Konstellationen Uber Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis Festschrift fur Dan Diner zum 65. Geburtstag

Herausgegeben von Nicolas Berg, Omar Kamil, Markus Kirchhoff und Susanne Zepp

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Galit Hasan-Rokem

Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition

Moving on with the Wandering few

"How does each step take me far?" "That is a profound secret, time turned into space!"

Ernst Bloch 1

Tradition is a major concept for discussing culture in its relationship to time. While most dictionary definitions of the word "tradition" begin with the aspect of "inherited and customary pattern of thought or behavior" and highlight something like "cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs and institutions;' they also refer to a "belief or a story relating to the past, commonly accepted as historical, although not verifiable;' and to the more dynamic "handing down of information, beliefs and customs by word of mouth and by example:' The con­cept of tradition has undergone important revisions since the 1980's when con­structed and manipulated aspects were accounted for and critiqued as "inven­ted traditions" often correlated to "imagined communities:'2 The theoretical and methodological validity of the concept of tradition, especially but not only when researching cultures of minority and non-hegemonic groups and entities,3 has since been reconfirmed time and again, and important new perspectives have been presented in various fields such as ethics, cultural geography, economic his­tory and animal, especially primate, ethnology. 4

1 Ernst Bloch, Art and Utopia, in: idem, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Se­lected Essays translated by Jack Zipes and Franck Mecklenburg, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, 95. Most of this article was written during Spring 2010 at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. A public presentation there and another one at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, helped clarify some of the riddles of the material. Others remain as always unsolved. Much of the preparatory research was carried out at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in spring 2005 and at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in fall 2005, as well as at the Folklore Program of the University of California, Berkeley, during parts of 2006-2007.

2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London 1991 (first published 1983); Eric Hobsbawm/Terence Ranger, The Inven­tion of Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

3 Charles L. Briggs, The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the "Invention of Tradition:' in: Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996), no. 4, 435-469.

4 David N. Livingstone, Geography, Tradition and the Scientific Revolution. An Interpreta­tive Essay, in: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series 15 (1990), no. 3, 359-373.

310 Galit Hasan-Rokem

Modern discourse, public, artistic and scholarly, on Jewish culture and iden­tity has often coupled Jews with Tradition with a capital "T:' Perhaps the most well-known example from popular culture is the opening song of the (originally) Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, where the protagonist, Tevye the Milk­man and the entire ensemble, celebrating Tradition, set the tone for the whole production and its immense reception around the world, iconizing Jewish cul­tural practices and identity under the formidable roof of Tradition. In the realm of scholarship YosefYerushalmi's academic bestseller Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory, transposing tradition on Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collec­tive memory,5 has gained in relative terms almost equal popularity.

The linking of "Jewish" and "tradition'' in discourse seems to solve the conundrum created by the multiple dimensions in which Jewish identity and cultural expression have been formulated by Jews as well as others throughout history: religion, nation, culture, ethnicity, and ethic - by blanketing them all by Tradition.

My present investigation of the concept of tradition with special reference to Jews addresses tradition's characteristic propensity to transform and to change, both in its movement from one place to another, and in its being transmitted from generation to generation. Tradition is here observed through the theme of the Wandering Jew, nomadologically - to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - arresting at certain plateaus, while aware of the wealth of materials that remain unrevealed.6 The theme of the Wandering Jew tends to repeatedly defy a comprehensive chronological review or a definition within a specific cul­tural context. On the other hand, it eminently emphasizes how cultural creativity occurs across identity boundaries rather than within them. 7

Folklore research is deeply invested in the study of tradition as well as in the critical investigation of the concept itself, drawing attention to the operations that mark tradition as tradition by projecting a contemporary canon into the past in order to legitimize the present. 8 My approach seeks to identify a flux of tradi-

5 Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle, Wash., 1982; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago, Ill., 1992 (first published in French 1925).

6 Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London/New York 2004 (second vol. of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972-1980). A particularly critical stance is necessary to distinguish Deleuze's and Guattari's management of the terminology of nomadism, tak­ing into account the history of the concept and its uses in treating the "Jewish Question:' See Paul Mendes-Flohr, Werner Sombart's "The Jews and Modern Capitalism:' An Analysis of its Ideological Premises, in: Leo Baeck Institute's Yearbook 21 (1976), 87-107, esp. 101-103; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton, N.J., 2004,52-60.

7 Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xii: "'Nomad thought' does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference:'

8 For a recent exemplary analytical overview, see Dorothy Noyes, Tradition. Three Tradi­tions, in: Journal of Folklore Research 46 (2009), 233-268.

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 311

tionalizations and de-traditionalizations with varied degrees of awareness and in­tention, presenting a middle position between the deconstruction of tradition as completely "invented" and a naive embracing of the concept.

Being associated with a body of knowledge and creativity that is above all transmitted by the spoken word and by behavioral example, much of folklore be­longs to the domain of tacit and embodied information that is especially open to adaptation to new conditions and environments. It is thus reasonable that one of the most productive concepts of twentieth century folklore scholarship, that gen­erally aimed at investigating the processes and mechanisms of tradition in per­formance as well as the modes of its changes, is the concept of ecotype, a term that refers to the cultural configurations shaped by adaptation to new conditions, new environments, and new ecosystems, both physically and symbolically speaking.9

Even more importantly, the concept of ecotype together with a critically informed notion of tradition may also enable us to uncouple tradition from its frequent linkage to specific identities and to deal with traditions not necessarily as emerg­ing within groups but rather in interactions and interchanges between groups.

In the following I intend to correlate the concept of ecotype with the figure of the Wandering Jew, a figure shaped by and within the interaction of various fields of human creativity, such as literature, the arts, religion, and perhaps above all, folklore. 10 Whereas the study of the theme of the Wandering Jew until the late twentieth century tended to emphasize the Christian identity of its authors and transmitters, I have repeatedly pointed at the ways in which this tradition has moved between authorships, subjectivities and agencies, and mainly between Christian and Jewish narrators, painters, and printers who have co-produced

9 Primarily in an oral presentation in 1932, and then in writing: Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, Geography and Folk-tale Oicotypes, in: Bealoideas 4 (1934), 344-355; idem, Selected Papers on Folklore, Copenhagen 1948, 44-59. Regrettably, recent publications make it very clear that von Sydow's position towards Nazism in Germany was far from steadfastly critical: Nils-Arvid Bringeus, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. A Swedish Pioneer in Folklore, Helsinki 2009, 178-186. The concept is further elaborated in: Lauri Honko, Four Forms of Adaptation to Tradition, in: Studia Fennica 26 (1981), 19-33; Galit Hasan-Rokem, s. v. "Okotyp", in: Enzyklopadie des Mar­chens. Handwiirterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzahlforschung, Bd. 10, Berlin/ New York 2000, 258-263.

10 The most comprehensive historical overview of the Wandering Jew materials is still George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence, R.I., 1965. Unless other­wise marked the materials about the legend that I shall refer to stem from this magisterial work. I also thank Dr. Dominique Coulombe at the John Hay Library of Brown University who guided me through the Wandering Jew Collection, characterized as follows: "The gift of W Easton Louttit, Jr., Class of 1925, this collection includes plays, poems, novels, and stories, and prints, as well as critical, philosophical, and scholarly studies of the archetypical story of men shut out from the human community and doomed to wander eternally. Possibly the finest accumula­tion of books on this theme to be found outside the Bibliotheque Nationale. It contains over 1,500 volumes featuring works by Goethe, Schiller, Shelley, Feuchtwanger, Edwin Arlington Robinson and especially Eugene Sue:'

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312 Galit Hasan-Rokem

European culture in many of its aspects for over a thousand years. 11 My discus­sion of the Wandering Jew as a European, including Jewish-European, cultural expression emphasizes the multi-directional and multi-functional cultural work done by it in its varied manifestations of media and genres.

The Wandering Jew will thus be shown here as adapted to various milieus, climates, periods and social formations not only as a concrete example of the folk­loristic pattern and process of ecotypization, but also as a metaphorical and sym­bolical embodiment of the phenomenon itself- as an exemplary ecotype, con­stantly moving, changing, adapting. The persistent and multifaceted hermeneutic function of the figure of the Wandering Jew in European culture can thus at least partly be understood through its correspondence with the ecotype that has been identified by scholarship as a central phenomenon in the transmission and dis­tribution of folklore and popular culture. In its ecoptypical function, the legend­ary Wandering Jew figure not only portrays a superbly adapting individual who readily learns the languages of all places and effortlessly crosses state boundaries and even combat fronts, 12 but the narrative itself also adapts to locality, so that in Switzerland he leaves traces in the snow, 13 in Finland he may wear the shape of an almost familiar but uncanny forest spirit, the fire fox, 14 and in Southern Swe­den he raises whirlwinds. 15

My study of the Wandering Jew (and of the concepts of tradition and eco­type) began at the University of Helsinki, the city where I was born, and where I had arrived again as a foreign exchange student after graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the city of my life - before returning to undertake doc­toral studies and an academic career at my alma mater. My Finnish mentor, the late academician Matti Kuusi, was the person who led me to undertake the study

11 For my own contribution see especially the following articles: Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Wandering Jew. A Jewish Perspective, in: Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division D, vol. 2, Jerusalem 1986, 189-196; idem, Homo viator et narrans. Medieval Jewish Voices in the European Narrative of the Wandering Jew, in: Ingo Schneider (Hg.), Euro­paische Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext. Festschrift fiir Leander Petzoldt, Frankfurt a.M. 1999, 93-102; furthermore Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Menasseh Ben Israel and the "Wandering Jew;' in: Ars Judaica 2 (2006), 59-82.

12 On the remarkable gift of languages, see the xenoglossy of popular prophets in North­ern Germany that have been suggested as parallel figures to the Wandering few, Jiirgen Beyer, Lutheran Popular Prophets in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. The Perfomance of Untrained Speakers, in: ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 51 (1995), 63-86, here 67. These prophets are also suggested as models for the Wandering Jew by P. V. Brady, Ahasver. On a Prob­lem ofidentity, in: German Life and Letters 23 (1968/69), 3-11.

13 Ernst Ludwig Rochholz, Schweizersagen aus den Aargau, Bd. 2, Aarau, 1856, 306, llO, and489.

14 Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Cobbler of Jerusalem in Finnish Folklore, in: idem/Alan Dundes (eds.), The Wandering Jew. Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, Bloom­ington, Ind., 1986, ll9-153.

15 Bengt afKlintberg, The Swedish Wanderings of the Eternal Jew, in: ibid., 154-168.

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17 Leonhard ~ kunde 22 (1912), ·

18 For one sw Headache, in: Has Franciscan Studie

19 Robert Bor ide of Ahima'az 1: Jew, 15 f., and 422.

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 313

fli the Finnish traditions of the Wandering Jew, who there and elsewhere in the Nordic countries is also known as the Cobbler ofJerusalem.16 I soon learned that lbe Wandering Jew tradition seemed when studied from Europe's margins, a fairly consolidated body of traditions evolving from the heart of the continent into strongly adapted, ecotypical traditions in the Nordic countries. I was confounded by the fact that the narrative tradition about the Wandering Jew had reached all Nordic countries, including insular Iceland, 17 before Jews had been allowed or nen attempted to settle there.

Introducing the Wandering Jew figure itself is somewhat complicated not only by the fact that the figure constitutes a most faithful example of an ecotype, thus ever adapting and changing, but also due to its long history in various climates and socio-cultural milieus. Scholars have always hoped to be able to pinpoint a Middle Eastern source to the narrative, in parallel, I assume, with the general idea of the path of Jewish migration to Europe. Ascertaining the narrative's source as a local legend in Jerusalem would possibly also have provided substantial Chris­tian theological clout to this legend by suggesting its historical reliability. 18 In the present state of research, we know about fragmented records from Italy in the early centuries of the second millennium of the Common Era, such as an eleventh century Jewish chronicle mentioning a person who could live forever using the power of God's secret name,19 and a thirteenth century Latin chronicle from Italy

16 Matti Kuusi, whom as a teacher I greatly respected, was involved in the 1930's in the na­tionalist right wing movements Academic Karelia Society (AKS) and Patriotic People's Move­ment (IKL), that were characterized by maximalist territorial positions, a struggle for Finnish language exclusiveness as against former Swedish dominance, and sympathies towards Ger­many's stance in World War II that were materialized in the fateful military alliance with the Nazis. The specific fate of Finland's Jews, who in a particularly ironic historical conundrum fought the two Finnish wars, cannot be fully discussed here. Kuusi's views had been trans­formed together with mainstream Finnish politics in the aftermath of the military failure of the Finns, but his specific cultural literacy still made him prefer to talk to me in German - rather than replying in English or Swedish- when I first arrived in Helsinki in 1968, until I recovered my Finnish speaking. I shall discuss the intricate ways in which this complicated background, including the fact that my late father was a war veteran from a combat unit, unlike Kuusi who was an education and information officer, was reflected in our working relationship and espe­cially in the advice for me to work on the topic of the Wandering Jew, separately in future work. On AKS and IKL see Matti Klinge, Introduction, in: Henrik Meinander, Finlands Historia, vol. 4, Helsinki 2 1999, 85f., 165-168, and 170-174.

17 Leonhard Neubaur, Zur Geschichte der Sage vom Ewigen Juden, in: Zeitschrift fiir Volks­kunde 22 (1912), 48.

18 For one such attempt, seeP. B. Bagatti, The Legend of the Wandering Jew. A Franciscan Headache, in: Hasan-Rokem/Dundes ( eds.), The Wandering Jew, 39-49; originally published in Franciscan Studies 9 (1949), 1-9.

19 Robert Bonfll, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle. The Family Chron­icle of Ahima' az ben Paltiel, Lei den 2009, 250 f.; see Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 15 f., and 422, n. 8.

314 Galit Hasan-Rokem

mentioning reports of pilgrims from the East who had met a Jew in Armenia who had witnessed the crucifixion ofJesus in Jerusalem, an instance repeated five years later in Roger of Wendover's monastic chronicle from St Albans in England, from where it was later widely transmitted in the chronicle of Matthew Paris. 20

In the double report about a four hundred year old man and the visit of one Gio­vanni that had been cursed by Jesus for having "driven Him along when he was led to the Crucifixion'' by the Italian astronomer Guido Bonatti, in whose na­tive city ofForli the visit had occurred in the year 1267, the tale moves out from the strictly ecclesiastical context. 21 In this first record of the arrival of the eternal wanderer on European soil, he is not a Jew and curiously the motif of longevity and the motif of witnessing the crucifixion appear in this record separately.

Let us return for a moment to the above-mentioned concept of ecotype- the process by which traditions adapt to certain locations, milieus, or in Pierre Bour­dieu's term, various habitus. 22 The adaptations occur exactly to create the im­pression that traditions, circulating between groups, may be identified as "our;' belonging to "us" who share a spot on earth, usually also a language and other markers of identity. Finnish scholar Lauri Honko has systematized the emer­gence of ecotypes on three levels of adaptation: 1. familiarization and adaptation to the physical environment; 2. adaptation to the cultural system, its genres and dominant motifs and figures; and 3. functional adaptation to specific needs of the narrators and the audiences and the group at large.23

The accursed wanderer appears in Spain as a shoemaker in a satirical text from the mid sixteenth century,24 less than a hundred years after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and one is reminded of Michel de Certeau's char­acterization of the "long seventeenth century" Europe as a continent burdened by a tacit and unacknowledged process of mourning embodied in the memory

20 Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 18-22. 21 Ibid., 23. The record was first printed many years later in Bonatti's De astronomia trac­

tatus X, Augsburg 1491; see E. Ann Matter, Wandering to the End. The Medieval Christian Con­text of the Wandering Jew, in: Transforming Relations. Essays on Jews and Christians through­out History. In Honor of Michael A. Signer. Foreword by John Van Engen, ed. by Franklin T. Harkins, Notre Dame, Ind., 2010,224-240. This article emphasizes (esp. p. 232f.) the Christian exegetical context and delves on the fifteenth century Italian version of Alberto Alfieri in his Og­doas (1421), however without revolutionizing the history of the legend's medieval emergence, on which see also: Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Genese medit!vale de Ia Legende et de l'iconographie du Juif Errant, in: Le Juif Errant. Un Temoin du Temps. A !'occasion de !'Exposition "Le Juif Errant, Un Temoin du Temps" au Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme, du 26 octobre 2001 au 24 fevrier 2002, Paris 2001, 54-73; Galit Hasan-Rokem, L'Image du juif errant et Ia construction de l'identite europeenne, in: ibid., 45-54.

22 Pierre Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus, Practices, in: idem, The Logic of Practice, Stanford, Calif., 1990, 52-79.

23 Honko, Four Forms of Adaptation to Tradition. 24 Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 29.

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 315

of the conversos, the Christianized Jews, both those who remained in Spain as well as those who were dispersed elsewhere in Europe.25 In the ecotypical for­mation of the Spanish tradition, even as it arrived - as did many of the expelled Jews and of the conversos themselves - in the Low Countries (including today's Holland and Belgium), the Wandering Jew bore recognizably Hebrew and Jewish names, most frequently the name Isaac Laquedem (roughly translatable as Isaac going to/from the East and/or Isaac the Ancient).26 The figure thus maintained the ambiguity of Christian and Jew that characterized the existential and social status of the conversos on one hand and continued to transmit central elements of the narrative, the roots of the wanderer in the east and his unusually great age on the other hand. 27 The ecotypical adaptation process thus encompassed both an adaptation to the cultural system, its genres and dominant motifs and figures and especially a functional adaptation to the specific needs and conditions in the new milieus. The ambiguity of the Jew turned into a pious Christian, or the pious Christian revealed as a Crypto-Jew, will haunt the further cultural transfor­mations of the figure of the Wandering Jew and energize both its rich associative power and its fatal socio-political force in modernity. Thus, the Wandering Jew is not only the embodiment of the ecotype, he also embodies the uncanny ( das Unheimliche), that which is at the same time both hidden and intimately known, and literally not at home anywhere, to paraphrase one of the great articulators of modernity, Sigmund Freud.

The identifiably most significant change in the European tradition of the Wandering Jew occurs in the precincts of Lutheran Reformation towards the end of the sixteenth century. The almost identical chapbook editions that literally popped up printed in German in various Central and North European cities from Switzerland to the Baltic coase8 carried a clearly uniform version of the tale iden-

25 Michel de Certeau, Introduction, in: idem, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, Chicago, Ill., 1992,1-26, here 14.

26 Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 59 f.; see also Yom Tov Lewinsky, Ha­yehudi ha-nitshi be-aggadat ha-belgim [The Eternal Jew in Belgian Legend], in: Moznaim, 1 December 1926, 10-13, and in Moznaim, 2 January 1927, 17-20.

27 See David Daube, Ahasver, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 45 ( 1955), 243 f., here 244. David Rosenberg-Wahl has developed in a paper written for the "Folklore of Dislocation'' graduate seminar taught by me at the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berke­ley in Spring of 2007, the theme of the con versos, the contacts between the Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg, and the particular conditions in Hamburg as suggested by Joachim Whaley (Reli­gious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg 1529-1819, Cambridge, Mass., 1985), as a pos­sible historical framework for the growth of the seventeenth century Ahasverbuch. The dates remain somewhat constrained. The identity of Esther as a hidden Jew in Ahasverus' court and the popularity of the book in Sephardic as well as Ashkenazi communities as an expressive me­dium, merit further discussion in the framework of the study of the Wandering Jew traditions.

28 It has been suggested that the various locations of printing are fictitious and the chap­books were actually distributed from one center, possibly Basel.

316 Galit Hasan-Rokem

titled as the Kurze Beschreibung the full title of which was the following lengthy summary of the tale: "A short description and story about a Jew by the name of Ahasverus who himself was present at the crucifixion of Christ and had also called 'Crucify, crucify him!' [(Kreuzige, kreuzige ihn!); quoted in the text in the exact wording of Luther's translation of Lk 23,21] regarding Christ, and instead of His release had wished for that of the murderer Barabbas, but after Christ's crucifixion could not return to Jerusalem, and never again saw his wife and chil­dren and stayed alive since then, and since a couple of years arrived in Hamburg etc:' The long title imparts a peculiar mixture of something unheard of that has to be conveyed in detail and intimate intra-cultural information welling from the canonical text.

The booklet describes a meeting between the bishop of Schleswig Paul von Eitzen - a known historical figure from the Luther associates in Wittenberg - and a strange man with a mournful face in the winter of 1542 in a church in Ham­burg. The man introduced himself as Ahasverus/9 a shoemaker from Jerusalem, who when Jesus was marched to the Golgotha to be crucified, refused to let him rest on the wall of his house. Jesus reacted on this cruel act by saying: "I shall find rest, but you shall wander until I come again:' Since then he had been wandering and could not stay in one place.

As a live eyewitness of the life of Jesus and more important, of his crucifix­ion, the Wandering Jew Ahasver supported Protestant ideas and the structure of knowledge favored by Protestant theology, with his report unmediated by gener­ations of clerics, seemingly in vivid contrast to the transport of inanimate relics of Jesus and the saints in Catholic practices, but in parallel to Franciscan guides for devotional practices inspired by their newly won administration of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Jesus' promise to return, quoted by the Wandering Jew, re­inforced in the minds of the readers the redemptive potential contained in their own moment in history. Ahasver the Jew's pious Christian behavior in the church and outside - almsgiving, prayer, sorrowful penitence - bore the signs of messi­anic fulfillment typical of popular Christianity of the period, especially the sign of

29 Ahasver/ Ahasverus interchangeably; this name of the Wandering few has inspired many interesting suggestions, most famously perhaps David Daube, Ahasver; see also Galit Hasan­Rokem, The Enigma of a Name, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 100 ( 2010), no. 4, 544-550, dis­cussing Daube's contribution. Amishai-Maisels has in her Menasseh Ben Israel and the "Wan­dering Jewv interestingly connected the name with Luther's note on Jewish blood thirst in the book of Esther (page 63). Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites. Purim and the Legacy of Jew­ish Violence, Princeton, N.J., 2006, suggests that the celebration of the events of the book of Esther constitutes a historical focus for expression of interreligious tension in Judaism, espe­cially with Christianity. Another intriguing suggestion is based on information culled from the Stadtchronik of Hamburg that the Nikolaikirche in the city housed a huge painting of Ahasverus and Esther that was damaged by lightning in the year 1555. See Paul Johansen, Warder Ewige Jude in Hamburg?, in: Zeitschrift des Vereins fUr Hamburgische Geschichte 41 (1951), 189-203, here 198.

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~Jew has inspired many r; see also Galit Hasan-0), no. 4, 544-550, dis­en Israel and the "Wan-Jewish blood thirst in

and the Legacy of Jew­e events of the book of nsion in Judaism, espe­rmation culled from the :e painting of Ahasverus >hansen, War der Ewige :hte 41 (1951), 189-203,

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 317

the conversion of the Jews heralding the Second Coming.30 The homo viator, the wandering human, as medievalist Gerhard Ladner has shown/1 most emphati­cally expresses the tension between the human being's alienation in a world with constantly widening horizons - and between social order. The period of the con­solidation of the Ahasver legend certainly was a period of a widening geograph­ical scope, when European merchants and soldiers sailing the oceans around the globe established the great colonial powers that later would to a large extent define European identity in the world. The Jew as a traveler thus became a per­sonification of a certain aspect ofEuropeanness.32

The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed both profu­sion and diversity of Wandering Jew figures in European culture that cannot be accounted for here, and I recommend warmly George K. Anderson's monumen­tal The Legend of the Wandering Jew {1964); his detailed listing of many hundreds of sources leaves ample space for interpretative work. The Short Description chap­book referred to above was translated to almost every European language. The ecotypical aspect of the distribution of the legend included "updated" informa­tion about Ahasver's recent visits to some relatively central city, not too far, but also not too close to the place of publication. His appearances characteristically coincided with wars and as a result his border crossing skills were proven again and again, culminating in crossing battle fronts thanks to his involuntary surviv­ability. Romantic, especially German, poetry adopted Ahasver as a rebel against all establishments, and somewhat paradoxically as a herald of secularism. In the probably most famous literary work ever bearing his name, Eugene Sue's Le juif errant (1844), devoted to the problems of the Huguenot Protestants in Catholic France - the Wandering Jew himself appears minimally, however his role as dis­tributor of cholera is ominously ill-advised.

The transformations of the Wandering Jew figure in the cultural milieu of mo­dernity derive from the extreme versatility that the theme had developed, one could say in direct correlation with the capacity of the allegorical reference, the European Jews, to adapt to changing times, in addition to their proverbial mo­bility in space. From the midst of the nineteenth century onwards, Jewish writ­ers explicitly took up the figure of the Wandering Jew in their texts, projecting on him both a critique of the life-style of East European Jews, but in other cases

30 Adolf L. Leschnitzer, The Wandering Jew. The Alienation of the Jewish Image in Chris­tian Consciousness, in: Hasan-Rokem/Dundes (eds.), The Wandering Jew, 227-235, here 232 (first published in Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 [1971], 391-396).

31 Gerhard Ladner, Homo Viator. Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order, in: Speculum 42 (1967), no. 3, 233-259.

32 See Hasan-Rokem, Ex Oriente Fluxus. The Wandering Jew- Oriental Crossings of the Paths of Europe, in: L'orient dans l'histoire religieuse de !'Europe. L'invention des origins, ed. by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and John Scheid, Turnhout-Paris 2000, 153-164; idem, L'Image du juif errant et Ia construction de l'identite europeenne, 45-54.

318 Galit Hasan-Rokem

also expressing the pathos of the lives of members of a discriminated minority barred from access to full political representation and equal opportunity for edu­cation.33 When articulated in texts written by Jews, the Wandering Jew figure re­vealed a double, one could almost say schizophrenic, tendency: on the one hand, engaged in marking a distance between an "us" that attempted not to experience itself as Ahasveric, that is Central and West European Jews with regard to the East European Ahasvers, and on the other hand as Ahasvers, admitting the non­Jewish threat at their multiple vulnerabilities - social, economical, physical and psychological.

At the same time, in the spirit of the above-mentioned adoption of Ahasver as a Romantic hero, the Wandering Jew develops into a powerful image of the modern human and modernity itself, as mobility - both geographical and so­cial - becomes a major component in the identification of modernity and in its self-definition. Many interesting figures embody this phenomenon, among them Shalom Aleikhem's Menahem Mendl and Kafka's Karl Rossmann that both trans­port the Wandering Jew to the United States. Unquestionably the most perfected literary portrait of the Wandering Jew remains James Joyce's Ulysses (Paris 1922 after the 1918-1920 serialized publication), in whose protagonist Leopold Bloom, Joyce interlaced two major European paradigms of wandering, Odysseus and the Wandering Jew. 34 Joyce's handling of the two sub-textual paradigms implies his incorporation of the accumulated association of the Greek and Jewish heritages as contradictory and complementary European legacies: the Odyssey lends to the book its structural order in the episodes identified by scholars as Telemachus, Ca­lypso, Sirens, etc. as was partially suggested in Joyce's letters. The Wandering Jew pops up mainly in the secularized Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom's stream

33 One example of many is Paulus Cassel, Ahasverus. Die Sage vom ewigen Juden. Eine wissenschaftliche Abhandlung, mit einem kritischen Protest wider Eduard von Hartmann und Adolf Stocker, Berlin 1885. The text debates against anti-Semitism. Cassel - whose brother David was a famous rabbi - converted early to Christianity. Ludwig Philippson had earlier re­jected the figure as unfit for Jewish identification, see his article under the title Literarische Nach­richten, in: Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 4 (1840), 444-462. I thank Dr. Ita Shedletzky for the reference and the identification of the author as Ludwig Philippson, the editor of the journal. The same view was supported by J. Braecker, Moses Mendelssohn, Ein Gegenbild des Ewigen Juden, in: Ich handle mit Vernunft ... Moses Mendelssohn und die europiiische Aufklarung, hg. von Norbert Hinske, Hamburg 1981, 15-44. I thank Prof. Shmuel Werses for the reference. However S. Lublinski praised Robert Jaffe's Ahasver (1901) in the following short review Einjudischer Roman, in: Ostund West 1 (1901), see in Hasan-Rokem/Dundes (eds.), The Wandering Jew.

34 Joyce had a copy of Eugene Sue's novel in his library, according to Richard EHmann, Joyce and Homer, in: Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 567-582, here 577. EHmann also discusses Joyce's interest in purported Semitic roots of the Odyssey on the one hand and Celtic culture on the other. See Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 77-79; Ira Bruce Nadel, Joyce and the Jews, in: Modern Judaism 6 (1986), 301-310, primarily addresses Joyce's personal relationships with Jews.

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 319

of consciousness, sometimes as Elijah, the immortal prophet who has been suggested as one of the Jewish sources for the idea of an immortal wanderer; but also as the Wandering Jew proper, and as Ahasuerus himself: "Cursed by God," in­cluding an oblique reference to the legendary episode on the way to the cross.35

As they increasingly adopted European values, mores and beliefs, Jews by the mid-nineteenth century more and more also shared the new political terms, interpreting the common apocalyptical traditions that they partly shared with Christian Europeans. The formation of the figure of the Wandering Jew was deeply rooted in the apocalyptic imaginary of both religions in their various stages and versions. The shared interpretation of the collective Jewish diasporic existence as a punishment, defined as Exile, e. g. represented in Samuel Hirschen­berg's classical painting "Golus" from 1904 (fig. 1)/6 according to Christian theology for denying the divinity of Jesus Christ and according to Jewish theol­ogy for various, above all social transgressions, also constructed a common horizon for the possible revoking of the legendary curse of the Wandering Jew. The narrative logic of the legend demanded that the end of the curse produce an end of the wandering.

The versatility of the image was proven once again: various proto-Zionist and Zionist thinkers, from Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) onwards, envisioned the "homecoming" of the Wandering Jew in the Holy Land, as their collective dream. The German socialist thinker Karl Kautsky fantasized in a 1914 essay a final rest, literally, of the Wandering Jew, together with the end of all other national entities in the great utopian fulfillment: "Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, will at last have found a haven of rest. He will continue to live in the memory of man as man's greatest sufferer, as he who has been dealt with most severely by mankind, to whom he has given mosf'37

Contemporaneously with this transformation in the tradition of the Wander­ing Jew and its inclusion in Jewish expressive genres/8 Jewish folklore research in

35 James Joyce, Ulysses, London 2000, 279, 439, and 623. See Dominique Jullien, Biography of an Immortal, in: Comparative Literature 47 (1995), 136-155. She reads the Wandering Jew in the works of Borges, Joyce and Hugo as "an allegory of the author" (p. 137), and discusses Joyce (p. 133-144). Hans-Peter Ecker, Poetisierung als Kritik. Stefan Heyms Neugestaltung der Erzahlung vom Ewigen Juden, Tiibingen 1987, considers Heym's Ahasver (that cannot be dealt with here for lack of space) an allegory of literary as well as social critique.

36 See Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley, Calif., 1998, 230-234.

3 7 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/jewsrace/ch12.htm> (15 December 20 10). 38 Examples abound, see a few in Hasan-Rokem, The Wandering Jew, 189-196; some others

e. g. Im deutschen Reich 12 (1900), 677 (a note on Robert Jaffe's novelAhasver); Alphonse Levy, Der Ewige Jude - kein Jude!, in: Im Deutschen Reich 1 (1904), 14-20 (a scholarly essay), and 1 (1904), 86-97. A curious constellation is in Die Welt (no. 22, 2 June 1899, 9) staging both a note announcing Alfred Nossig's since then famously vanished "Wandering Jew" sculpture and the following news item: "Ahasver. [sic] Aus einer neueren Statistik ist zu ersehen dass die

320 Galit Hasan-Rokem

Fig. 1: One of the most famous paintings of Samuel Hirschenberg (1865-1908), Golus (1904), here used as a motif for a postcard.

Germany was established. In 1898 Max Grunwald established in Hamburg, the

city where the conversos first arrived in Germany and in which Ahasver was first

told to have met with the Lutheran bishop of Schleswig, the Association for the

Study ofJewish Folklore (Gesellschaft fur judische Volkskunde), a field that was not

included in German academe.39 Folklore studies, Volkskunde, had by then been

introduced in German academia. However the slow and painful introduction of

Jews into German universities did not include the field of folklore - Volkskunde,

Einwanderung russischer und rumiinischer Juden im Hafen von New York seit dem Jahr 1881 die riesige Zahl von 680,000 erreicht hat''! Q.E.D. that German Jews viewed "Ostjuden'' in parti­cular as Ahasvers. For an original approach to Nossig's work and fate, see Hugh Raffles, Jews, Lice and History, in: Public Culture 19 (2007), 521-566; Jonathan Skolnik, Writing Jewish His­tory between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach's Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish His­torical Fiction, in: Prooftexts 19 (1999), 101-125. Skolnik interprets the death of Ahasver in the first European Jewish historical novel in the context of the construction of a German Jewish modern, secularized identity.

39 An analysis of the arduous path of Jewish folklore studies into institutionalized aca­demia even in characteristically Jewish contexts, and indeed even in Israel, is included in Dani Schrire's dissertation (in preparation) initiated in the context of a research cooperation between Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix, Giittingen University, and Prof. Galit Hasan-Rokem, the Hebrew Uni­versity of Jerusalem: "Perspectives on Cultural Studies. A Critical History of the Disciplines of European Ethnology and Folklore in Germany and Israel;' funded through the Niedersachsen­Hebrew University cooperation by the VW-Foundation.

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 321

or even Volkerkunde- social anthropology.4° Folldore was in general identified as addressing continuity, locality, rural life, collectivity, tradition, and the past. Notable Jewish scholars who studied culture in the German context of that period gave rise instead to the then inchoate and academically unrecognized field of cultural studies. They addressed discontinuity and rupture, universality, urban especially metropolitan life, individuality, innovation, and the future - thus pro­jecting the almost exactly reversed mirror image of the interests of the folldorists of that period. Most important among them was George Simmel, who when re­jected from the study of Volkerkunde - social anthropology and ethnography -developed his influential concept of the marginal individual as a paradigmatic phenomenon of modern mass culture and a key figure of an ethnography of the modern world. Others, among them Siegfried Kracauer41 and Walter Benjamin followed. Simmel's work is still productive in the various disciplines studying culture,42 notwithstanding the intellectual loss and impoverishment caused to the academic study of folldore and ethnography in Germany due to the racist ex­elusion of Jews. 43 Jewish folklore, not being German, could not be studied in the racist circles of German academe as folldore, Volkskunde; but being European it could not be studied as social anthropology, Volkerkunde. It was thus consigned to a small "academic ghetto of spirits" in the words ofJewish Austrian ethnologist Friedrich Salomon Krauss, or in other words: to the role of the intellectual home­less Wandering Jew. 44 In Eastern Europe, other Jews, perhaps more Ahasveric ones according to some of the stereotypical criteria, established their own non-

40 Thomas Hauschild, Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology, in: Amer­ican Anthropologist 4 (1997), 746-753; Wolfgang Kaschuba, Einfiihrung in die Europaische Ethnologie, Miinchen 1999, 46-56; see also Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity. The For­mation of Folklore Studies, Madison, Wise., 1997.

41 For the use of the Ahasver figure in a meta-historical discussion: Siegfried Kracauer, His­tory. The Last Things before the Last, New York 1969, 157-159.

42 See for instance David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Cambridge, Mass., 1986; Otto Gerhard Oexle, Geschichte als Historische Kulturwissenschaft, in: Wolfgang Hardtwig/Hans-Ulrich Wehler (eds.), Kulturgeschichte Heute, Gottingen 1996, 14-40, here 17, and 31.

43 The Nazification of an Academic Discipline. Folklore in the Third Reich, edited and translated by James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, Bloomington, Ind., 1994; Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism. The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde, Bloomington, Ind., 1994; see also Kaschuba, Einfiihrung in die Europaische Ethnologie, 69-82.

44 For Krauss' criticism of Grunwald for the ghettoizing Jewish folklore, see Christoph Daxelmiiller, Volkskunde. Eine antisemitische Wissenschaft?, in: Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (eds.), Conditio Judaica. Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis 1933/1938, Tiibingen 1988, 190-226, here 194, and 199, fn. 31. For Krauss' analysis which rightly interprets the Jewish "folkloristic separatism'' as a reaction to the exclusion by German Volkskunde scholars (p. 206f.); consider Daxelmiiller's striking formula­tion "Der Jude existierte innerhalb der Folkloristik nicht als Kulturtrager, sondern als Zerrbild:' (p.220)

II

322 Galit Hasan-Rokem

academic institutions for the study of Jewish folklore and ethnography. But in Central Europe, although Jewish historians and philologists were mining the Jewish past practicing the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), Jews were by the ascribed scholars of tradition exiled from tradition, and be­came instead intensely active in the creation of reflexive modes of thinking on modernity.

Another field of experience where rupture conquered tradition was the emerg­ing Zionist ideology that developed into a political movement with strong orga­nizational aspects under the leadership of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904). Its un­equivocal purpose was to create a territorial basis for Jewish identity and in fact to provide a foothold for the symbolic Wandering Jew, the Jewish nation. I shall focus on some moments in time and space where the Wandering Jew is concretely taken up by the Zionist movement (fig. 2-3). A postcard with Max Fabian's 1902 paint­ing "Ahasver" displays an unusual image of the Wandering Jew accompanied by a woman and a child, whereas in the vast majority of his portrayals, both verbal and pictorial, he is lonely and the legend of the German chapbooks usually mentions explicitly that he left his wife and child when the irresistible urge to start wan­dering overtook him. Significantly, the backside of the postcard bears the logo of the eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913. The copy of the postcard from the collections of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California, is auto­graphed in Hebrew by a number of persons who appear to have been delegates to the congress, however no addressee is indicated and the postcard bears no stamps or dates, so it appears to have been created as a personal or collective memento. The extensive role of postcards as a particular genre of modern popular culture in the shaping and representation of Jewish mobility in modernity has been the focus of my study born out of a collective project at the Folklore Research Cen­ter of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, expressing our joint special interest in the interaction of tradition and modernity nursed by the generosity rooted in the tradition of Jewish philanthropy that placed the Joseph and Margit Hoffmann Judaica Postcard Collection with us, comprising over seven thousand items.45

The agenda of this specific Zionist congress addressed a number of cultural issues such as the Hebrew language, the founding of a Hebrew University in Palestine, and even theoretical questions regarding what is Jewish art. The choice of the picture of the Wandering Jew as a theme should thus probably be under­

stood as pertinent to those issues. The picture1s troubled protagonist could be in­terpreted as an Ahasver who has packed his meager earthly belongings in a sack on his way to the Zionist goal, the Land of Israel. However, the ambiguity of the image remains powerful and Fabian's image does not deviate from the traditional iconography of the Wandering Jew.

45 Galit Hasan-Rokem, Jews as Postcards, or Postcards as Jews. Mobility in a Modern Genre, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 99 (2009), no. 4, 505-546.

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ethnography. But in lsts were mining the haft des Judentums), m tradition, and be­llodes of thinking on

:lition was the emerg­ent with strong orga­(1860-1904). Its un­identity and in fact to h nation. I shall focus ~w is concretely taken c Fabian's 1902 paint­ew accompanied by a ayals, both verbal and oks usually mentions 1le urge to start wan­:ard bears the logo of of the postcard from y, California, is auto­ave been delegates to :card bears no stamps · collective memento. dern popular culture 1dernity has been the lklore Research Cen­·int special interest in 1erosity rooted in the td Margit Hoffmann thousand items. 45

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Ji!ity in a Modern Genre,

Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 323

Fig. 2: Postcard with Max Fabian's painting, Ahasver (1902), frontpage.

Fig. 3: Postcard with Max Fabian's painting Ahasver (1902), verso, with the logo of the eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna and Hebrew signatures of some delegates.

11~

324 Galit Hasan-Rokem

On another postcard from the Hoffmann-Postcard -Collection, a mixed Jewish group of young people - one or two revolutionaries, one, possibly two orthodox, a bourgeois, two women -pose on a pier. The text in Yiddish says nokh erets-yisroel

(to the Land oflsrael) and the Hebrew text shows that this is a new year's card by wishing the traditionalle-shana tova tikatevu (will you be [well] written up for the next year [indicating the book of life]). It is unclear if this is the port of departure or rather of disembarkation. The Zionist message of this postcard printed appar­ently in Germany for use in Poland between 1925 and 1935, appears incidentally in Yiddish - the language of the East European diaspora - rather than in Hebrew and lacks altogether a utopian and revolutionary tone: "Soon the ship sails to the holy coast I to life and freedom, to bright days I the hearts beat and warmer throbs the blood I so sweet and so delightfully good will it be:' The youngsters seem more like any European leisurely tourists, however of Jewish origin, than pioneers on their way to change their lives and history. The handwritten backside of the postcard reinforces the non-dramatic and non-revolutionary message: a couple, Leizer and Feige Mitshnik, wishes their sister- and brother-in-law utterly universal wishes - health, good economy and general satisfaction with life.

Although in multiple expressive forms, viewed by many as the very epitome of modernity or perhaps just because of that, Jews also became the principal victims of the formation of modernity that took the form of Nazi fascism. Because of its powerful resonance in German folklore and literature, the Wandering Jew figure was enlisted to the propaganda machine of Nazism in various ways, the most well­known being his appearance in the film industry. The nastiest of all terrible Nazi propaganda films is no doubt the one that bears one of the most frequent German attributes for the Wandering Jew in German literature and culture, the eternal Jew, namely the 1940 film Der Ewige Jude initiated by Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.46 The film has been extensively studied as an effective tool to manipulate German audiences before mass extermination was begun and probably in preparation for them. Its representation of Jews does not only include morbid sequences of Jewish ritual slaughtering, and methodically selected espe­cially disharmonious Jewish faces in order to prove their racial inferiority, but also the detestable parable in which the supposed migration routes of Jews on the world map are visually transformed into masses of crawling rats, indicating all the imaginable revolting comparisons. It did however not gain much popular­ity, perhaps due to its didactic and semi-documentary character. In contrast, the film Jud Suess by Veit Harlan- also made in 1940- often called the most success­ful anti-Semitic film made by the Nazis, was a huge hit and its artistic qualities are

46 See also Yizhak Ahren/Stig Hornsh0j-Moller/Christopher B. Melchers, "Der Ewige Jude'' - Wie Goebbels hetzte. Untersuchungen zum nationalsozialistische Propagandafilm, Aachen 1990; Stig Hornsh0j-Moller, "Der Ewige Jude': Quellenkritische Analyse eines anti­semitischen Propagandafilms, Gottingen 1995.

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ction, a mixed Jewish sibly two orthodox, a :ays nokh erets-yisroel ; a new year's card by ell] written up for the the port of departure ;tcard printed appar­appears incidentally tther than in Hebrew >On the ship sails to rts beat and warmer be:' The youngsters 'Jewish origin, than andwritten backside utionary message: a rather-in-law utterly ction with life. ; the very epitome of the principal victims ;cism. Because of its Vandering Jew figure ways, the most well­>t of all terrible Nazi >St frequent German ture, the eternal Jew, ropaganda minister as an effective tool on was begun and ~es not only include ically selected espe­tcial inferiority, but 1 routes of Jews on ling rats, indicating ~ain much popular­:ter. In contrast, the d the most success­artistic qualities are

Vlelchers, "Der E";ge ische Propagandafilm.. 1e Analyse eines anti-

Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 325

still praised by film critics. 47 The Wandering few figure in it, the Court Jew Suss Oppenheimer- slyly based on a historically inexact historical novel from 1925 by the Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger- is the only Jew in the film who dresses and looks like a Christian, while all the others bear traditional attire. The film insists that the Jews who attempt to assimilate constitute a greater threat than others, echoing the view that Ahasver's conversion in the chapbook versions was an illegitimate overstep that did not erase his Jewish "essence:'

I shall not even try to analyze how the Wandering Jew took the form of rats in the imagination of artists who served the kingdom of evil by producing the Eternal Jew film. But I would like to point at one single trajectory of the many that piece by piece, step by step, led there. Carl Schmitt, whose concept of political theology has quite recently exerted a considerable attraction on scholars of vari­ous fields and persuasions, attacks Hobbes in his treatise on Leviathan for using an inadequate symbol for the State. 48 I have elsewhere proposed at some length that Schmitt's criticism of Hobbes in this case is based on his erroneous assump­tion that in Hobbes' work, political terms have replaced religious terms, an error that reading Hobbes' work - in itself a formidable Bible exegesis - instantly re­veals.49 I claimed that Schmitt's misreading ofHobbes' Leviathan symbol is rooted in his ignorance and perhaps unconscious - but perhaps not - denial and de­nunciation of the Jewish genre of Midrashic interpretation of Scripture shared by many Christian thinkers and authors, a mode of interpretation based on a pol­ysemic reading of the canonical text over which the law of contradiction has no jurisdiction. I shall not discuss here Schmitt's inconsistent relationship with Nazi

47 Linda Schulte-Sasse, The Jew as Other under National Socialism. Veit Harlan's Jud Siiss, ill: The German Quarterly 61 (1988), 22-49. See also Marcia Klotz, Epistemological Ambiguity .d the Fascist Text. Jew Siiss, Carl Peters and Ohm Kriiger, in: New German Critique 7 4 ( 1998 ), 91-124. Klotz also briefly discusses Hippler's Der Ewige Jude (p. 91 f.). Her work on Jud Siiss aaalyzes the complex politics of desire of the film's sexual-racial manipulation, pointing out its faoction in motivating SS soldiers (p. 97), however referring to Michal Friedman's discussion of dlr subversive aspect in the lead star Ferdinand Marian's proven erotic power on female view­en (p. 98). See also Susan Tegel, The Demonic Effect. Veit Harlan's Use of Jewish Extras in "Jud Siiss" (1940), in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (2000), 215-241. I thank Ruth HaCohen b these references, and for sharing with me a particularly dramatic viewing of Jud Siiss at the 6bn archives of the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives) in Berlin. See also Ruth HaCohen, Vocal Fictions of Noise and Harmony. The Music Libel Against the Jews, chap. 7: The End. Essential­iring Jewish Noise in Nazi Movies (forthcoming at Yale University Press).

48 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Meaning and Failure ol a Political Symbol, Chicago, Ill., 2008 (first published 1996).

49 Galit Hasan-Rokem, Carl Schmitt and Ahasver. The Idea of the State and the Wander­lllg Jew, in: Behemoth, A Journal on Civilization 2 (2008), 4-25, accessible online <http://www. kbcmoth-journal.de/archive/volume-1-no-2/ galit -hasan -rokem/> ( 15 December 2010 ). See Molrk Lilla, The Reckless Mind. Intellectuals in Politics, New York 2001, 68-73. Lilla's under­liilling Schmitt's affinity with certain strands of contemporary Catholic thought is best under­~ in the framework of Lilla's own not altogether theologically neutral discussion.

326 Galit Hasan-Rokem

ideology as well as with the Nazi establishment that has been studied by others. 50

For this discussion, it is more important to mention Schmitt's quite systemati­cal denial ofJewish participation in European culture, for instance by never men­tioning the fact that the idiom "political theology" made famous by him is in the title of one of Baruch Spinoza's essays. 5 1 The Wandering Jew figure addresses the complexity of Jewish particularity, imbricate and intertwined with the inherent participation of Jews in the culture and society of Europe. Schmitt's insistence on the state as a formation producing both the categorical distinction between friend and foe and the total linking of identity and territory, leads him to a systematical excommunication of the figure representing the opposite values, namely the Wandering Jew Ahasver. Ahasver's boundary crossing - both actual boundaries and identity boundaries- offends one of Schmitt's dearest principles, the sanctity of borders, as well as the clear demarcation of enemies as distinguished from the members of one's own group, the nation. Ahasver is also an embodiment of the "outrage'' of an identity not predicated on an unambiguous territorial definition, the identity of the Jews. Theoretically Schmitt rejects the concept of Jews as imag­inary itinerants. On a more pragmatic level, Schmitt, as many other Europeans informed by the Wandering Jew image, could not accept the modern Jews' am­biguous and varied yearnings to stop the wandering, especially when accom­plished by assuming a bourgeois identity, as if blending in the environment. Con­sequently, the worst kind of Jews in Schmitt's eyes were those who assimilated, changed their names and even converted. His attitude, in which he was not alone, thus repeated the ambivalent reception of the conversos in the Spanish realm when it had informed earlier stages of the formation of the figure of Ahasver. Like all the readers of the pamphlet about Ahasver's visit to Hamburg or any other European town, or as an indirect consumer of the tradition, Schmitt knew that just by converting, giving alms and sighing when hearing the tale of the cruci­fixion, Ahasver was not accepted by the burghers of the town, and was still con­sidered a Jew. In this gradual sowing of a racial definition in contradiction to the option of religious conversion of the Jews, one can discern the seeds of what grew to the monstrous plant of the extermination in the Shoah, including of families who had converted generations earlier.

Arguably the image of the Wandering Jew shares characteristics with the pos­itively universalizing view of border crossing in the context of Europe that has

50 Ruth Groh, Arbeit an der Heillosigkeit der Welt. Zur politisch-theologischen Mythologie und Anthropologie Carl Schmitts, Frankfurt a.M. 1998; Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews. The "Jewish Question'', "the Holocaust" and German Legal Theory, Madison, Wise., 2007 (first published in German in 2000).

51 Baruch de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, a Critical Inquiry into the History, Purpose, and Authenticity of the Hebrew Scriptures with the Right to Free Thought and Free Discussion Asserted etc. Translated from the Latin with and introduction and notes by the editor [R. Willis], London 1862.

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emerged in the wake of the establishment of the European Union and its ideolog­ical utopias, limited as they may be. Etienne Balibar, in his critical introductory essay to the 2002 French translation of Schmitt's book on Hobbes's Leviathan, sketches a symbolical figure who shares many characteristics with the Wandering Jew, in his terminology "the vanishing mediator:' That figure's presence is neces­sary for institutional renewal: he knows many languages, and as a translator he is the "true idiom of Europe;' says Balibar quoting Umberto Eco, providing a trans­national transformation of the Wandering Jew in a Europe devoid of most of its Jews ofyore.52

In 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, the forty years that had passed since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the State oflsrael and the German Federal Republic were marked by an exhibition titled "New Hebrews. A Century of Art in Israel" at the Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The painting welcoming everyone who entered the exhibition was Samuel Hirszenberg's "The Wandering Jew;' 53 apparently painted 1899 under the impression of the Dreyfus affair. 54

The introductory position of the Wandering Jew at the exhibition creates a number of complex effects, as we would by now expect from anything involving this multifarious figure. The Dreyfus affair connection associates with Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, who as an Austrian journalist covered the affair in Paris, although its effect on his ideological development is nowadays considered mainly legendary. Also: Hirszenberg who was born in Poland immi­grated to Ottoman Palestine in 1907 to join the faculty of the recently founded Bezalel art school in Jerusalem, and died of disease one year later. Boris Schatz, the founder ofBezalel, was fond ofbeing photographed under the Wandering Jew painting with prominent guests, 5 5 as documented for instance in a famous photo­graph with Ahad Ha'Am (fig. 4), the representative of Zionist ideology who em­phasizes cultural not political autonomy and independence. In its location at the above-mentioned exhibition, the painting also pointed directly at the German re­sponsibility for the destruction of European Jewry, showing the catastrophe in

52 Introduction to Carl Schmitt, in: Etienne Balibar, Le Leviathan dans Ia doctrine de I' etat de Thomas Hobbes. Sens et echec d'un symbole politique, Paris 2002; see also idem, Expanded version of the first George L. Mosse Lecture at Humboldt-Universitat Berlin for the Academic Year 2002-2003, delivered on Thursday, 21 November 2002, in: We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton, N.J., 2002, accessible online <http://www. binghamton.edu/fbc/balibarl102.htm> (15 December 2010).

53 Cohen, Jewish Icons, 217, and 224-227. 54 Richard I. Cohen, The Visual Dreyfus Affair. A New Text? On the Dreyfus Affair Ex­

hibition at the Jewish Museum New York, in: Art and its Uses. The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 6, ed. by Ezra Mendelsohn, Jerusalem 1990, 89, fn. 21.

55 See Cohen, Jewish Icons, 216.

328 Galit Hasan-Rokem

Fig. 4: Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, to­gether with Ahad Ha'Am in front of Samuel Hirschenberg's painting Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew, 1899). Photo­graphy presumably 1911.

the shadow of the many crosses, from which the Wandering few of the painting flees - apparently to Israel, where the painting went, unlike the same painter's Exile painting that has mysteriously disappeared. 56 The fleeing Wandering Jew's identity as an old man links the figure to the ancient traditions of the Jews and to the European traditions about ancient Jews, rather than emphasizing the novelty and young image of Israel and the Israelis. Its presence at the exhibition reified the presence of the horror of the past and especially of the Holocaust at the heart of Israeli self-consciousness.

The Bezalel art school was also an important site for the shaping of the Orientalist, imaginarily biblical style that brought Zionist art into dialogue with the local Palestinian and Oriental Jewish folk art - a dialogue that abounded in

56 Ibid., 230-234.

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contradictions and convolutions, yearnings and misunderstandings. 57 In parallel, Jewish theater in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine represented biblical figures in Bedouin attire, especially the patriarchs and the matriarchs, in parallel with the early nineteenth century ethnographic study of Palestinian village life by Europe­ans as representing everyday life in Jesus' times, 58 with their slight nod towards the nomadic life style associated with the Arabs in general, 59 bringing the Wan­dering Jew full circle in yet another form. These transformations serve to reinter­

pret the relationship between continuity, tradition and territory under the aegis of the Wandering Jew.

A different sense of the Wandering Jew's homecoming is conveyed by Judith Sherman's postcard sent to her home in New Jersey from the fiftieth anniver­

sary of the liberation of the Ravensbriick concentration camp, where she was in­terned as a young woman, captioned in her handwriting with the following text: "I am sending this postcard to myself- I will be home to receive it!;' reproduced in her 2005 memoir as a survivor.60 Only a deeply ingrained- Ahasverian- in­security about home and stability can explain the need to assert the above. The fact that in 1995- more than five years after the reunification of Germany- the postcards of Ravensbriick still fly the red flag - reminds us of the uncertainty of borders even in Europe, still breathing with the spirit of the great transgressor of boundaries, Ahasver.

I shall summarize this "journey" with one more instance demonstrating the persistence and transformability of the Wandering Jew image. Linking the presence of numerous young Israeli males in the moving business in the United

States to the Wandering Jew may sound absolutely anecdotal. The young Israeli author Assaf Gavron does not seem to think so. In his novel Mooving (fig. 5),61

(in an early version of the translation spelled with a double "o" to retain the

flavor of the Hebrew title using the American word), he writes:

57 Sara Hinski, Rokmot ha-taharah be-Betzalel [Women's Lacework in Bezalel), in: Theory and Criticism 11 (1997), 177-205 (Heb.).

58 See Hilma Granqvist, Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village, vol. 1, Helsingfors 1931; vol. 2, Helsingfors 1935; idem, Birth and Childhood among the Arabs. Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine, Helsingfors 1947 (Reprint New York 1975); idem, Child Problems among the Arabs. Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine, Helsingfors 1950. To close at least one of the many circles of this essay, Granqvist was born and raised as a Swedish-speaking Finn like myself.

59 The more-or-less total absence of the Wandering Jew figure in Moslem and Arab coun­tries is a topic that cannot be exhausted here, but may well be linked with the heroic nomadic past cherished by that civilization.

60 Judith H. Sherman, Say the Name. A Survivor's Tale in Prose and Poetry, Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2006.

61 AssafGavron, Mooving, Tel-Aviv2003; Cover Art. Frank Moore "Emigrants" 1997-1998; see Yael Zerubavel, The "Wandering Israeli" in Contemporary Israeli Literature, in: Contem­porary Jewry 7 (1986), 127-140.

330 Galit Hasan-Rokem

Fig. 5: Book cover of Assav Gavron's Novel Mooving (orig­inally published in Hebrew, Tel Aviv 2003), using Frank Moores painting Emigrants (1997/98).

"An old Jewish customer, someone Haim once moved from upstate New York to Florida, said, 'Tell me, how is it that the Jews, after three thousand years of suffering, have turned into schleppers?' Schleppers is the oldest Israeli moving company in New York[ .. . ]:'62

The old Wandering Jew character projecting itinerancy on the younger men re­veals a privileging of 3,000 mythical years over history and of time over place, re­calling the de-territorializing spirit diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka's writing, a diagnosis that has inspired the present analysis of the tradition of the Wandering Jew. 63 The young Israelis in the story, and in reality, have abandoned the homecoming of the Wandering Jew and returned to another mode of his itinerancy, carrying furniture - the emblems of sedentary life - from one end of

62 <http://www.assafgavron.com/english/images/moving.pdf>, 28 (17 December 2010). 63 Gilles Deleuze/Fe!ix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis, Minn.,

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Contemporary Perspectives of Tradition 331

the United States, upstate New York, to the other, Florida, where aging old Jews typically and stereotypically spend their last years.

I have attempted to follow the Wandering Jew in a trajectory emphasizing the connection between the legendary figure and the concept of tradition with spe­cial reference to Jewish culture and its interaction with European and Western Christian culture. As Michel de Certeau beautifully states in his essay on Walking in the City, 64 space is created by the human, social act of moving in space. Tradi­tion is interpreted by tracing its transformations through times, spaces and com­munities of humans.

64 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Calif., 1984,91-110.