Jew
Related: anti-semitism - ethnicity - genocide - Holocaust - race - Anne Frank - intellectuals
The Wandering Jew (1844) - Eugène Sue [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Wandering Jew (1844) was a "huge book by radical socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is the dispossessed laborer and his partner is downtrodden woman. Marx hated Sue as a writer (not without reason—less, for Sue, is not in more) but hell, it’s an important book." -- China Miéville via http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist/full/ [May 2006]
Definition
Jew is a term used to denote both followers of a religion and members of an ethnicity (adj. Jewish). In a religious sense, the term refers to followers of Judaism whether they are ethnically Jewish or not. In an ethnic sense, it refers to those who trace their ancestry from Heber (Gen 10:21) or the ancient patriarch Abraham through his son Isaac and in particular Jacob, the son of Issac. Ethnic Jews include both Observant Jews and those who, while not practicing Judaism as a religion, still identify themselves as Jews in a cultural or ethnic sense. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew, Feb 2004
Famous ethnic Jews
Despite the relatively small number of Jews worldwide, many influential thinkers and leaders in modern times have been ethnically Jewish. Ethnic Jews have stood at the basis of modern psychology, philosophy, socialism, capitalism and many important scientific and technological advances were first discovered by Jews.
The list of famous Jews includes Moses Maimonides (rabbi and philosopher), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher), Karl Marx (founder of Marxism, parents converted to Christianity when he was young), Benjamin Disraeli (baptised by parents into Anglican Church, British Prime Minister), Leon Trotsky (creator of the Russian Red Army and philosopher), Sigmund Freud (father of psychoanalysis), Albert Einstein (physicist who proposed the theory of relativity), Haym Solomon (financier of the American Revolution), Judah Benjamin (Confederate leader), Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), Theodor Herzl (founder of modern secular Zionism), Ludwig von Mises (economist), Ayn Rand (writer), Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher, and social theorist), Hyman Rickover (admiral, father of U.S. nuclear navy), David BenGurion (founding Prime Minister of Israel), Henry Kissinger (U.S. Secretary of State), Milton Friedman (economist), Kirk Douglas (movie actor), Steven Spielberg (movie producer), William Shatner (TV and movie actor), Michael Bloomberg (billionaire financier and New York City mayor), Moshe Feldenkrais (founder of the Feldenkrais Method), and Andrew Grove (co-founder and chairman of Intel). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew#Famous_ethnic_Jews [Jul 2004]
The Wandering Jew (1844) - Eugène Sue
The Wandering Jew is a figure from Christian folklore, a Jewish man who, according to legend, taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character; sometimes he is said to be a shoemaker or other tradesman, sometimes he is the doorman at Pontius Pilate's estate, and presumably a Roman rather than a Jew.
When some interpreters see the "wandering Jew" as a metaphorical personification of the Jewish diaspora, the subtext that links the two is that the destruction of Jerusalem was in retribution for Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion. A more allegorical view claims instead that the "wandering Jew" personifies any individual who has been made to see the error of his wickedness, if the mocking of the Passion epitomizes the callousness of mankind toward the suffering of human beings.
The Wandering Jew in literature
The figure of the doomed sinner, forced to wander without the hope of rest in death till the millennium, impressed itself upon the popular imagination, mainly with reference to the seeming immortality of the wandering Jewish people. These two aspects of the legend are represented in the different names given to the central figure. In German-speaking countries he is referred to as "Der Ewige Jude" (the immortal, or eternal, Jew), while in Romance-speaking countries he is known as "Le Juif Errant" and "L'Ebreo Errante"; the English form, probably because derived from the French, has followed the Romance. The Spanish name is Juan Espera en Dios, "John [who] waits for God", or, more commonly, "El Judío Errante". --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew [May 2006]
Eugene Sue wrote his Juif Errant in 1844
Eugène Sue's Le Juif Errant (The Wandering Jew) is a serially published novel, which attained incredible popularity in all of Paris, and beyond. Its publication, and that of its predecessor Les Mystères de Paris, single-handedly increased the circulation of the magazines in which they were published, influenced legislation on the Jesuits, and caused a general "jesuitophobie". The novel is over 800 pages long. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Juif_Errant [May 2006]
See also: Jew - fantastic fiction - science fiction books - Eugène Sue - Karl Marx
Les Juifs, le Monde et l'Argent (2002) - Jacques Attali
Les Juifs, le Monde et l'Argent (2002) - Jacques Attali [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The historical background is common knowledge. Jews were prevented from engaging in agriculture or working as artisans, with fields reserved for members of the professional guilds, and instead forced to loan money — an economic activity forbidden to the Church faithful. But Attali takes the history lesson up a notch by arguing that Jews engaged in financial affairs because they were eternal wanderers: From the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the Mark of Cain, through the journeys of the Patriarchs between the Euphrates and the Nile and the Israelites wandering through the Sinai Desert on their way to the Promised Land, to the exile of the Jews from their homeland and their dispersion among the nations of the world, money has always been the Jewish people's highly portable instrument of survival. And this wandering, Attali argues, may be responsible for another feature of Jewish life: the belief in one God. A nation continually on the move had no time or opportunity to become involved with the statues of a multitude of gods or for adopting the gods of the places where it briefly sojourned. --YOEL SHER