Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew

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Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew

by Lisa Lampert-Weissig

University of Michigan Press, 2024

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-13346-8

eISBN: 978-0-472-90395-5 (OA)

About the Book

How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adapters of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.

About the Author

Lisa Lampert-Weissig is Professor of English Literature and Comparative Medieval Studies and Jerome and Miriam Katzin Chair of Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego.

Reviews

"Lisa Lampert-Weissig offers the first critical and comprehensive monographic analysis of the legend, in which she posits that the Wandering Jew's curse is unified in his role as an instrument of memory. Drawing on a vast literary and visual tradition, Instrument of Memory paints the Wandering Jew as a motif for interdisciplinary Jewish-Christian cultural cohesion."— Anoushka Alexander-Rose, English: Journal of the English Association

“With its new analysis of a well-known and enduringly popular legend and new identifications of Jewish literary and artistic re-imaginings of it, Instrument of Memory will be an important intervention in both literary criticism and Jewish studies. It also provides new insights relevant to our understanding of nationalism and antisemitism, subject areas in which the author has published other important work. For medievalists, it newly demonstrates how medieval Christian tropes and ideas provided the historical infrastructure for antisemitisms of later periods, which is an issue of concern across disciplines.”

— Debra Strickland, University of Glasgow

“This study expands considerably our understanding of how and why the Wandering Jew legend continues to appear in such a variety of cultural studies. Though at times one senses that the author has over emphasized time and again ”the entangled nature of Jewish and Christian cultural memory," she has mastered the previous literature on the legend and quite remarkably sharpened our attention to hidden elements of the works discussed and others that remained outside of her insightful interpretations."

— Richard I. Cohen, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

"Throughout everything, Lampert-Weissig’s Instrument of Memory remains a deeply enriching, intensely gripping, and ultimately troubling book that pays due homage to previous studies of the Wandering Jew while also presenting her own original ideas about the history of the legend and the future of the Wandering Jew. . . I hope Instrument of Memory will entice you too to begin a discovery of the aftereffects of a medieval legend on the literature and culture that followed."— Miriamne Ara Krummel, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"The focus of the book is a combination of sociology and psychology: how this legend was used by communities, Christian and then Jewish, at bind themselves together by reliving their past. This is an important contribution to the history of literature, and an enlightening tour of a fascinating occult theme, written with a sensitive appreciation of Jewish sensibilities." — 96th of October

“Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s volume significantly contributes to the rich and varied scholarship on the Wandering Jew. With her deep knowledge of European languages and cultures she beautifully reads texts from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth and the twentieth century almost to our own time, focusing the powerful lens of memory studies on the cultural interactions woven into the art of Jewish and Christian authors and artists. Well worth reading and teaching!”

— Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem