The Wandering Jew. [Footnote 274]
[Footnote 274: Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. By S. Baring Gould, M.A., London, Oxford, and Cambridge, Rivingtons. 1866.]
There are certain popular fables which, in one shape or another, seem to have wandered all over the world, and to have planted themselves, and grown, and developed progeny in the folk-lore of nearly every nation. Of all these none has been more generally a favorite than the fiction of Time sparing in his flight some solitary human being, before whose eyes the centuries unroll their mighty panorama; cities and nations rise, flourish, and decay; changes pass over the face of nature herself; seas dry up and rocks crumble to dust; while for one man only age brings no decay and life seems to have no termination. The early Christian legends are full of such stories. There are rumors of mysterious witnesses, hidden for ages from the world's eyes, not dead but sleeping, who are to come forth in the last days of time, and bear testimony against Antichrist; and one of these was conjectured to be the apostle St. John, of whom our Lord said to St. Peter, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" So there was a belief that the beloved disciple still slept at Ephesus, awaiting the summons, and the earth above his breast heaved as he breathed. Joseph of Arimathea, according to another beautiful legend, was rewarded for the last tender offices which he performed for the dead Christ by perpetual life in the blessed city of Sarras, where he drew divine nourishment from the holy grail, that precious chalice which the Saviour used at the Last Supper, and which caught the blood that trickled from his side upon the cross. The poetical legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, who fled from the persecution of Decius to a cavern on Mount Celion, and slept there three hundred and sixty years, until God raised them up to confound a growing heresy against the immortality of the soul; and the still more beautiful story of the monk of Hildesheim, who, doubting how with God a thousand years could be as yesterday, listened to the melody of a bird in the greenwood during three minutes, and found that in those minutes three hundred years had flown away, are familiar to all our readers. But pagan literature also abounds in stories of miraculously long slumbers. The beautiful shepherd Endymion was condemned by Jupiter to perpetual sleep in a cavern of Mount Latmus; or, according to another form of the story, to a slumber of fifty years, at the end of which time he was to arise. The giant Enceladus was imprisoned under Mount Etna, and as often as he turned his weary body, the whole island of Sicily was shaken to its foundations. The epic poet Epimenides, while tending his sheep, retired one hot day into a cavern, and slept there fifty-seven years. This reminds one of the tale of Rip Van Winkle. The Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, so an old German fable relates, is waiting with six of his knights in the heart of a mountain in Thuringia, for the time to release Germany from bondage and raise it to the first place among nations. When his great red beard has wound itself thrice around the stone table at which he sits, he will awake and rush forth to do his appointed work. So, too, it was believed that Charlemagne survived in some mountain recess, and would appear again at the fulfilment of the days of Antichrist to avenge the blood of the saints. The British King Arthur, the Portuguese Don Sebastian, Ogier the Dane, and the three Tells of Switzerland were expected by the superstitious peasantry to reappear at some distant day and become the deliverers of their country; and there are even some remote parts of France where a popular belief survives that Napoleon Bonaparte is still living, and will put himself some day at the head of another victorious host. Who of us is not familiar with that pretty fairy tale of the sleeping beauty?
"Year after year unto her feet,
She lying on her couch alone,
Across the purple coverlet
The maiden's jet-black hair has grown.
......
"She sleeps: her breathings are not heard
In palace chambers far apart.
The fragrant tresses are not stirred
That lie upon her charmed heart.
She sleeps: on either hand upswells
The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest;
She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells
A perfect form in perfect rest."
And who of us in his childhood has not read with a delight which repeated perusals could not satiate of the coming of the fairy prince, who was fated, after a hundred years, to wake that sleeping palace into life, and bear away the happy princess far across the hills, "in that new world which is the old"?
"And o'er the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, across the day,
Through all the world she followed him."
These many stories are only the protean forms of one favorite popular conception; the idea of one individual standing still, while the world sweeps by, and either blest or curst with a perpetual renewal of youth, or else awaking out of a sleep of centuries to find creation wearing a new face and new generations acting out the great drama of history. The different modifications of the story seem to derive their peculiar character from the peculiarities of the time and country in which they originate. The pagan tendency to personify all the phenomena of nature is exemplified in the myth of Enceladus, under which were represented the throes of Mount Etna. The wild, warlike, and semi-pagan spirit of Germany, which peoples dark mountain recesses with mysterious forms, and fastens a legend to each frowning crag and almost inaccessible fastness, finds apt expression in the legend of the sleeping Barbarossa and his mailed companions. And how beautifully the piety of the monkish chroniclers has embellished the same fiction in the fables of the seven sleepers and the monk of Hildesheim! In the former of these two stories, however, it is worthy of remark that an actual fact has been blended with the fiction. The seven sleepers are real historical personages, and their names are enrolled in the list of canonized saints. They were martyrs whom the Emperor Decius caused to be walled up alive in a cave, where many generations afterward their relics were found; and this discovery of the relics has been amplified into an actual resuscitation of the living men. The narrative in this spurious form is given by Jacobus de Voragine in his Golden Legend, and was made the subject of a poem by Goethe. The German poet adds that there was a dog with the seven Christians, and that immediately after their awakening, as soon as they had been seen by the king and people of Ephesus, they disappeared for ever from the sight of man:
"The most blessed angel Gabriel,
By the will of God Almighty,
Walling up the cave for ever,
Led them into paradise."
The most remarkable of all the varieties of this fiction is the legend of the Wandering Jew. Like the story of St. John's sleep at Ephesus, it seems to be based upon a false interpretation of Scripture. "There are some of them standing here," said our Lord, "who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom," (St. Matt. xvi. 28.) And it was the old belief that this prophecy was being literally fulfilled in the person of a Jew who was wandering over the face of the earth, and would continue to wander until the day of judgment. The earliest mention of this mythical person occurs in Matthew Paris's Chronicle of English History, wherein he records that, in 1228, a certain Archbishop of Greater Armenia visited the abbey of St. Albans, on a pilgrimage to the shrines of the saints in England; and in the course of conversation he was asked "whether he had ever seen or heard any thing of Joseph, a man of whom there was much talk in the world, who, when our Lord suffered, was present and spoke to him, and who is still alive in evidence of the Christian faith; in reply to which, a knight in his retinue, who was his interpreter, replied, speaking in French, 'My lord well knows that man, and a little before he took his way to the western countries the said Joseph ate at the table of my lord the Archbishop of Armenia, and he has often seen and conversed with him.'" The archbishop went on to relate that, when Jesus had been delivered up to the Jews and they were dragging him out to be crucified, "Cartaphilus, a porter of the hall, in Pilate's service, as Jesus was going out of the door, impiously struck him on the back with his hand, and said in mockery, 'Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker, why do you loiter?' And Jesus, looking back on him with a severe countenance, said to him, 'I am going, and you shall wait till I return.' And according as our Lord said this Cartaphilus is still awaiting his return. At the time of our Lord's suffering he was thirty years old, and when he attains the age of a hundred years he always returns to the same age as he was when our Lord suffered. After Christ's death, when the Catholic faith gained ground, this Cartaphilus was baptized by Ananias, (who also baptized the apostle Paul,) and was called Joseph. He dwells in one or other divisions of Armenia, and in divers eastern countries, passing his time among the bishops and other prelates of the church; he is a man of holy conversation and religious; a man of few words, and very circumspect in his behavior; for he does not speak at all unless when questioned by the bishops and religious; and then he relates the events of olden times, and speaks of things which occurred at the suffering and resurrection of our Lord, and of the witnesses of the resurrection, namely, of those who rose with Christ, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto men. He also tells of the creed of the apostles, and of their separation and preaching. And all this," added the archbishop, (though we should think the statement rather superfluous,) "he relates without smiling or levity of conversation, as one who is well practised in sorrow and the fear of God, always looking forward with dread to the coming of Jesus Christ, lest at the last judgment he should find him in anger, whom, on his way to death, he had provoked to just vengeance." There is something not easy to explain in this story. Matthew Paris was an eye-witness of the events which he relates, so there can be little doubt that the Armenian prelate or his interpreter did really tell some such wondrous tale as this to the monks of St. Albans. Was it a pure invention? Or did the interpreter, by a familiar species of embellishment, represent his master as having seen the wandering Jew when he had only heard of him? Or had the archbishop been deceived by some impostor who had taken advantage of the popularity of the legend to palm himself off upon the credulous as its veritable hero? One thing at all events is clear from the narrative of the monk of St. Albans; and that is, that the fable was by no means a new one in his time, though he is the earliest known writer who has handed it down to us. The Jew, according to this narrative, refused all gifts that were offered him, being content with a little food and scanty raiment; but with all his humble piety he seems to have cherished an odd sort of pride; for it is related that "numbers came to him from different parts of the world, enjoying his society and conversation, and to them, if they are men of authority, he explains all doubts on the matters on which he is questioned."