Overview

Combining history, detective story, and memoir, a surprising and revealing account of the antisemitic myth of ""the Wandering Jew"" The story behind the mythical figure of ""the Wandering Jew"" is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, National Jewish Book Awardwinning historian Yair Mintzker traces the tale back to its source, follows its many metamorphoses through five centuries, and relates it to the fraught present moment. According to a mysterious pamphlet published in 1602, the Wandering Jew was a real person, named Ahasversus, who was cursed by Jesus to eternal wandering after refusing to help him as he was led to his crucifixion. For more than four hundred years, many otherwise reliable witnesses have claimed to have seen the Wandering Jew. Moving in reverse chronological order, I, Wandering Jew explores crucial episodes in the story of this figure. We meet an unforgettable, Wandering Jewlike character who appeared out of nowhere in Israel in the 1950s; a nineteenth-century novelist who was the first Jew to favorably describe the Wandering Jew; an eighteenth-century German scholar who saw the Wandering Jew emerging from a devastating fire; and the man who likely inspired the 1602 pamphlet. A work of history that reads like a detective story, I, Wandering Jew is also part memoir. As Mintzker discovers affinities between his own story and that of the Wandering Jew, the surprising history of an old antisemitic trope and its meanings becomes a profound meditation on home and exile, Judaism and Christianity, poetry and truth, the deep past and the present.

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9780691272702

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Reviews

""This book is rich with scholarly inquiry. But it is also rich with personal reflection. . . . A breathtaking work of historical research and personal insight that makes an old legend come alive."" * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Information

Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of The Many Deaths of Jew Sss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton), which won the National Jewish Book Award and was named a book of the year by the Financial Times.

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