[NGFP-BookClub] My questions

[ruth.murphy at comcast.net]

Dear Dr. Hasan-Rokem,

Thank you for opening this course; it is a fascinating subject.

I had a question about your reply to Joe. From what I could tell, the Legend of the Wandering Jew is completely a Christian creation. The legend does bear some resemblance to the later Elijah figure, but they are not the same man or mythical figure.

Is this so? Or was/is the Wandering Jew ever part of Jewish-created folklore?

A dank,

Ruth Murphy


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Galit Hasan-Rokem" <hasanrokem at mscc.huji.ac.il>
> Dear Joe Myerson,
> 
>  
> 
> 1)       I couldn’t agree more – the Wandering Jew certainly shares many of 
> the characteristics of Jesus, although they are far from identical. In fact, as 
> you will see I describe Ahasver as a foil of Jesus in an article that you will 
> hopefully read later in this course, and of course the contrast emerges exactly 
> because of the great likeness. If we are right in supposing, as most scholars 
> do, that the full characterization of the Wandering Jew stems from Christian 
> narrators and authors then the use of motifs characterizing Jesus may account 
> for the ambivalence towards Ahasver, not completely condemning. On the other 
> hand the figure of Ahasver may then serve as an outlet for ambivalent feeling 
> towards Jesus that could not be legitimately expressed directly towards him. 
> Your suggestion about the ambivalence towards the strange Oriental god fits into 
> this model of thought and is a very good idea indeed. 
> 
>  
> 
> 2)       When Jews adopted the figure of the Wandering Jew in the nineteenth 
> century they did so in varied modes and ideological frameworks. Rejecting him as 
> a marginal figure was certainly a dominant mode among Jews who were striving at 
> adaptation to European society and thus were eager to underline the similarities 
> between Jews and Christians rather than the differences. Since the 
> assimilationist attitudes were typically harbored by bourgeois, upper middle 
> class Jews, the marginality of the figure was in itself a reason to reject him 
> as a possible symbol for the Jewish group. The variations of the approaches 
> towards the Wandering Jew among Jews in modernity will be discussed in one of 
> the later chapters of this course. 
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you for these stimulating questions,
> 
> Galit Hasan-Rokem
> 
>  
> 
>   _____  
> 
> From: ngfp-bookclub-bounces at lists.ngfp.org 
> [mailto:ngfp-bookclub-bounces at lists.ngfp.org] On Behalf Of Joe Meyerson
> Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 8:49 PM
> To: ngfp-bookclub at lists.ngfp.org
> Subject: [NGFP-BookClub] My questions
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Professor Hasan-Rokem
> 
> I too, am excited about this course. The topic has so many interesting aspects 
> which you touch on in your first article. My questions:
> 
> 1) Maybe it seems a bit far-fetched, but many of the characteristics which you 
> list to describe the wandering Jew's earliest "incarnation" can be applied to 
> Jesus himself - a wandering mendicant, a scholar, a Jew. And while the 
> "Jerusalem cobbler" isn't the carpenter from Galillee  it still makes me wonder. 
> Also, Oriental to me always has a connotation of foreign and exotic. So perhaps 
> this legend was a place where local people could project their resentment that 
> this foreign god from an Oriental land replaced their local one?
> 
> 2) You seem to imply in the latter part of the article that the modernizing Jews 
> appropriated this myth as a negative stereotype to fight against, i.e. 
> assimilation is away to stop wandering. Could you elaborate on this point?
> 
> Thanks so much.
> 
> Joe
> 
>  
> 
> 


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