Legend of the Wandering Jew

Plot

Cousin to the Passion Play of Oberammergau, the story of the Wandering Jew dates back easily to the 1300s and tells an interesting story.

According to the traditional account as Jesus sought a moment of solice before the property of a local Jerusalemite, the man told him to tarry not. By way of reply, Jesus said the man himself would be forced to tarry and wait until Jesus' return.

By the thirteen hundreds, of course, that man had done a lot of tarrying and his story was used to underscore how bad the man felt at having deprived Jesus a moment's rest and in some cases his actual conversion to Christianity itself.

Like the Passion Play of Oberammergau (particularly its 1935 and before manifestations) the story of the Wandering Jew was typically a story of antisemitism and hatred against Jews for their nonacceptance of Jesus as messiah.

For reasons unknown to me, author Joseph Gaer like Edgar Goodspeed has largely passed into oblivion even among Biblical research scholars. That's particuarly true here where he manages to compress all the relevant data about this interesting tale into such a short accessible package.

The only caveat I can offer about this book is that for some reason he omits the Chaucer version of this story when he discusses other author's treatments of the story of the Wandering Jew.

Other than, he does include a reference to a 1933 movie of the same name (The Wandering Jew) starring the estimable Conrad Veidt. A clip of that film is available on youtube and is probably the best video short snippet version of this tale you can find anywhere.

The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character; sometimes he is said to be a shoemaker or other tradesman, sometimes he is the doorman at Pontius Pilate's estate.