Chapter I: Preface

It might be offered as a sufficient reason for writing this book that no other treatise on the same subject exists in our language. But to this it may be added, that in pamphlets that have appeared in other languages, the relations of the Legend with Eastern mythology have been little considered, and its connection with Hebrew and Christian mythology almost ignored. Furthermore, those studies of the Legend which I have read consider it mainly as a curiosity. But the subject, as it appears to me, possesses a larger significance. Even the poems and romances it has suggested fail to render the still sad music of humanity pervading the variations of the folk-tale itself.

The Legend of the “Wandering Jew” is an example of how the folk-tale may sometimes be a mirror brought by Truth from the bottom of her well--the heart of the child-like world--wherein may be seen by reflection things that few eyes can look upon directly. The splendours now gathered around a triumphant Christ conceal from many the face of the changeling really there. But children, fools, and folk-lore speak the truth. The modern French song says, “Jesus, who is goodness itself, sighing said, Thou shalt march till Judgment Day.” There is a touch of sceptical sophistication here. But among the many earlier songs, ballads, stories, there is not one which betrays the faintest suspicion of anything in the curse on the Wanderer not characteristic of Jesus. No one tried to soften the case. Another widespread legend relates that once when Jesus begged bread of a baker, the dough prepared for him was reduced, before being placed in the oven, by the baker’s daughter; whereupon Jesus taught her the beauty of kindness by changing her into a deathless owl. Ophelia murmurs: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.” These last words would not have been inappropriate for the owl to address to a Christ whose transformation her own reflected. Is this only a fantastic tale? It is coinage of the creed that a human word or action may find its fair measure in ages of penalty. In it is the fictitious equation of every theology which unites ancient divinities not subject to moral laws with human ideals. The sacerdotal sorcery which for the lover of enemies substituted a curser of enemies is discoverable in the earliest Christian theology; but the working out of it among the masses is not told in histories. The true record remains to be written, and the materials for it are indestructibly preserved in such legendary lore as this of the Wandering Jew.

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