Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew

by Lisa Lampert-Weissig

Overview

How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adapters of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472903955
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	01/18/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Lisa Lampert-Weissig is Professor of English Literature and Comparative Medieval Studies and Jerome and Miriam Katzin Chair of Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego. 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: The Wandering Jew and Christendom
Chapter One: The Wandering Jew as Relic in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora
Chapter Two: The 1602 Kurtze Beschreibung: A Lutheran Recalibration
Part Two: The Wandering Jew in the Age of Emancipation
Chapter Three: Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant
Chapter Four: Heine and the Wandering Jew’s Beard
Part Three: The Wandering Jew and Jerusalem in an Age of Global War
Chapter Five: Marc Chagall’s Remembrance and White Crucifixion
Chapter Six: Uri Zvi Greenberg’s King Ahasver
Chapter Seven: Edmond Fleg’s Jésus: Raconté par Le Juif errant
Chapter Eight: Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene
Part Four: Contemporary Encounters with the Wandering Jew
Chapter Nine: Stefan Heym’s Ahasver
Chapter Ten: The Wandering Jew in the Twenty-First Century: Eshkol Nevo, Dara Horn, and Sarah Perry
Conclusion
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Lisa Lampert-Weissig offers the first critical and comprehensive monographic analysis of the legend, in which she posits that the Wandering Jew's curse is unified in his role as an instrument of memory. Drawing on a vast literary and visual tradition, Instrument of Memory paints the Wandering Jew as a motif for interdisciplinary Jewish-Christian cultural cohesion."

Anoushka Alexander-Rose

"Throughout everything, Lampert-Weissig’s Instrument of Memory remains a deeply enriching, intensely gripping, and ultimately troubling book that pays due homage to previous studies of the Wandering Jew while also presenting her own original ideas about the history of the legend and the future of the Wandering Jew. . . I hope Instrument of Memory will entice you too to begin a discovery of the aftereffects of a medieval legend on the literature and culture that followed."

Studies in the Age of Chaucer Miriamne Ara Krummel

"The focus of the book is a combination of sociology and psychology: how this legend was used by communities, Christian and then Jewish, at bind themselves together by reliving their past. This is an important contribution to the history of literature, and an enlightening tour of a fascinating occult theme, written with a sensitive appreciation of Jewish sensibilities." 

96th of October

Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s volume significantly contributes to the rich and varied scholarship on the Wandering Jew. With her deep knowledge of European languages and cultures she beautifully reads texts from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth and the twentieth century almost to our own time, focusing the powerful lens of memory studies on the cultural interactions woven into the art of Jewish and Christian authors and artists. Well worth reading and teaching!

Galit Hasan-Rokem

With its new analysis of a well-known and enduringly popular legend and new identifications of Jewish literary and artistic re-imaginings of it, Instrument of Memory will be an important intervention in both literary criticism and Jewish studies. It also provides new insights relevant to our understanding of nationalism and antisemitism, subject areas in which the author has published other important work. For medievalists, it newly demonstrates how medieval Christian tropes and ideas provided the historical infrastructure for antisemitisms of later periods, which is an issue of concern across disciplines.

Debra Strickland

"Lisa Lampert-Weissig offers the first critical and comprehensive monographic analysis of the legend, in which she posits that the Wandering Jew's curse is unified in his role as an instrument of memory. Drawing on a vast literary and visual tradition, Instrument of Memory paints the Wandering Jew as a motif for interdisciplinary Jewish-Christian cultural cohesion."

English: Journal of the English Association

With its new analysis of a well-known and enduringly popular legend and new identifications of Jewish literary and artistic re-imaginings of it, Instrument of Memory will be an important intervention in both literary criticism and Jewish studies. It also provides new insights relevant to our understanding of nationalism and antisemitism, subject areas in which the author has published other important work. For medievalists, it newly demonstrates how medieval Christian tropes and ideas provided the historical infrastructure for antisemitisms of later periods, which is an issue of concern across disciplines.

University of Glasgow Debra Strickland