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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
The post Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
