Wandering Jew

“Once the association of vagabondage [“traveling insanity”] with ‘ambulatory’ pathology had been made, it was only natural to go on to apply this latter model to the westward migration of the Jews after the Russian pogroms – that modern literalization of the legend of the Wandering Jew” (Goldstein, 539). Wandering Jew entered French psychiatric literature in 1887; Charcot went beyond the trope with a patient who was not only afflicted with the traveling neurosis but was also a Jew (540). In his medical thesis of 1893, Charcot’s student, Henry Meige took it one step further with a clinical study of Jewish nervousness in relation to the Wandering Jew in legend and iconography (541ff.): “Meige’s variant of it could be seen to serve the cause of a refurbished, modern anti-Semitism. The restless wanderings of the Jews, he seemed to say, had not been caused supernaturally, as punishment for their role as Christ-killers, but rather naturally, by their strong propensity to nervous illness (543).