The story behind the mythical figure of 鈥渢he Wandering Jew鈥� is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, National Jewish Book Award鈥搘inning historian Yair Mintzker traces the tale back to its source, follows its many metamorphoses through five centuries, and relates it to the fraught present moment.
According to a mysterious pamphlet published in 1602, the Wandering Jew was a real person, named Ahasversus, who was cursed by Jesus to eternal wandering after refusing to help him as he was led to his crucifixion. For more than four hundred years, many otherwise reliable witnesses have claimed to have seen the Wandering Jew. Moving in reverse chronological order, I, Wandering Jew explores crucial episodes in the story of this figure. We meet an unforgettable, Wandering Jew鈥搇ike character who appeared out of nowhere in Israel in the 1950s; a nineteenth-century novelist who was the first Jew to favorably describe the Wandering Jew; an eighteenth-century German scholar who saw the Wandering Jew emerging from a devastating fire; and the man who likely inspired the 1602 pamphlet.
A work of history that reads like a detective story, I, Wandering Jew is also part memoir. As Mintzker discovers affinities between his own story and that of the Wandering Jew, the surprising history of an old antisemitic trope and its meanings becomes a profound meditation on home and exile, Judaism and Christianity, poetry and truth, the deep past and the present.
Yair Mintzker is professor of history at 快色直播 University. He is the author, most recently, of The Many Deaths of Jew S眉ss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (快色直播), which won the National Jewish Book Award and was named a book of the year by the Financial Times.
"This book is rich with scholarly inquiry. But it is also rich with personal reflection. . . . A breathtaking work of historical research and personal insight that makes an old legend come alive."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“This profound and poetic book is impossible to summarize—you have to read it. By turns detective mystery, literary meditation, personal memoir, and recreation of lost worlds, it pursues the figure of the Wandering Jew. Starting with the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, Yair Mintzker takes us forward to twentieth-century Israel and backward to sixteenth-century Germany. What we learn is not just a whole new way of seeing German culture and its vein of antisemitism; Mintzker shows us how the Wanderer can be reworked as a figure for identity itself, both Jewish and German. A rare, mind-opening book, it is also deeply hopeful.”—Lyndal Roper, author of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
“With arresting prose and razor-sharp analysis, Mintzker unravels the surprising origins of the legend of the Wandering Jew and traces its reception in history and literature. A tour de force of historical reasoning, this short, brilliant book reads like a dazzling intellectual detective story even as it makes a profound comment about our time. I couldn’t put it down.”—Helmut Walser Smith, author of Germany: A Nation in Its Time
“In I, Wandering Jew, Yair Mintzker weaves a panorama of Jewish history and culture across five centuries, spanning Reformation Germany, nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and contemporary Israel. This slim, beautifully written book—part historical inquiry, part literary criticism, and part autobiography—is greater than the sum of its parts. Mintzker has created a profound meditation on Jewish destiny over time.”—Elisheva Carlebach, coauthor of A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe
