Introduction: The Nation and the Spectral Wandering Jew

Abstract

Leo Pinsker’s famous 1882 essay promoting Zionism entitled ‘Auto-Emancipation’ identifies the key elements of the present study — national identity and belonging, the principal trope of the undying and uncanny Wandering Jew spectre who haunts European nations, and the Jewish Question, which Michael Ragussis rightly characterizes as plural and incorporating ‘a variety of Jewish questions (religious, legal, racial, and so on)’ (‘Secret’: 298). With the Enlightenment era genre of British Gothic fiction as its principal domain of focus, this study engages with the related questions of why, in what ways, and with what implications, the legendary Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, haunts modern Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This infamous, transgressive antichrist, associated with what Edgar Rosenberg has called ‘the Ur-crime of the Crucifixion’ (27), was cursed to immortality until the Millennium for mocking Christ as he carried the cross to Calvary.¹ In that instance, he figuratively assumed the cross as an ambivalent representative of ‘a deicide nation … on whose redemption the fate of mankind’ was said to hang (Fisch: 15).² He has since been repeatedly crucified for his Original Sin (Horkheimer and Adorno: 49–50).

Among the living nations of the earth the Jews are as a nation long since dead … [A]fter the Jewish people had ceased to exist as an actual state, as a political entity, they could nevertheless not submit to total annihilation — they lived on spiritually as a nation. The world saw in this people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. The ghostlike apparition of a living corpse, of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive, and yet walking among the living — this spectral form without precedence in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, could [not] but strangely affect the imagination of the nations. And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of mankind, why be surprised at the effect produced by this dead but still living nation?

A fear of the Jewish ghost has passed down the generations and the centuries. First a breeder of prejudice … it culminated in Judeophobia … a variety of demonopathy with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind, and that this ghost is not disembodied like other ghosts but partakes of flesh and blood, must endure pain inflicted by the fearful mob who imagines itself endangered.

(Pinsker: 163)