Part 6

That the myth of the Wandering Jew was interwoven with that of the Demon Huntsman of Germany (which is called Aaskarreya in Norway), there can be no doubt. “Perhaps,” says Karl Blind, “one of the clearest proofs of the phantom figure of the Wandering Jew having been grafted upon that of the great Wanderer and World-hunter, Wodan, is to be found in a tale of the Hartz Mountains. There it is said that the Wild Huntsman careers ‘over the seven mountain-towns every seven years.’ The reason given for his ceaseless wanderings is, that ‘he would not allow our Lord Jesus Christ to quench his thirst at a river, nor at a water-trough for cattle, from both of which he drove him away, telling him that he ought to drink from a horse-pond.’ For this reason the Wild Huntsman must wander about for ever, and feed upon horseflesh. And whoever calls out after him, when his ghostly chase comes by, will see the Wild Huntsman turn round, and be compelled by him to eat horseflesh too. No allusion whatever is made in this tale to a Jew, though the name of Christ is pressed into it in a way very like the Ahasuerus legend. We seem to get here a mythic rendering of the struggle between the old Germanic faith and the Christian religion. The ‘horse-pond’ and the ‘horseflesh’ are, to all appearances, references to our horse-worshipping, horse-sacrificing, horseflesh-eating forefathers, who came to Britain under the leadership of Hengist and Horsa. To call out after the eternal Huntsman entails the danger of being forced by him to eat horseflesh--that is, to return to the old creed. The Holy Supper of the Teutonic tribes consisted of horseflesh and mead. When Christianity came in, the eating of horseflesh was abolished as a heathen custom. But at German witches’ banquets--in other words, at secret festive ceremonies in which the pagan traditions were still kept up--there continued for a long time a custom of drinking from horse-shoes.”[27]

We have in this sentence last quoted from Mr. Blind’s able article a suggestion of the probable origin of the horse-shoe as a charm against witches. To the pagan Teuton it was as sacred an emblem as to the Christian his cross. While the Christians still believed in the power of the Wild Huntsman and his train to work them mischief, they might naturally show this symbol of pagan orthodoxy over their doors to induce the witches to pass on and visit their wrath on the openly disloyal.

This article in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ contains an original speculation and theory concerning two remarkable problems connected with our legend. How is it that the name Cartaphilus was replaced by Ahasuerus? How did the “doorkeeper” of the thirteenth century become the “shoemaker” of the sixteenth century legend? Mr. Blind, with a creditable caution, suggests that the name may have been a modification of As-Vidar. This god (_As_) Vidar was in the Scandinavian mythology the symbol of everlasting force: he was the deity who was alone to survive the universal destruction of Ragnarök, “Twilight of the Gods.” In the Prose Edda it is written: “The Wolf (Fenris) swallows Odin, but at that instant Vidar advances, and setting his foot on the monster’s lower jaw, seizes the other with his hand, and thus tears and rends him till he dies. Vidar is able to do this because he wears shoes for which stuff has been gathering in all ages, namely, the shreds of leather which are cut off to form the toes and heels of shoes; and it is on this account that those who would render a service to the Æsir (gods) should take care to throw such shreds away.” It is said there are (or were) preserved in the Government Library at Berne traditional relics left by the Wandering Jew, his staff and pair of shoes. These shoes are said, by an early local authority, to be “uncommonly large and made of a hundred snips--a shoemaker’s master-piece, because patched together with the utmost labour, diligence, and cleverness out of so many shreds of leather.” A similar pair of shoes are said to have also been left by Ahasuerus at Ulm.

It may be remarked that the name given to the Wandering Jew in the _Praxis Alchymine_ of Libavius, viz., Buttadæus, may possibly refer to the boot (A. S. _butte_) of the Wanderer, and it may have been that _deus_ was added. Whether it meant the “booted god,” or the man who struck God with a boot, or _bouter dieu_ (to push God), must remain doubtful. It is a striking coincidence, if no more, that, in Talmudic legend, Enoch also was a shoemaker, who with every stitch exclaimed, “The Lord and His Majesty be praised!”

The names of the Wandering Jew are characteristically various, not to say vagarious; they are also sometimes puzzling. Cartaphilus is pretty certainly κάρτα φίλος, in allusion to the “beloved” disciple; Ahasuerus is perhaps the Hebrew form of Xerxes, though there is nothing in the history of that king to connect him with the Wandering Jew. Several give his name as Gregorius, through a mistake, as M. Paris has pointed out, as to the meaning of Botoreius, who wrote that Jesus stopped “ante tabernam gregorii illius;” the Turkish Spy names him Michob Ader. One name popularly ascribed to him in Brussels is “Isaac Laquedem.” Concerning this Grässe has a note in which he says, “I asked for an explanation of the word, and my friend Dr. Böttcher, the celebrated expert in Hebrew, gave me the following answer, ‘If the name Laquedem is written and pronounced in French (Walloon) “Lakedem,” and is derived from the Hebrew, it can scarcely be anything else but la-kĕdem, _i.e._, “the former world” [belonging to an anterior world], in which case we must say the use of the prefix “la” is without a parallel in names of later Jews, and therefore the “la,” the French article, may be considered due to a half-learned inventor of names (_vide_ Lacroix, Lamarque, La Loresh. Wolf, _Bibl. Hebr._ iv. 812).’”

As for the name “Joseph,” given by the Armenian Bishop as the baptismal name of Cartaphilus, there is evidence in the old Chronicle itself that it was derived by association with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have wandered through a large part of the world and to have come to Britain in the year 66, where his blossoming staff fixed the site of Glastonbury Abbey.

It is an indication of the steadiness with which every being, however exalted originally, was degraded by coming under the supposed preternatural fate of the Jewish race, that this Joseph of Arimathea, by giving a baptismal name to Cartaphilus, gave the English populace their epithet for the beggars or impostors who were supposed to be the Wandering Jew. He was called “Poor Joe!” Of him, as representing the dregs of the myth, more must be said hereafter. Another example of this degradation is shown in the fact that in various parts of Europe the storm-demon is called _Maccabee_. The process by which this was brought about has not, to my knowledge, been traced, but the following facts seem to bear on it.

In 2 Maccabæus, v. 2–4, it is written--“Then it happened that through all the city, for the space almost of forty days, there were seen horsemen running in the air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances like a band of soldiers.... Wherefore every man prayed that that apparition might turn to good.” These apparitions, resembling those said by Josephus to have reappeared at the siege of Jerusalem, were adopted as good Christian omens. Judas Maccabæus also records his vision of the prophet Jeremiah giving him a golden sword to defend the holy people. It is probable that this was the germ of the superstition which proved so fatal to the Christians at the siege of Constantinople (1453). After the capture of the city, men, women and children rushed into the Church of St. Sophia for protection, because of a prophecy that “one day the Turks would enter Constantinople and pursue the Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the square before St. Sophia; but that this would be the term of their calamities; that an angel would descend from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a poor man seated at the foot of the column. ‘Take this sword,’ would he say, ‘and avenge the people of the Lord.’ At these animating words the Turks would instantly fly.... While they expected the descent of the tardy angel, the doors were broken with axes; and, as the Turks encountered no resistance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting and securing the multitude of their prisoners” (Gibbon, ch. lxviii.).

It looks as if the association of the wild aerial chase with _Maccabee_, in France and other southern regions, might have resulted from the diffusion of the superstition which drew such a thunderbolt upon the Christians of Constantinople, and its gradual subjection to the demonising doom which rested upon even the brightest figures of Jewish history not wearing the Christian uniform.

XI.

“THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION.”

“Enter Launcelot Gobbo!” So begins Scene ii. of Act II. in the _Merchant of Venice_. Or as the original stage-direction ran, “Enter the Clown!” His very name suggests the glutton and knave, yet it seems to be from him some Shakspearian guides derive their chief light on the great poet’s picture of Shylock!

Gobbo does indeed cast light upon the Jew, but it comes from the mob which he represented. To say “my master is a very Jew,” and “the Jew ... is the devil himself,” are equivalent phrases in the capacious mouth of Gobbo. He speaks for his gaping herd, and their breed is not unknown. Judenhetze is able to turn out such men in the latter days of the nineteenth century.

Bochart, in his _Hierozoicon_ (seventeenth century), says there was a Sea-monster called “The Old Jew;” with the white-bearded face of a man he had the hairy body of an ox, otherwise calf-shaped. This monster always appeared the night before Saturday on the surface of the sea, and one could see him until sunset next day leaping and diving like a frog, and following ships. This monster, no doubt a variety of Al-Sâmeri, elsewhere considered, is a fair type of what every Jew was, for many centuries, in the eyes of the multitudinous Gobbites. What stood for religion in them was the vulgar ribaldry of the Miracle Plays, under which those holy farces presently perished. In them Judas, still the buffeted Wanderer, was the one figure-head of the Jewish race, with the devil for his familiar.

In ancient Persian pictures Ahriman and his host have flame for hair. After the introduction of Christianity the deities of Europe, which it degraded to devils, were described and painted with fiery hair and beard; as it stands in the German saying, “Roter Bart, Teufelsart.” In the early Miracle Plays Judas was made up with red hair and beard to show the fiery abode to which he belonged. This feature survived also in the “yellow bonnet” which the Jews were compelled to wear, which replaced the scarlet or red bonnets which the “Scarlet Woman” found too like her own.[28] The significant costume, and the ideas it expressed, passed to the conventional stage-Jew. Barabas, in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, and after him, Shylock, were represented with the “orange-tawny bonnet,” and fiery red hair and beard.

In keeping with this the crimes popularly ascribed to the Jews, for which they suffered so terribly, were not human crimes. They were utterly without motive--such as no man, however vile, could have committed. For one example out of many, the Jews of Lincoln were charged with having fattened a Christian child of eight years on white bread and milk, then scourged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified him, giving him gall. For that impossible crime 112 eminent Jews were tortured and slain. It was rumoured that the earth would not receive the body of that child, yet for years Christian pilgrims visited its grave.

Such wild, popular notions were faithfully reflected in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_. “Barabas,” says Charles Lamb, “is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble. He kills in sport--poisons whole nunneries--invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners, _by the Royal command_, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the cabinet.”

It will be now apparent to those who have followed the travels of this Jew-myth that it had carried about in its endless wanderings the belief in which it originated, and of whose development it was a type--the infranatural, finally the infernal, nature of the Jewish race. It inevitably blended with all the superstitions about uncanny phantoms, bringing the most evil and ominous shapes haunting the popular imagination in every locality into connection with the detested race. Demons from the air, goblins from their caves, birds of ill-omen, fearful gales, betokening the proximity of the Wandering Phantom, brought an ever-accumulating mass of fear, suspicion and hatred upon the race of which its supposed doom was a too faithful emblem. This vast cesspool of vulgar superstition mirrored the dogmas of a theology ever developing downward. It was not permitted the masses to look upon the alleged offences of Judas or Ahasuerus in comparison with offences familiar to them. As we have seen, the offence thought of was the wrong and insult done to a God; it was an intensification of the same feeling that regarded theft from a church as worse than theft from the poorest widow, or a slight untruth under oath as more wicked than the most malicious lie not sworn to. Out of such a principle of unreason naturally came the doom of a race through many centuries to realise every ingenuity of torture fabled in the Greek Hades, with Gehenna added. Every revolving century was their Ixion-wheel, and every stream their Phlegethon.

XII.

THE WANDERING RACE.

Professor Child, of Harvard University, has remarked that, “in the second form of the legend, the punishment of perpetual existence, which gives rise to the old names, _Judæus non mortalis_, _Ewiger Jude_, is aggravated by a condemnation to perpetual change of place, which is indicated by a corresponding name, _Wandering Jew_, _Juif Errant_, etc.”[29] In this change a great deal of history is represented. The Jewish race under persecution steadily became a wandering race. They were compelled to “move on” by the remorseless police of Christendom. One after another the laws of nations detached them from the soil, from the trade-guilds, from civic position, and they became a nation without a country.

This process went on for a long time before it was represented in any myth or legend. Mohammed said, “The Jews are the People of the Book.” Joshua ben Siras ben Eliezer, a priest in Jerusalem two hundred years before the burning of the Second Temple (quoted by Heine), wrote, “All this is the Book of the Covenant made with the Most High God, namely, the Law which Moses commanded as a precious treasure to the House of Jacob. Wisdom floweth therefrom as the water of Pison when it is great, and as the water of Tigris when it overfloweth its banks in spring. Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates when it is great, and as Jordan in the harvest. Correction cometh forth from it as the light, and as the water of the Nile in autumn. There is none that hath made an end of learning it, there is none that will ever find out all its mystery, for its wisdom is richer than any sea and its word deeper than any abyss.”

So spake the genius of Israel, and, so speaking, itself uttered its first doom. A people to whom a book had become their Fatherland, which had come to see in it their Jordan, their Tigris, their Nile, had already given up their hold upon the territories of this world and become a wandering colony of Jahve, governed by a code unrelated to the vices or the aims of other races. This abstract country, whose geography was books and texts, was fenced around and fortified as strongly as the territory of any nation. Its fortresses were ceremonies, customs, national traditions, and a perfect patience derived from faith in the God of their fathers. The Cain whom they abhorred was not more effectually “cursed from the earth,” prohibited from tillage of the ground than this race which had taken Jahve for their portion and his law for their habitation.

In such a system there could be no compromise. And as a matter of fact there never was any compromise with the enemies of their faith. These people, who have shown ingenuity and cleverness of every kind, have never developed any sort of Jesuitism. I was astonished lately at learning of an instance in which a Jew outwitted his persecutors in true Christian style, for I never heard of another. This Jew was a pedlar, and he was wandering in France in the neighbourhood of one of those districts where the Virgin Mary is still continually opening new water-cure establishments. This Jew, having heard the latest miracle which had evoked a new fountain, smiled, and even made light of it. Thereon the innkeepers excited a mob, and they resolved to hang the _miscreant_--that is, the unbeliever--faggots being old-fashioned. They seized the poor pedlar and bore him off pallid with terror. As they passed near the new fountain, the Jew begged permission to moisten his lips thereat; this was conceded, but no sooner had the water touched his lips than he leaped about with joy, and declared that the fountain had healed a severe rheumatism which he had suffered from for many years. “A miracle! a miracle!” shouted the crowd; the Jew suddenly became a hero, and was carried before the priest, who appointed the next day to baptize him before all the people and make a grand demonstration. The Jew, however, disappeared during the night.

This story, which I found in a recent number of the _Jewish World_, is a modern appendage to the old legend mentioned by Mr. Baring-Gould, that the gipsies were said to wander under a doom pronounced on them because they refused to shelter the Virgin and child in the flight into Egypt. But this witty pedlar is not a fair representative of the race. “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” said Shylock. Though Shylock has been regarded by many as a type of avarice and extortion, yet even he cannot be tempted by money when his struggle with the Merchant becomes a religious issue. Shakspeare rightly shows Shylock unyielding; many times the money due to him cannot bribe him from the blow he feels empowered to strike for his despised Israel. And when, in the beginning of this century, Nathan Rothschild started as the great banker of London, no temptations could induce him, shrewd as he was, to lend money or enter into any contracts for the benefit of Spain or its colonies. The Israelite was never lost in the banker, and showed his supremacy when it came to a race which had banished his own from the Iberian Peninsula; though at the same time his charities and those of his house have included Christians hardly less than Jews. The same unyielding religious spirit was shown when thirty-three years ago Baron Lionel de Rothschild was elected Member of Parliament for the City of London. The honour of being the first Jew in that body could not induce him to swear his allegiance “on the true faith of a Christian,” and on the New Testament. He remained out of his seat for eleven years--and with him David Salomons, who paid the penalty of £500 for voting in the House without being duly sworn--when Parliament yielded to men who did not yield, and the oath was changed for Jews.

It has sometimes excited wonder why this wanderer among the races, uncompromising amid the hatred of ages, was not exterminated. It must often have appeared to them that, like the bush in their own legend, they were burnt without being consumed, because their God was in the bush. But no miraculous force need be sought in the case, nor any exceptional tenacity of life in them as a race; their circumstances developed in them special faculties adapted to the commerce and civilisation of the world. Heine said truly “the Jews were legally condemned to become rich.” The populace generally believed that Jewish wealth was got from the Devil, their wages for maintaining the kingdom of Antichrist in the world. The Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, who died in 1789, leaving a large property, had a black cock which was popularly believed to be connected with his wealth. The suspicion was confirmed when the bird died a day or two before its master.

As a matter of fact the Jews were driven to deal in money and jewellery--a word supposed by some to be derived from “Jew”--by the general exclusion of them from the possession of land and from the acquisition of property by handicraft. Gold and silver alone were left for their enterprise.

And there were good causes why they amassed wealth. The first was that they did not spend it on Gentile baubles. They cared not for the pomps and luxuries of a world to which they did not belong. Why then did they want to accumulate it? Why were they so thrifty and unwearied in their pursuit of gold? To ascribe this to avarice is to accept a popular fallacy refuted by the history of that people, who are even lavish in their charities and in their support of public enterprises (as in England and America) where they are free and equal citizens. In their earlier days the Jews’ hope of recovering their country and re-establishing their Theocracy under the Messiah was a passionate aspiration, it was as sincere as any patriotism; every Jew held his wealth and his life as a trust for that end. All their wealth they hoped one day to lay at the Messiah’s feet. So it began, and then a new factor re-enforced it. The wealth of the Jews became the main means of their survival as a people. Kings and Popes protected them for the money they could get out of them. But for this they would certainly have been exterminated. From them chiefly was extorted the money for Henry the Second’s Crusade in their own Holy Land. Mainly by their labour and wealth Westminster Abbey was built. By such protective extortions there was established a certain force of natural selection and evolution, based on their wealth, which gradually made them the financial princes of Europe and bankers of the world.

Whatever German bigots may say, the financial supremacy of the Jews has been well and wisely exercised. The nations not included under it have fared according to their folly. When Queen Isabella of old wished to protect the Jews because of such advantages, she was confronted by the fanatic who said, “Judas sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver; will you sell Him for thirty millions?” So the Jews suffered in Spain; but what did Spain suffer? What did Holland and England gain by the Spanish Jews, first tolerated, then welcomed in their cities? This Germany will be able to answer if the jealous bigots there let loose on the Jews should succeed in driving them out of the country.