I, Wandering Jew: A Five- Century History of Our Modern Condition
By Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 288 pp.
For centuries the “Wandering Jew” served as a motif, legend, mystery and bête noire in Western culture, the subject of an extraordinary number of artistic allusions and treatments, snide references and polemical disputes.
In today’s world, the Wandering Jew doesn’t disturb non-Jews as much as the Jew who refuses to move on—from a neighborhood victimized by antisemitism, a country sought by others, or political positions that others oppose.
And yet Yair Mintzker, a Princeton University history professor, confides in his new book that the image of the Wandering Jew has been “stamped, like a watermark” on a great deal of his life.
His teenage best friend, Itai, greatly admired the German author Stefan Heym’s 1981 novel Ahasver, called The Wandering Jew in its English edition. Together, they read and discussed it intensely. What struck Mintzker was “how closely” the personality of the book’s fictional protagonist Ahasverus, in Heym’s rendition, resembled that of his flesh-and-blood friend. Thus began Mintzker’s “fascination with the story of the Wandering Jew,” which led him to become an indefatigable scholar of that tale.
The upshot many decades later is I, Wandering Jew: A Five-Century History of Our Modern Condition. The subtitle rightly points us away from a conventional “history” of the title figure. While Mintzker provides enough of the Wandering Jew’s history as a character in Western culture to get us started, his idiosyncratic book mingles memoir with a scholarly detective story that dives into the weeds of Wandering Jew sources, and then into the weeds of those weeds.
The ur-story of the Wandering Jew dates back to the birth of Christianity. “For centuries,” writes Mintzker, the phrase “referred to a legendary Jewish figure who allegedly betrayed Jesus Christ on his way to the Crucifixion.” Phrases and names for that man included the “Eternal Jew” or Ahasverus.
Why Ahasverus? The name appears in the main modern European source of the legend, a 1602 German pamphlet known as the Kurtze Beschreibung, or “Short Description.” It tells the tale of a bishop named Paul von Eitzen who claimed to have met the Wandering Jew in a Hamburg church in 1542. The wretched and seemingly middle-aged man, with bare calloused feet and hair hanging over his shoulders, told von Eitzen he’d been a shoemaker “born a Jew in Jerusalem in the time of Christ.” He gave his name as that of the Persian king Ahasverus in the Book of Esther, and soon related his biographical tale.
The man, Mintzker explains, had considered Jesus a “heretic and a seducer of the Jews.” After calling for the release of Barabbas rather than Jesus with the crowd at Pilate’s palace, he returned to his shop to watch Jesus struggle with his heavy cross to Calvary. When Jesus stopped by his shop to lean on a wall for a moment of rest, Ahasverus cursed him. Jesus then sternly condemned him to wander until the Second Coming. And so, Ahasverus confirmed to von Eitzen, he continued to wander.
In today’s vernacular, Ahasverus went viral, Mintzker reports—at least in northern Europe. Forty more editions of the anonymously authored pamphlet came out by the end of the 18th century. Translations appeared in many European languages. Sightings of Ahasverus multiplied, including in Danzig, Madrid, Brussels, London, Paris “and even upstate New York.” Within a few centuries, Ahasverus found his way into the work of such writers as Dumas, Goethe, Pushkin, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Hawthorne.
The Wandering Jew, in short, became a folklore hit.
According to Mintzker, the tale of Ahasverus led to evil things too. For instance, the antisemitic stereotypes in the original pamphlet’s description of Ahasverus appeared centuries later in an “infamous Nazi propaganda exhibition titled ‘The Eternal Jew’ and the eponymous and extremely vile film, directed by Fritz Hippler, in 1940.”
With that kind of intro to his subject, one expects Mintzker will take us on a rich historical and cultural interpretation of why the Wandering Jew figure achieved such cultural power. Did Ahasverus symbolize, in a single person, the diasporic history of the Jews? Did his shabby, forlorn appearance appeal to antisemitic inclinations to see all Jews that way? Was his tale just a Jewish version of an eternal literary plot or trope (e.g., Odysseus, the Flying Dutchman) about a “divinely punished exile”?
Instead, after his introduction, Mintzker shrugs off his cultural analyst role and turns Sherlock Holmes, a dead-serious history scholar and textual detective pursuing his undead subject. He declines to get too philosophical and interpretive about the Wandering Jew’s cultural impact because “the drawback of treating stories like that of Ahasverus as an expression of a universal symbolic grammar is that it deprives them of their historical specificity.”
“If we are to better understand Ahasverus’s gravitational pull in the modern world,” he writes, we must replace that kind of analysis “with at least a modicum of history.”
Mintzker provides more than a modicum. The questions that attract him most include: “[W]hy was the pamphlet about him published in 1602, and not earlier or later? Who wrote and published it, where, for what particular purpose, and with what specific audience in mind?” Another set of questions that excite him: “Why the meeting with Paul von Eitzen of all people, why in 1542, why in Hamburg, and why the name ‘Ahasverus’ and not Cartaphilus, Butadeus or John?”
Mintzker gets as close to answering those scholarly queries as anyone could. He burrows into textual history in five chapters that unfold in reverse chronological order, “each describing an isolated moment when Ahasverus’s anthropological and literary aspects intermingled with very real circumstances.”
The first takes us to 1950s Israel, when multiple eyewitnesses claimed they’d met a man who fit the description of Ahasverus “to a T.” The second rewinds to late 19th-century Russia and famed Jewish writer Sholem Abramovich, whose 1873 novel The Nag about a cursed talking horse—a suffering “Wandering Nag” who’s actually a punished prince—betokens the first sign of Jewish intellectuals identifying and sympathizing with the Wandering Jew, if in an equine incarnation. The third chapter explores the great Frankfurt Jewish Ghetto Fire of 1711 and one Johann Jakob Schudt, an antisemitic scholar of Hebrew and Jewish history who “wrote the most important academic treatment of the legend of the Wandering Jew before modern times.”
In that chapter, the most enlightening of the five, Mintzker effectively hands off the task of interpreting the Wandering Jew’s place in Western culture to Schudt, even while regretting the 18th-century scholar’s anti-Jewish bias. (Schudt insisted that Ahasverus did not exist, and that an angry God made the Jewish people suffer after the Crucifixion for rejecting and killing Jesus.)
The fourth chapter returns to the 1602 publication of the Kurtze Beschreibung, investigating its “enigmatic circumstances.” In the fifth and final chapter, Mintzker unfolds his own biographical tale of wandering from Jerusalem to Princeton, and shares his opinions of everything from yordim, those who leave Israel for the diaspora, to Benjamin Netanyahu, to October 7.
As the author acknowledges, one can read all five chapters as stand-alone pieces. Those inclined to textual detective stories more than cultural interpretation will especially enjoy them—they teem with the crisp detail that first-rate scholarship uncovers.
Yet one leaves the book feeling as if Mintzker has, in some sense, buried the lede of his elusive subject. In one of the best 2025 scholarly books of Jewish history, Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, offers a brilliant counter-narrative of Jewish diaspora. Drawing on a wealth of Jewish history and thought, Kraemer argues that Jewish tradition, far from insisting on the obligation to return to Zion, also celebrates diasporic life, that “the longing to return to Zion was not the only motivating ideology of Jewish life and dreams.” The description on the book’s flap begins, “Jewish people have always wandered.”
I, Wandering Jew rewards the reader with its own multiple virtues. One wishes, however, that Mintzker had spent more time on the elephantine question in the room: whether the Wandering Jew flourished as it did in Western culture because so many wished that Jews would keep wandering.
Carlin Romano, Moment’s critic-at-large, teaches philosophy and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania.