I, WANDERING JEW

Tales of the diaspora.

Legend has it that a doubting Jewish man reviled Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion. Condemned to live forever, he walks the earth without a family or home. As Princeton University historian Mintzker writes, this is the origin of the “Wandering Jew,” a figure reimagined in modern Europe to symbolize the supposed rootlessness of Jewish people. He became a sighting, an apparition coalescing fear and angst into a man of rags. He became a literary figure, inhabiting the corners of the Yiddish imagination. But he came, ultimately, to stand as “an allegory of the history of the Jewish people.” He lived a diasporic life, exemplifying “Jewish progress…and the future Zionist movement, which envisioned a linear path leading Jews out of Europe and into a better future in Palestine.” But for others, the Wandering Jew embodied all that was alien about a culture of exclusive faith and practice. German stories proliferated in print and were revived in the 20th century to give weight to antisemitic legislation. This book is rich with scholarly inquiry. But it is also rich with personal reflection. The author’s own life—from a family of immigrants to Palestine, to an Israeli youth, to an American academic career—takes on new meaning, as ghosts of friends and relatives haunt his dreams and the modern state of Israel betrays his hopes. Mintzker writes, “The estranged lover leads a life of exile, constantly on the lookout for a way back to a lost (real or imaginary) home.” Historical research grants insight into our desires, and we make sense out of love and loss by turning to the myths of culture. “Aren’t all our lives bound in intimate bonds of fiction?”

A breathtaking work of historical research and personal insight that makes an old legend come alive.