“For two thousand years he had impatiently waited for death, but now he suddenly wanted very much to live … the Wandering Jew was no more.”
Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov
The Little Golden Calf (2016)
Jewish artists and writers began to see the Wandering Jew as uniquely positioned to face a new wave of brutality and persecution. Responding to pogroms and war, Marc Chagall (1887-1985, Belarus) modernised the legend. Colourful figures on the move, with their possessions – or even homes – on their back are found in ‘Remembrance’ (1915) and ‘En route/Le juif errant’ (1923). In ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938), the Wandering Jew runs away from Jesus, who wears a prayer shawl to draw attention to his Jewish origins.
For Soviet duo Ilf and Petrov (Ilya Ilf, 1897-1937, and Yevgeny Petrov, 1902-1942, both Ukraine), the Wandering Jew meets his death before the Second Coming, subverting the original Christian legend. The Little Golden Calf (1931) is a satirical novel which employs the biblical stories of Cain, and of the Golden Calf. The Wandering Jew is shot by Ukrainian troops during the Russian Civil War: “For two thousand years he had impatiently waited for death, but now he suddenly wanted very much to live … the Wandering Jew was no more.”
In the interwar period, the Wandering Jew was used by public figures to symbolise the coming turmoil. The journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939, Ukraine) published Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927), reporting on Jewish migration westwards following the First World War, as well as the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union.
With the rising threat of Nazism, Rabbi Dr Abraham Cohen (1887- 1957, England) delivered a sermon in 1940 relating the legend of the Wandering Jew to the scriptural command ‘lech lecha’ (“get thee gone, go to the land which I shall show thee”). Cohen declares that “An end will come to our vagabondage, and Jewry will have rest. When will that happen depends largely upon ourselves.” Although the full horrors of the Holocaust were yet to be realised, he nevertheless sees a path to Jewish salvation through piety and Zionism.