APPENDIX
ANNOTATIONS
[1]—page 3.] The legend of the Wandering Jew first appeared in the thirteenth century, in the chronicle of Matthew of Paris, who professes to have received his information from an Armenian bishop to whom the hero had himself communicated the events. According to this version, he was a servant in the house of Pilate, named Cartaphilus, and gave Christ a blow as He was dragged out of the palace to execution. Another and perhaps more familiar version, probably of the fifteenth century and of German origin, states that he was a shoemaker named Ahasuerus. As Jesus bore His cross along the via dolorosa, staggering with pain and weakness, He leaned for a moment against the doorway of the rude shopkeeper, who, with cursing and bitterness, ordered him to “go on.” The sufferer looked upon him and said: “I go, but tarry thou till I come!” From that awful moment he found life a burden and death an impossibility. From time to time he was able to rejoice in gray hairs and a stooping form, but regularly these indications of the end would vanish, and clothed again in the form of youth, he felt the look and heard in his soul the dread voice bidding him wander on and on forever. All versions agree touching the verdict of Christ, that he should wander on earth till the Second Coming.
In its deepest import, “the tradition is simply a wonderful picture of a people—a people forever suffering and yet undying; forever doomed to wander; without a home or any fixed abiding-place; safe nowhere, and yet immortal; trampled and beaten; robbed and persecuted, and yet, strangely, living and flourishing in spite of all. The most vigorous, virile, and healthful people under the sun; the bravest and most enduring in battle or siege; the most patriotic and loyal of all peoples, they stedfastly, through all their wanderings and sorrows, cling to a land which is but a memory or a dream.”
In this story, Dr. Croly adds to the typical traditions, peculiar features of his own. Having such a hold on popular imagination, the Wandering Jew has figured very largely in fiction, particularly in the works of A. W. Schlegel, Klingemann, Béranger, Eugene Sue, Hans Christian Andersen, and others.
[2]—page 11.] The Mount of Corruption lay to the south of Jerusalem, across the Valley of Hinnom. Its summit looks down upon the spot in connection with which the Jewish ideas of the future life of the wicked were formed. The valley, named, according to Dean Stanley, from “some ancient hero, the son of Hinnom,” is first mentioned in Joshua (xv. 8; xviii. 16), in marking out the boundary-line between Judah and Benjamin. Solomon erected high places there for Moloch (1 Kings xi. 7), whose horrid rites were revived by later idolatrous kings. Ahaz and Manassah made their children “pass through the fire” in this valley (2 Kings xvi. 3; 2 Chron. xxviii. 3; xxxiii. 6); and the fiendish custom of sacrificing infants to the fire-gods seems to have been kept up for some time in Tophet, its southeastern extremity (Jer. vii. 31; 2 Kings xxiii. 10). To put an end to these abominations, Josiah polluted the place to render it ceremonially unclean (2 Kings xxiii. 10, 13, 14; 2 Chron. xxxiv. 4, 5), and it became the common cesspool of the city, and the laystall where all the solid filth was collected.