<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Dear Professor Hasan-Rokem<br><br>I too, am excited about this course. The topic has so many interesting aspects which you touch on in your first article. My questions:<br><br>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?<br><br>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?<br><br>Thanks so much.<br><br>Joe<br></div></div><br>
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