were preserved, a deadly hatred of those who had really founded
Christianity, and furnished its Messiah, was carefully fostered. The
connection of Christianity with Judaism was reduced to a series of
fairy-tales. Characteristic of these was that about the True Cross.
Seth receives from the Archangel Michael a branch of the Tree of
Knowledge to plant in Adam’s grave, and is told that when it should
bear fruit Adam would recover. Out of Adam’s grave grows the Tree,
which Solomon hews down for the Temple. The workmen cannot so adapt it,
and it is used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, crossing
it, beholds a vision of Christ on the Cross, and informs Solomon
that when a certain person shall be suspended on that wood the fall
of the Jewish nation would be at hand. Solomon in alarm buries the
wood, and then springs over it the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before
the crucifixion the tree floated on the water, and ultimately, as a
cross, bore its fruit. The Jews concealed the Cross, while pagans
built a Temple of Venus on the spot where it stood. Helena, mother of
Constantine, having sentenced a Jew to torture and death, remits the
punishment on condition that he will inform her where the Cross is. Out
of the three found the true one manifests itself by performing cures.
Thus the Cross itself was a holy immortal Wanderer, with the branded
Jew ever beside it, seeking to destroy or bury it.
Race-hatred had much to do with the shaping of this theology, which
anathematised the race from whose primitive superstitions it was
chiefly borrowed, without discrimination or comprehension.
The “anti-Semitic” venom crept for ages through the veins of
Christendom. Fed by millions of pulpits the deadly stream percolated
through the world, and a consistent theory concerning the Jews was
formed, not very different from that which at length appeared in
Swedenborg’s pious phantasmagoria. In the history of Israel, says
Mr. White, Swedenborg “sees nothing but selfish Jacob over and over
again; and throughout the _Arcana Celestia_ he pursues the Jews with
one whip of epithets as the basest of mankind.”[24] The Jewish race
was “chosen” by God not because of their excellence, but for their
baseness: their lack of interior religion made them fit actors in a
drama where literalness was needed; their sensuality adapted them to be
the instrument of incarnation; and Jesus was born of a Jewish mother
because he could go no lower! “In that body, whose every faculty was
an avenue to the Hells, he met as on a battle-field the Powers of Evil
and Darkness and subdued them.” A fine offset this to the late Lord
Beaconsfield’s proud reflection that the majority of Christendom hold
a Jewess to be Queen of Heaven! It is true that Mary was excepted by
Christendom from the general curse which it saw resting upon the Jewish
race; but her exaltation, in the fifth century, was largely due to
legends of the Jews, which represented her as an unchaste woman. Her
apotheosis among Christians was the other side of her condemnation
by the Jews; their vision of her in Hell was replied to in the story
of her Assumption. The Jews were never benefited by any of the holy
personages transmitted from their race for the homage of Christendom.
They were held to be the official persecutors and crucifiers of such as
were divinely sent unto them: whatever the light seen in their history,
the only credit of the Jews was to lie under the shadow it cast.
It was largely through the Miracle Plays that hatred of the Jews,
diffused by mediæval homilies, gained the shape which proved so fatal
to the Jews. On the stage the holy drama represented a great struggle
between the hosts of Heaven and Hell, of which the scene was on earth.
In that drama the Jewish race was not merely the “heavy villain,” it
was the incarnation of all devils. It would appear that for a thousand
years no Christian regarded any Jew as a man at all. In those excesses
of cruelty too wild to be now comprehensible--when every European
river ran red with Jewish blood, when Jews’ eyes and teeth were plucked
out and their bodies burnt as torches in saturnalia beside which those
of Nero with his Christian martyrs were trivial--it is plain that
there was an epidemic possession wrought by the long education of the
people in the belief that the Jews, from a supernatural, had become an
infranatural people.
They from whose ears the reported denunciations of the Jews by
Jesus--as “of their Father the Devil,” as “vipers,” “children of
Hell”--were never suffered to die out, and who avenged the crucifixion
of one man by the crucifixion of a race for centuries, are condemned
for inhumanity. But the charge is inexact. They were as charitable as
are their posterity to those whom they regarded as human beings. Their
theology had dehumanised the Jews, and its progress was traced in
Christian inhumanities wrought in pious zeal for the Trinity. It was
not a suspicion admitted into any mind, thus sophisticated, that it was
a man against whom Judas and the Jews had raised their hand. It was
against the Eternal Majesty. That they saw as the obvious functional
work of Satan. It was the culminating attack in an eternal war against
God. Hence those perpetual dooms beheld overhanging all concerned in
the crucifixion, which denoted the unpardonable and everlasting nature
of the offence against the eternal Avenger of his honour. It is only
the God of Theology whose vengeance never sleeps nor ends with any
generation, whose wrath is fresh every day, and his hell eternal. Only
when man has had his human heart dexterously removed, and has become
the changeling of some vampyre Phantasm he coweringly adores, could he
be the instrument of the crimes that Christianity has committed against
humanity.
Seven times shall Cain be avenged, seventy and seven times Lamech, ran
the old song; but Jesus said, seventy times seven shalt thou forgive.
The human Jesus was speedily overlaid and lost beneath the myths that
gathered around the passive Jesus--the babe, the dead body. No holiday
was appointed for the Sermon on the Mount, nor was there any Festival
of the Golden Rule.
IX.
THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE.
It is related in the _Legenda Aurea_ of John Capgrave that St.
Brendain, on his famous voyage, came to an island filled with beautiful
birds whose music entranced the souls of listeners. The birds told the
saint that they had been angels; when the rebel angels plotted their
designs in heaven they had been tempted by the Archfiend to join his
party; they did not yield, but dallied with the temptation, and when
the wicked beings were cast into the sea of fire, they were transformed
into birds. They sang hymns of joy, awaiting their release.
On the other hand, the ill-omened “Seven Whistlers” or “Seven Plovers,”
of English superstition are said to have been Jews who assisted in the
crucifixion of Jesus.
These birds are types of the fables that flitted about the world
in the Middle Ages, each the transformation and diminution of their
like which had been set free by the decay of both European and Jewish
mythology. Christianity had preserved both with care. The Jewish
mythology it had disintegrated and recombined for its own supernatural
authentication; to the European deities it had given a new lease of
life by degrading them to devils, affirming their power to haunt and
harm their former worshippers. If there had been any kindly attributes
or pleasant tales associated with these deities they were transferred
to the Christian saints; if any evils had been told of such, they were
intensified under the sweeping anathema of the new religion.
Into this miasmatic atmosphere anti-Semitic prejudice and theology were
diffused. The same process as that just mentioned concerning “paganism”
presently overtook the Jews. When all hope of changing or exterminating
it had passed away the theological theory was naturally formed by which
all the good in the Jewish system was transferred to Christianity,
and everything repulsive was diabolised. Unfortunately for the Jews
their anathema came later than that which had degraded the deities and
beliefs of pagan Europe; their sacred forms, rites, superstitions were
the more vivid; so that the fading phantoms of European mythology
were able to acquire new life by union with the fresher ones imported
from the East. In this way the demons, gnomes, witches, which, from
representing the majesty as well as the menace of nature, had been
doomed to bear responsibility for all its cruelties, now came to nestle
with the Jews. These were already the normal scapegoat for the fall of
man and martyrdoms of Christians; now there entered into them a troop
of imaginary horrors worse than any known to their most barbarous days.
Of these a few characteristic examples may be selected from the very
large number known to every student of folk-lore.
The periodical assemblies of witches believed to occur in various wild
places were called “Witches’ Sabbaths,” because Jews were supposed
to be the chief attendants at them. They there received their wages
for supporting the kingdom of Antichrist. They celebrated a grand
mass before the Devil. The blood of Christian children was said to be
essential to their sacrifices. In some regions where, under the ancient
religion, the effigy of winter had been burnt on one or another day
of spring, it became the custom to burn it on Good Friday and under
the name of Judas. The ceremony of scourging and burning Judas still
takes place annually in the London Docks. In Spain it is considered
necessary to spit after pronouncing the word “Jew;” and from that
country the paganised effigies of that people have spread through
distant regions of the world. In some regions (as Oldenberg) the
birthday of poor everlasting Judas is said to be February 14, in others
(as Franconia) it is fixed as April 1, and these days are unlucky.
The stigma of Iscariot passed upon certain trees, as the aspen, which
was said to tremble perpetually because he hung upon it; and the
Judas-tree, with its blood-drop blossoms. In the Bergstrasse, or high
road between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, the peasantry still believe that
every Jew possesses the “evil eye,” and that if a sick person wishes
to die swiftly he must get a Rabbi to pray for his convalescence. In
sundry places Jews are believed able to foretell the weather by means
of dividing a loaf of bread, putting the parts together again, and
shoving it with a mysterious word into an oven. They are also believed
to spread diseases by spells written in Hebrew on bits of paper, and
to deal in such charms. In some regions noises heard in mines were
indifferently attributed to kobolds, or to the ghosts of Jews believed
to have been made to work in them as slaves by the Romans. In East
Friesland it is considered very unlucky to meet a Jew first in the
morning; if a Jew is the first to enter one’s house on Monday, or
even to look into the window, it renders the whole week unlucky to the
house, and was once an offence that might be prosecuted.[25] Other
Jews impaled in the ever-repeated Christian legend took on, in the
popular imagination, the diabolical forms into which the pagan deities
had been degraded by missionaries. In storms Herod was said still to
hunt the Innocents. The Perigord peasant names the fierce thunderstorm
“la chasse Herode.” This was probably an ingenious development of the
Herr-Rote, or Haar-Rote, the red-haired demon-huntsman. Associated
with him was Herodias. Grimm says that the Italians sometimes identify
their misshapen fairy Befana--a terror to children, who has sprung out
of Epiphania--as Herod’s daughter (Salome); so that both mother and
daughter were made into evil wanderers.[26] Herodias, who prompted her
daughter to demand the head of John the Baptist, was associated with
Diana and Holda in the nocturnal expeditions of demons and witches.
She was at the head of an aerial host of such. Only from midnight to
cockcrow can she rest, and then sits upon oaks and hazel-trees. She was
said to have an unrequited passion for John, and when his head was
brought in on a charger would have kissed it, but it recoiled and blew
upon her, and she was whirled into the air, where she wanders. In Lower
Saxony whirlwinds are accounted for by the dancing of Herodias, as
elsewhere to that of the devil. Herod and Herodias are said by Josephus
to have been banished to Lyons, and eventually to have died in Spain;
perhaps this may account for the special prominence she holds in the
folk-lore of Spanish America. In Mexico the puppet Herodias dances in
a kind of Punch and Judy show in Holy Week, to the music of rattles
made of “Judas bones.” In Eugene Sue’s _Wandering Jew_ Herodias appears
in Arctic America. M. Gaston Paris cites several Italian proverbs in
which Judas and Malchus are united (as in Sicily, _lu Juda--Marcu_) to
characterise an ugly or unpleasant countenance. It has been thought
(though I have not investigated the matter) that our puppet-show,
_Punch and Judy_, is a distant outcome of an old play, _Pontius cum
Judæis_, in which the Jews were severely handled by the pro-consul.
X.
THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER.
There is one class of survivals from the fatalistic ideas of all
so-called paganisms which have always been very strong in the popular
mind of Europe. It was a creed in which all ancient faiths converged,
that an irresistible power was lodged in any officially-uttered curse.
The word once solemnly spoken, became the weird, the fatum, and not
even the tongue that spake could revoke it. Oftenest the dooms that
represented this belief in the Middle Ages were supposed to come
from Heaven in response to some defiant invocation, or blasphemous
challenge like that of the Flying Dutchman. It is a notable fact for
the antiquarian that in the year 1881 the courts of England should be
trying a case involving the question of whether a lecturer took out his
watch and gave the deity, whose existence he denied, five minutes to
strike him dead. That is an old myth normally fixed on misbelievers;
and it is probable that the motives for selecting that particular
slander for judicial denial, if traced out, would be found connected
with the ancient superstition that such words must have the eternal
effect of real natural forces. From the ancient patriarchalism, which
has so many political and social survivals in Europe, came the idea
that a father’s curse (or blessing) carried with it the fatal forces of
the universe. More universal still was the potency supposed to attend
the word of a priest, however casual. This notion is still met with in
the many stories of persons said to have died soon after ridiculing the
proceedings of “revivalists.”
Grässe has collected some examples of such superstitions in Europe,
beginning so far back as the legend of Domitilla, the grand-daughter of
Domitian. In her room, after she had become a Christian, her husband
introduced dancers to win her back to the world and to himself: he
began showing them how to dance, but could not stop; and after dancing
two days and nights, died. Such “dances” are now familiar in folk-lore,
and are associated with some of the stone circles of England. In
Kolbeck, near Halbustadt, there is a legend that, in the year 1012,
a peasant named Albrecht and fifteen others who danced before the
Church on Christmas while Mass was going on, were ordered by the priest
to dance for a year. The Bishop of Cologne had to come and release
these dancers, who had worn a deep hole in the ground. In the same
vein is the story of “the merry smith of Jüterbogk,” a small survival
of Sisyphus. A remarkable story of this kind is that of Freiburg (A.
Müller, _Theatr. Freiburg Chron._, 1633). An irritable father, Lorent
Richter, ordered his son of fourteen years to do something: the boy
hesitated, standing in the middle of the room. “Cursed boy,” cried
the father, “may you stand there for ever!” The boy remained standing
there, propped by supports, and after many years the priests, by many
prayers, could only secure the small commutation of a removal to a
corner where he would not be so much in the way of the household. “At
last the kind God a little altered the punishment by allowing him
to sit during the last six months of the year, and also to lie in
a bed placed near him. When asked what he did, he answered that he
was punished by God the Lord for his sins; that he left all to His
will; and trusted in the merits of Christ to obtain final happiness.”
After seven years--a number associated with many famous sleepers--the
boy “was relieved, 11th Sept., 1552.” His footprints were pointed
out on the floor for a hundred years. The father had wished to
obliterate this memento of his anger, but the authorities decided that
the footprints should remain as a warning to wrathful parents and
disobedient children.
The great majority of “dooms” known to Northern paganism have exchanged
connotations with the legend of the Wandering Jew. The sentence
pronounced upon such royal huntsmen or robber-knights as Dyterbjernat
of Danzig, Diedrick of Bern, Duke Abel the fratricide (Schleswig), and
others, is usually of this character. In the Netherlands it is the
story of a son who refused to listen to his father’s Christian advice,
but called his dogs into the wood: the father cried, “Hunt, then, for
ever!” and so he hunts on, and his voice, mingled with the baying of
dogs, is heard in the woods about the Castle of Wynedal. In Thuringia,
it is Hakelnberg who would not listen to the priest, who bade him “hunt
until the last day.” These formulas of the curse are related to that
of the Jew legend: the primitive pagan legend is different, _e.g._ the
hunt long known as the Horlething, on the banks of the Wye. It was said
King Herla went to the marriage feast of a dwarf: when he returned to
his palace he found that he had been in the mountain with the dwarf
two hundred years, and was under a doom to ride on until the day of
judgment. The visit to the dwarfs festival simply meant a relapse into
paganism.
That the myth of the Wandering Jew was interwoven with that of the
Demon Huntsman of Germany (which is called Aaskarreya in Norway), there
can be no doubt. “Perhaps,” says Karl Blind, “one of the clearest
proofs of the phantom figure of the Wandering Jew having been grafted
upon that of the great Wanderer and World-hunter, Wodan, is to be
found in a tale of the Hartz Mountains. There it is said that the Wild
Huntsman careers ‘over the seven mountain-towns every seven years.’
The reason given for his ceaseless wanderings is, that ‘he would not
allow our Lord Jesus Christ to quench his thirst at a river, nor at a
water-trough for cattle, from both of which he drove him away, telling
him that he ought to drink from a horse-pond.’ For this reason the Wild
Huntsman must wander about for ever, and feed upon horseflesh. And
whoever calls out after him, when his ghostly chase comes by, will see
the Wild Huntsman turn round, and be compelled by him to eat horseflesh
too. No allusion whatever is made in this tale to a Jew, though the
name of Christ is pressed into it in a way very like the Ahasuerus
legend. We seem to get here a mythic rendering of the struggle between
the old Germanic faith and the Christian religion. The ‘horse-pond’
and the ‘horseflesh’ are, to all appearances, references to our
horse-worshipping, horse-sacrificing, horseflesh-eating forefathers,
who came to Britain under the leadership of Hengist and Horsa. To call
out after the eternal Huntsman entails the danger of being forced by
him to eat horseflesh--that is, to return to the old creed. The Holy
Supper of the Teutonic tribes consisted of horseflesh and mead. When
Christianity came in, the eating of horseflesh was abolished as a
heathen custom. But at German witches’ banquets--in other words, at
secret festive ceremonies in which the pagan traditions were still
kept up--there continued for a long time a custom of drinking from
horse-shoes.”[27]
We have in this sentence last quoted from Mr. Blind’s able article
a suggestion of the probable origin of the horse-shoe as a charm
against witches. To the pagan Teuton it was as sacred an emblem as to
the Christian his cross. While the Christians still believed in the
power of the Wild Huntsman and his train to work them mischief, they
might naturally show this symbol of pagan orthodoxy over their doors
to induce the witches to pass on and visit their wrath on the openly
disloyal.
This article in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ contains an original
speculation and theory concerning two remarkable problems connected
with our legend. How is it that the name Cartaphilus was replaced by
Ahasuerus? How did the “doorkeeper” of the thirteenth century become
the “shoemaker” of the sixteenth century legend? Mr. Blind, with a
creditable caution, suggests that the name may have been a modification
of As-Vidar. This god (_As_) Vidar was in the Scandinavian mythology
the symbol of everlasting force: he was the deity who was alone to
survive the universal destruction of Ragnarök, “Twilight of the Gods.”
In the Prose Edda it is written: “The Wolf (Fenris) swallows Odin, but
at that instant Vidar advances, and setting his foot on the monster’s
lower jaw, seizes the other with his hand, and thus tears and rends him
till he dies. Vidar is able to do this because he wears shoes for which
stuff has been gathering in all ages, namely, the shreds of leather
which are cut off to form the toes and heels of shoes; and it is on
this account that those who would render a service to the Æsir (gods)
should take care to throw such shreds away.” It is said there are (or
were) preserved in the Government Library at Berne traditional relics
left by the Wandering Jew, his staff and pair of shoes. These shoes are
said, by an early local authority, to be “uncommonly large and made of
a hundred snips--a shoemaker’s master-piece, because patched together
with the utmost labour, diligence, and cleverness out of so many shreds
of leather.” A similar pair of shoes are said to have also been left by
Ahasuerus at Ulm.
It may be remarked that the name given to the Wandering Jew in the
_Praxis Alchymine_ of Libavius, viz., Buttadæus, may possibly refer to
the boot (A. S. _butte_) of the Wanderer, and it may have been that
_deus_ was added. Whether it meant the “booted god,” or the man who
struck God with a boot, or _bouter dieu_ (to push God), must remain
doubtful. It is a striking coincidence, if no more, that, in Talmudic
legend, Enoch also was a shoemaker, who with every stitch exclaimed,
“The Lord and His Majesty be praised!”
The names of the Wandering Jew are characteristically various, not to
say vagarious; they are also sometimes puzzling. Cartaphilus is pretty
certainly κάρτα φίλος, in allusion to the “beloved” disciple; Ahasuerus
is perhaps the Hebrew form of Xerxes, though there is nothing in the
history of that king to connect him with the Wandering Jew. Several
give his name as Gregorius, through a mistake, as M. Paris has pointed
out, as to the meaning of Botoreius, who wrote that Jesus stopped “ante
tabernam gregorii illius;” the Turkish Spy names him Michob Ader.
One name popularly ascribed to him in Brussels is “Isaac Laquedem.”
Concerning this Grässe has a note in which he says, “I asked for an
explanation of the word, and my friend Dr. Böttcher, the celebrated
expert in Hebrew, gave me the following answer, ‘If the name Laquedem
is written and pronounced in French (Walloon) “Lakedem,” and is derived
from the Hebrew, it can scarcely be anything else but la-kĕdem, _i.e._,
“the former world” [belonging to an anterior world], in which case we
must say the use of the prefix “la” is without a parallel in names
of later Jews, and therefore the “la,” the French article, may be
considered due to a half-learned inventor of names (_vide_ Lacroix,
Lamarque, La Loresh. Wolf, _Bibl. Hebr._ iv. 812).’”
As for the name “Joseph,” given by the Armenian Bishop as the baptismal
name of Cartaphilus, there is evidence in the old Chronicle itself that
it was derived by association with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to
have wandered through a large part of the world and to have come to
Britain in the year 66, where his blossoming staff fixed the site of
Glastonbury Abbey.