The Wandering Jew is one of the most intriguing myths in Western cultural history, which arises together with the central figure of Christ. In the Jerusalem of the time as Goethe recounts in his autobiography – there was a cobbler, Ahasverus (in Italian Asvero) who had entered into confidence with Jesus, trying to dissuade him from frequenting that gang of twelve idlers, who wanted to elect him king of Israel . Climbing to Calvary Jesus, when he passes in front of the cobbler’s shop, falls under the weight of the Cross, which is lifted by the Cyrene, while Veronica wipes his face. On the threshold Asvero, closed in his pride, reproaches Christ for not following his advice. Jesus replies: «I am going and you will wait for me until I return». Thus was born the legend of the Wandering Jew – in German: the Eternal Jew – condemned to remain on earth until the end of time, without stopping, without peace, in continuous movement.
The myth spreads with the invention of printing: in 1601 the Volksbuch, the popular book of the wandering Jew, was printed, while in 1587 the most famous Volksbuch was published: the Faust. Two figures who tell the restless myth of modernity from different perspectives. In 1905, the Italian-German poet Arturo Graf composed a dramatic poem A Pause for the Wandering Jew which culminated in the fateful meeting of Faust with Asvero. The German scientist is animated by a continuous tension towards knowledge and power, the other only yearns for death to finally reach peace. If we depict other myths we see surprising and unexpected contamination. In a private writing of 1851 Wagner notes the analogy between “Odysseus’ wanderings and his nostalgic aspiration towards homeland, home, hearth and wife” and the vicissitudes of the Wandering Jew zeternally condemned to live, without purpose or joy, a life long overdue “. Moreover, in 1841 Wagner had composed the Flying Dutchman, another variation of the eternal wandering as a curse of man. It is the myth of the impossibility of finding a place to rest, dead or alive. Another modality of the theme comes to mind: the fate of the Kafkaesque Hunter Gracchus, also condemned to be suspended between life and death: “How are you, hunter Gracchus, who has been traveling with this old boat for centuries?”. «For fifteen hundred years now Don’t ask me more. I am here dead, dead, dead. I don’t know why I’m here. “
In those same years Joyce in Stephen Hero, the first draft of Dedalus. Portrait of the artist as a young man, published in installments between 1914 and 1915, hints at Wagnerian presences, always denied and always masked, in which suggestions of the Flying Dutchman pour into Joyce’s work to lead to Ulysses in 1922. In 1915 the Wandering Jew must have known one of the most famous reinterpretations of him in Gustav Meyrink’s Golem. The Golem is the Jewish spirit of the Prague ghetto that appears every 33 years to announce tragic events. In those years the old Prague ghetto was demolished for the rehabilitation of the city, to Kafka’s great sadness, who perceived disturbing presences, but still founding elements of Jewish spirituality: “The old unhealthy Jewish quarter within us is more real than the new hygienic city around us. Wake up, we walk in a dream: we ourselves ghosts of past times ».
The theme of the Eternal Jew reappears the following year in Meyrink’s best-known initiatory novel: The Green Face, with the character of Chidher Grün, the mysterious master initiator who indicates the esoteric path to the protagonist in an apocalyptic Amsterdam. The evocative figure of Chidher Grün signals the vivacity of the hermetic tradition in German literature confirmed by other novels, from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to Mann’s Enchanted Mountain. The Eternal Jew is also the motif, depicted powerfully by Joseph Roth, especially in the novel Job and in the essays collected in Wandering Jews in which the author claims with enthralling passion the superiority of Diaspora Judaism, of wandering Jews, in controversy with the project of the Zionists. Judaism has the universal mission of wandering among men to witness faith in the unity of the sacred against all idols. Only when this sublime and immense task is fulfilled will the Messiah appear who will redeem humanity, personified by the Wandering Jew.
But in those years there were other myths and other idols: those of anti-Semitic racism. In 1940, by order of Goebbels, the documentary film Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew) was shot to demonstrate the wickedness, perfidy, moral degeneration and ugliness of the Jews and the abjection of their animal life in the ghettos of the Poland invaded. The documentary was mandatory for SS members, but it turned out to be a flop, unlike the other anti-Semitic film, Süss the Jew by Veit Harlan also from 1940, which had around 30 million viewers.
After the Second World War, Roth was rediscovered and republished to whom, in Italy, Claudio Magris dedicated a wonderful monograph Lontano da dove in 1971. Joseph Roth and the Jewish-Eastern tradition, moving and moving reinterpretation of that German-Jewish literature, which arose in the Yiddish communities destroyed by persecutions. The essay opens with an exergue from Saint-Exupéry which provides the rapid and profound key to the fate of the Jewish wandering (and not only): «It is the terrible word of that Jewish story: Are you going down there, then? how far you will be !. Far from where? ». The eternal Jew is present everywhere and nowhere: this perpetual pilgrimage contains, anticipating it, the profound sense, cursed and blessed, of the destiny of modern man, who is now the inexhaustible pilgrim with his message of perdition and redemption. congenial to modernity. Going is now in human destiny, in the continuous beyond of modern man in search of himself.