Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza (1837)

The Wandering Jew and Jewish History

The literary figure which has longest served to represent "Jewish history" in the European mind is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Yet it was in rebellion against this image from the repertoire of Christian (and, later, anti-Semitic) legend that the modern Jewish historical novel emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany. Outwardly confident and full of hope, German-Jewish writers such as Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) responded to the Enlightenment project of secularization through the adaptation of secular literary forms which would recast Jewish identity for an agenda of integration and universalism in a new progressive age, countering an image of perpetual Jewish suffering as theologically justified punishment with a new conception of Jewish history.

The image of the tormented and immortal Wandering Jew, however, seems both horrifying and appropriate to the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century imagination. In Siegfried Kracauer's work on the philosophy of history, it is Ahasuerus who is said to exemplify the antinomies of historical time. In History: The Last Things Before the Last, the Wandering Jew stands for the sum total of all historical continuities, discontinuities, parallels, and nonsimultaneities, the irreconcilability of myriad human "shaped times" with chronological time. Kracauer's Ahasuerus is a hideous and tragic image, a monster with multiple faces that reflect his turbulent travels, one who vainly attempts to construct his own history, "the one time he is doomed to incarnate," from the jumble of possibilities. That the Wandering Jew could ever come to rest, reflect back upon his journeys, and disappear is, for Kracauer, unthinkable, akin to the notion that history could have an end or that it might be "aesthetically redeemed" in a Proustian moment of transcendent reflection. In Kracauer's view, the time conception implicit in the narrative strategies of Remembrance of Things Past is invalid for historiography: it presupposes a standpoint outside of time's permanent flux which would allow the fragmented life to be ultimately revealed as a unified process. Kracauer's suspicion of any aesthetization of history which privileges a stable notion of self is even stronger in his earlier attack on the subject-centered conception of history that informed the historical biographies popular during the Weimar Republic. The historian Martin Jay notes the autobiographical echoes inherent in Kracauer's attraction to the Wandering Jew motif: the "eternally extraterritorial" Ahasuerus appears to represent Kracauer himself as a German-Jewish "permanent exile." But Kracauer's figure of thought for the inability of the human mind to conceptually surmount historical time points to Jewish history's dilemma as well. Still trapped in the form of the Wandering Jew, a literary image not of its own making, a Jewish history which cannot write itself free becomes emblematic of an unredeemed world. The enormity of twentieth-century upheaval and destruction confirms Kracauer's tortured Ahasuerus as an adequate literary expression of unmasterable history, yet his Wandering Jew is itself an aesthetization of historical time, and it is implicitly an image of the Jew as eternal victim. Eschewing a constructed past, Kracauer's Ahasuerus abandons the future to a timeless present unable to process historical trauma. Nineteenth-century German-Jewish writers could, by contrast, still impute utopian potential to aestheticized history and they did so in numerous historical novels.

Kracauer, of course, was not the first to employ the Wandering Jew (in German der Ewige Jude, "the Eternal Jew") as a symbol for historical time. In his monumental study of the Ahasuerus legend and its reception, George K. Anderson demonstrates that, by the late eighteenth century, the medieval tale of a Jewish shoemaker condemned to roam the earth as punishment for tormenting Jesus had become a figure for the nascent modern discipline of History. In the crucial "threshold era" (Sattelzeit), the century from 1750 to 1850 which marked the philosophical transition to modernity, Ahasuerus appears in many works as a chronicler, a narrator of history as world history with a grasp of global geography which sets him apart from his literary predecessors. The melancholy wanderer as a marker of time within a worldview dominated by Christian salvation history had now become a literary perspective from which universal history could be recounted.

Yet, in the early nineteenth century, the historiography of the Jewish people remained seemingly unaffected by the changing conceptual paradigms. Interest in Jewish history was still a by-product of theological motivations: for Jews, the establishment of religious authority and the normative interpretation of sacred texts and, for Christians, a concern with the eschatological implications of the fate of the Jewish people. Thus, when the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Jewish Culture and Scholarship) was formed in Berlin in 1819, as the first attempt by a group of Jewish historians to lay the theoretical foundations of a modern Jewish historiography, the only available general histories of the Jews were partisan accounts by Christian writers. And in literary form, Jewish history was still presented in the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Although a novel such as George Croly's Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future (1827) could present the Wandering Jew as the personification of a forward-looking Enlightenment conception of history (Croly's Wandering Jew heroically resists Roman tyranny in the battle for Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and, despite defeat, looks in anticipation to an open future which will bring such things as the discovery of America and the invention of printing), works like Gustav Pfizer's poem "Der ewige Jude" (1831) still pointed skeptically to the continued degradations suffered by the Jewish people, symbolized by Ahasuerus.

But in 1837 (or was it 1661?) the supposedly immortal Ahasuerus died unexpectedly. Of course, few took notice and the legend of the Wandering Jew continued as a productive myth for the modern age, but in Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman (Spinoza: A Historical Novel; 1837), Ahasuerus expires. Spinoza is a fictionalized account of...