The Wandering Jew

THE WANDERING JEW is a Jew bearing the name of Ahasuérus, whom, according to an old legend, Christ condemned to wander over the earth till He should return again to judgment, because He drove Him brutally away as, weary with the cross He carried, He sat down to rest on a stone before his door. In symbolic token, it is surmised, of the dispersion of the whole Jewish people over the earth as homeless wanderers by way of judgment for their rejection of Christ.

However, there are various versions of the story of "The Wandering Jew," the legends of whom have formed the foundation of numerous romances, poems and tragedies. One version is that this person was a servant in the house of Pilate, and gave the Master a blow as He was being dragged out of the palace to go to His death.

A popular tradition makes the wanderer a member of the tribe of Naphtali, who, some seven or eight years previous to the birth of the Christ-child left his father to go with the wise men of the East whom the star led to the lowly cot in Bethlehem. It runs, also, that the cause of the killing of the children can be traced to the stories this person related when he returned to Jerusalem of the visit of the wise men, and the presentation of the gifts they brought to the Divine Infant, when He was acknowledged by them to be the king of the Jews, He was lost sight of for a time, when he appeared as a carpenter who was employed in making the cross on which the Saviour was to be lifted up into the eyes of all men. As Christ walked up the way to Calvary, He had to pass the workshop of this man, and when He reached its door, the soldiers, touched by the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows, besought the carpenter to allow Him to rest there for a little, but he refused, adding insult to a want of charity. Then it is said that Christ pronounced his doom, which was to wander over the earth until the second coming. Since that sentence was uttered, he has wandered, courting death, but finding it not, and his punishment, becoming more unbearable as the generations come and go. He is said to have appeared in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even as recently as the eighteenth century, under the names of Cartaphilus, and Ahasuerus, by which the Wandering Jew has been known. One of the legends described him as a shoemaker of Jerusalem, at whose door Christ desired to rest on then road to Calvary, but the man refused, and the sentence to wander was pronounced.