sight of all. ”

“ And not only is it in point of numbers that God is again causing His people "to increase greatly," but by their superior wits and energy and by their habits of frugality and thriftiness He makes them " stronger than their enemies," so that in those regions where the bulk of the nation is to be found, wherever the Jew has a fair chance he naturally places his Gentile neighbour in a less favourable position in the struggle for existence. ”

“ Whether in the tropics or in the most northern latitudes, the Jew is the same intellectual and physical man, and carries about with him the indelible marks of a descendant of those patriarchs who were commanded not to intermarry with the people among whom they dwelt. ”

“ It is one of the absurd fallacies of Anglo-Israelism to presuppose that the term " Jew " stands for a bodily descendant of "Judah." It stands for all those from among the sons of Jacob who acknowledged themselves, or were considered, subjects of the theocratic kingdom of Judah, which they expected to be established by the promised " Son of David " the Lion of the tribe of Judah whose reign is to extend not only over " all the tribes of the land" but also " from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." ”

“ It is only in the West that the Jew is regarded as the sample of superior sharpness in the walks of life that call for the exercise of the qualities most necessary in the operation of getting the better of one's neighbour. ”

“ Who ever heard of the Jew taking any part in those noble struggles which have saved the honour or secured the rights of any nation on earth? His business is gain, and it is the only business that he ever follows; from the man with ten firms and five hundred clerks, with a counting-house in every village from the Rhine to the Neva, down to the seller of old clothes, and the pedlar in dilapidated slippers, who ever heard of a Jew thinking of anything but to make money? ”

“ The inference is sought to be drawn that the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national life amid that among which he dwells. We accept all the facts; but can only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought and research of its great leaders, Judaism is shaking off the dust of ages, and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth. ”

“ The Jew arrives in a city at night, and in the morning takes down the shutters and is doing business. The Jew winds his way into the life of every city and becomes at once an integral part of it—a part, yet separate and distinct, for his social and religious life is not colored by his environment. ”

“ Still later, through the great migrations at the close of the Roman period, and in the early Middle Ages, the barbarians of Europe became imbued with the leaven of Jewish ideals in the form of Christianity, and further still in the course of time the migrations of the hunted Jews from Germany to Poland, and from Spain to Holland and to England, influenced permanently the current of the world's affairs. ”

“ In the Jews we have another example of the persistence of those national characteristics which history has made known to us. The Jews first appear in the dimness of the remote past as a group of nomad tribes, wandering over southern Palestine, Egypt, and the intervening deserts; and at the present day we see them still homeless, scattered over the face of the globe, the "tribe of the wandering foot and weary breast." ”

“ But the bulk of the race still is a people of wanderers; and their hope of restoration little more than a beautiful, melancholy dream. There are at the present hour upwards of ten million Jews, scattered to the four corners of the earth. Nine of these millions live in Europe: two-thirds of them in Russia, Roumania and Poland. In the Middle Ages persecution in the West had driven them Eastwards. Lately persecution in the East has turned the tide Westwards. There is no rest for Israel. ”