‘I suppose that explains the legend of the Wandering Jew.’
‘You mean the Diaspora?’
‘Yes, the Diaspora since Roman times and the expulsion of the Jews from European countries over the centuries and the Aliyah.’
‘The Wandering Jew is in fact a figure from medieval folklore that commenced around the thirteenth century. It tells the tale of a Jew who is supposed to have taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming.’
‘That’s true in a sense!’
‘Maybe, some do see the Wandering Jew as a characterization of the Jewish diaspora, a kind of divine retribution for perceived Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion together with the destruction of Jerusalem.’
‘A kind of anti-Semitism.’
‘I wouldn’t mix the two, though one leads to the other. The fact that the New Testament implicates the Jews in the trial and crucifixion of Jesus is one thing, however, we shouldn’t forget that Jesus was a Jew and a rebel. Rebels were dealt with harshly, look what happens to them today in certain countries!’
‘But it did lead to anti-Semitism.’
‘It was used as a rabble rousing excuse. The fact is that Medieval society and for that matter modern society rejects what is different, there are a thousand examples of ethnic confrontation across the world today.’
‘Ethnic confrontation.’
‘Yes, the Jews have always maintained their difference and this was difficult for the communities in which they lived to accept. Look at pre-revolutionary Russia. There were six million Jews in the Russian Empire, who were badly treated as Jews, but once they were converted they could accede to the nobility and high status in Russian society, like Lenin.’
‘What’s Lenin got to do with it?’
‘His family was Jewish, converted to the Orthodox Church, and his grandfather was admitted to the nobility.’
‘So the Jews were rejected because they were different.’
‘In a nutshell yes.’
A modern allegorical view claims instead that the ‘Wandering Jew’ personifies any individual who has been made to see the error of his or her wickedness, that is if the mocking of the Passion epitomizes the callousness of mankind toward the suffering of individual human beings.
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The Legacy of Solomon Page 83