A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

The library of the Wandering Jew
The numinous library

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see,

it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice

as fast as that.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2

WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, my family spent a summer in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a postcard Alpine village with geranium-filled balconies, heart-shaped openings in the shutters, and orange cows that waddled through the little streets at dusk, sounding their copper bells. In those days, I had no sense of my social or cultural identity: I didn’t know that my family was Jewish, and therefore I had no notion of how strange it was for a Jewish family to choose, as a holiday destination less than a decade after the war, a village that had been one of Hitler’s favorite haunts. Deep-blue woods rose on the surrounding slopes, and often we trekked up the shaded paths to one of the hilltops for a picnic. One of these paths was a via Crucis, each station sculpted in wood and set high up on a pole: fourteen little scenes that led, as through a comic strip, from Christ’s trial and sentencing to the laying out of his body in the tomb. My nurse (a Czech Jew who had escaped the Nazis, and who possessed little imagination and less humor) knew the story of the Passion only vaguely, and her explanation of the various images never quite satisfied me. One scene, however, that of Christ’s third fall, she seemed to know well. Christ, having stumbled twice under the weight of the Cross, stumbles once more, this time by the door of a Jewish cobbler called Ahasuerus. The cobbler pitilessly pushes Christ away, telling him to move on. “I will move on,” Christ answers, “but you will tarry till I come!” From that day onwards, Ahasuerus is condemned to wander the earth and is only allowed to stop here and there for short respites. His shoes and his clothes never wear out completely, and every hundred years he is miraculously rejuvenated. His beard hangs down to his feet, he carries five coins in his pocket that match the five wounds of the man he offended, and he is able to speak every language in the world. Since he is a little over two thousand years old, he has witnessed countless events of historical importance and knows every story there is to tell.

Though the Eternal Wanderer, condemned because of a sin committed or a promise not kept, has a few precursors in Jewish, Islamic, and early Christian and even Buddhist literature, the story as we know it first makes its appearance some time in the thirteenth century. The earliest datable telling is Italian, tucked away in a Bolognese chronicle spanning the years 781 to 1228. In 1223, according to the chronicle, a group of pilgrims arrived at the abbey of Ferrara and informed the abbot that when traveling in Armenia, they had met a certain Jew who had revealed to them that he had been present at the Passion and had driven Christ from his door, and was thus cursed till the Second Coming. “This Jew,” the chronicle explains, “is said, every hundred years, to be made young to the age of thirty, and he cannot die until the Lord returns.”

Five years after the Italian chronicle, Roger of Wendover, an Englishman staying at the monastery of Saint Albans, northwest of London, described a similar encounter in his Flores historiarum. Obviously based on the Bolognese account, Wendover’s story, told in much greater detail, was considered for centuries to be the authentic one, though the name of the man and the circumstances of his curse differ from the version we know today. According to Wendover, in 1228 an Armenian bishop visiting Saint Albans told his hosts that back in Armenia, a very pious man named Joseph (nothing is said of his being Jewish) had often eaten at the bishop’s table. This Joseph had been present at the trial of Christ, and when, after Pilate’s judgment, Christ was dragged away to be crucified, one of Pilate’s porters, a certain Cartaphilus, struck him on the back with his hand and said mockingly: “Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker; why do you loiter?” And Jesus, looking on him with severity, replied, “I’m going, and you will wait till I return.” After Christ’s death, Cartaphilus was baptized by Ananias (who also baptized the apostle Paul) and was called Joseph. He lives mainly in Armenia, preaches the word of the Lord, and places his hope of salvation on the fact that he sinned through ignorance.

Roger of Wendover’s chronicle gave rise to a number of variant versions. In the Mediterranean countries, Cartaphilus became Buttadeus (He Who Beats or Pushes God); in French, Boutedieu; in Italian, Botadeo, which in turn became Votadeo (Devoted to God), translated into Spanish as Juan Espera en Dios, into Portuguese as João Espera em Dios, and again into Italian, this time as Giovanni Servo di Dio. Under these various names, the Wandering Jew appears in the work of many major Western writers, from Chaucer to Cervantes, from Francisco Rodrigues Lobo to Mark Twain, from Eugène Sue to Fruttero & Lucentini.

The most influential of all the early versions of the legend, in that it lent the Wandering Jew a tangible contemporary presence, was a small German pamphlet published in 1602 under the title ????? Beschreibung und Erzehlung [sic] von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus (Short Description and Narrative of a Jew Called Ahasuerus). It tells how the bishop of Schleswig, in his youth, had visited Hamburg in the year 1542 and there had seen in church one Sunday “a man who was a very tall person, with long hair reaching down over his shoulders, standing barefoot by the chancel.” The soles of his feet were hard as horn, and so thick that one could measure them with two fingers held across. The stranger turned out to be Ahasuerus, the Jew who drove Christ away from his door. He told the bishop that at the time of Christ’s Passion he was a shoemaker, and after he was cursed he had wandered without respite through the world. To the bishop’s astonishment, Ahasuerus was able to describe in detail “the lives, sufferings, and deaths of the holy apostles.” Years later, in 1575, the Schleswig ambassadors to Spain reported back to the bishop that they had seen a stranger with similar traits in Madrid, and he spoke good Spanish. (Later versions lend him the power to speak all the languages that sprang up in Babel.) “What are we to think of this man?” concludes the pamphlet. “One may be free in his judgment. The works of God are wonderful and inscrutable, and as time goes on they will be more so, and more things hitherto hidden will be revealed, particularly … on the approaching Day of Judgment and end of the world.”

The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I did not feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly, to visit every country in the world and to meet all sorts of extraordinary people; above all, to be able to read any book that fell into my hands. Until the age of eight, my only languages were English and German. I had enviously scrutinized the Hebrew letters in my father’s coffee-table Haggadah, and the Arabic inscriptions on the boxes of Egyptian dates that my mother ordered from Cairo, and the Spanish words in the storybooks sent to me from Buenos Aires by an enterprising aunt who hoped they would encourage me to learn my native language. All these scripts were as tantalizing and mysterious as the secret codes that appeared in the Sherlock Holmes stories. I envied the Wandering Jew’s ability to read in the universal library.

Because behind every idea of universality lies that of the knowledge of that universality. Behind every overwhelming nightmare of an almost infinite universe lies the mad dream of Babel, to reach its unattainable limit, and the mad dream of Alexandria, to hold under one roof all that can be known of its mysterious nature. A blend of Babel and Alexandria, every library, however small, is a universal library in potentia, since every book declares its lineage of all other books, and every shelf must admit its helplessness to contain them. The essence of a library is that it humbly and magnificently proclaims at the same time its ambitions and its shortcomings. Every time a reader opens a book on the first page, he is opening the countless series of books that line our shelves from the morning on which writing was invented to the last afternoon of the future. It is all there, every story, every experience, every terrible and glorious secret: we lack only the perspicacity, the patience, the strength, the space, the time. All of us, except the Wandering Jew.

To see the Wandering Jew’s fate not as a curse but as a blessing may be less odd than we might think. Two conflicting impulses rule our short time on earth: one draws us forward, towards the distant horizon, curious to find out what awaits beyond; the other roots us to one place and weds us to one sky. Both impulses are ours, define us as human beings as much as self-consciousness and its corollary, language. The impulse to move on and the impulse to stand still shape our sense of place; the urge to know who we are and the urge to question that knowledge define our sense of time.

Stateless wanderers and city dwellers, cattle herders and crop farmers, explorers and householders (or, in literary terms, Enkidu and Gilgamesh, Cain and Abel, Odysseus and Penelope) have, throughout time, embodied these two longings, one for what lies outside, the other for what lies within. And two moments in Christ’s Passion, two stations in his via Crucis, symbolize, I think, these opposing forces. The moving and the questioning are acted out in the ninth station, when the meeting with Ahasuerus takes place; the standing still and the mirroring of self occur in the sixth station, when Veronica places a cloth on Christ’s agonized face and finds his traits miraculously embedded in the fabric.

These vital forces compete with and complement each other. To move away from the place we call ours allows us a better sense of our true identity but at the same time distracts us from self-reflection; to sit at a steadfast point helps us unveil that identity in communion with the numinous but also renders the task impossible by blinding us to what defines us in the surrounding, tangible world. We must move to meet those others who provide the shifting mirrors by means of which we piece together our self-portrait. And yet there must be a steadfast place in which we can stand and, by seeing what Yeats called “the face I had before the world was made,” pronounce the word I.

As a child, I made no clear distinction between my own identity and that which books created for me. What I mean is that I didn’t consciously differentiate between the roles books invented for me (Sinbad or Crusoe) and those which became mine through family circumstances and genetic makeup. I was that first-person singular whom I read and dreamt about, and the world overflowed from the page into conventional reality and back again. Space was that which Sinbad’s magic carpet forded, and time the long years Crusoe spent waiting to be rescued. Later, when the differences between everyday life and nighttime stories crept up on me, I realized that in a certain measure I had been given, thanks to my books, the words that helped make the one meaningful and the other intelligible, and offered a degree of consolation for both.

It may be that, of all the instruments we have invented to help us along the path of self-discovery, books are the most useful, the most practical, the most concrete. By lending words to our bewildering experience, books become compasses that embody the four cardinal points: mobility and stability, self-reflection and the gift of looking outward. The old metaphor that sees the world as a book we read and in which we too are read merely recognizes this guiding, all-encompassing quality. In a book, no one point is exclusively the north, since whichever is chosen, the other three remain actively present. Even after Ulysses has returned home to sit by his quiet hearth, Ithaca remains a port of call on the shores of the beckoning sea, one among the countless volumes of the universal library; Dante, reaching the supreme vision of love holding bound “into one volume all the leaves whose flight / Is scattered through the universe around” (legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna), feels his will and his desire turned by that love “that moves the sun and the other stars” (ma già volgeva il mio disio e l’velie, / sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle). Likewise the reader who in the end finds the page written for him, a part of the vast, monstrous volume made up by all the libraries and lending sense to the universe.

And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong. In the most popular of the fictionalized versions, Eugène Sue’s nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton, Le Juif errant, the underlying theme is the wicked Jesuit plot to govern the world; the intellectual undertakings of the timeless Wanderer himself are not explored. On Ahasuerus’s ongoing journey (according to Sue) libraries are merely gathering rooms in aristocratic houses, and books either pious tracts or evil catalogues of sin under the guise of Jesuitical confession manuals.

But it is hard to believe that a merciful God would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting room without reading material. Instead, I imagine Ahasuerus granted two thousand years of itinerant reading; I imagine him visiting the world’s great libraries and bookstores, exhausting and replenishing his book bag with whatever new titles appear during his travels, from Marco Polo’s Il milione to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, from Xueqin Cao’s Dream of Red Mansions to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, in which (like all readers) he will find traces of his own curious destiny. Closer to our time, so as not be overladen, the Wanderer travels perhaps with an e-book, which he periodically recharges at an Internet café. And in his reader’s mind, the pages, printed and virtual, overlay and blend and create new stories from a colossal mass of remembered and half-remembered readings, multiplying his books by a thousand, again and again.

And yet, even in the Universal Library, the Wandering Jew, like the Ideal Reader, can never be satisfied, can never be limited by the circumference of one Ithaca, of one quest, of one book. For him the horizon of every page must always — thankfully, we say—exceed his wit and his grasp, so that every last page becomes the first. Because, as we have said, every book once ended leads to another lying patiently in wait, and every rereading grants the book a Protean new life. Ahasuerus’s library (which, like all the best readers, he carries mainly in his head) echoes through mirrored galleries that gloss and comment on every text. Every library is a library of memory: first, because it holds the experience of the past, and second, because it lives on in the mind of each of its readers.

The Jews know this practice well. Long after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Jews in scattered lands continued to carry out the appointed rituals, moving about in a space that no longer existed in stone and mortar, but only in the words set down for their guidance. That is the nature of all exile: it affirms the perseverance of memory. Expelled from their native al-Andalus, the Arabs of Córdoba, Toledo, and Granada continued to recite the verses that their Spanish landscape had inspired; as refugees in South America and Canada, the Armenians who survived the Turkish massacre rewrote the libraries destroyed in their Anatolian homeland; the survivors of the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina created publishing companies in their new countries for the literature that continued to be written in spite of the blood-imposed silence; in Paris, the Cubans who fled Castro’s regime borrowed the French language and tailored it to suit the retelling of their stories; in London, Mahmoud Darwich blended the Palestinian cadence of his verses with his readings of Borges, Paul Eluard, and Emily Dickinson; Vladimir Nabokov carried with him into his American exile the Russian dictionary which held, he said, the building blocks of all his childhood reading. The examples are, unfortunately, countless. The condemned crowds outside the city walls, Ahasuerus’s traveling companions in the detention camps of Calais, Lampedusa, Málaga, and scores of other places carrying with them the tattered libraries of their past, are so vast and varied that our protected inner citadels seem desolate and despoiled by comparison. In our anxiety to punish our enemies and protect ourselves, we have forgotten what it is that we are meant to be securing. In our exacerbated fear, we have allowed our own rights and freedoms to be distorted or curtailed. Instead of locking the other out we have locked ourselves in. We have forgotten that our libraries should open onto the world, not pretend to isolate us from it. We have become our own prisoners.

That is the deeper meaning of the Wandering Jew’s punishment, and its inevitable consequence, because no curse is ever one-sided. The legend of the man condemned to wander because of an uncharitable act became an uncharitable act in which many men were condemned to wander. Pogroms, expulsions, ethnic cleansings, genocides regardless of nationality or creed are the abominable extensions of this reading of the legend. But I suggest there might be others, like the one I intuited as a child when I first heard the story.

Eternal wandering as a punishment or as an enlightening exploration of the world; a fine and private place as a reward or as the dreaded and silent grave; the “other” as an anonymous enemy or as a reflection of ourselves; ourselves as single, solitary creatures or as part of a multitudinous, timeless, world-conscious being. Perhaps Christ’s words to the Jewish cobbler were meant not to punish but to teach that charity is of the essence, because, as we are told by Saint Paul, charity “rejoiceth in truth.” Perhaps what Christ meant was that in order to learn why the underdog must not be mocked and why the needy must not be pushed away from our door we must go out into the world and live among our neighbors and be the underdog, the needy, and understand that, whoever and wherever we are, we always wander outside a city wall.

I said that libraries carry in their essence the ambition of Babel to conquer space and of Alexandria to outlive time. I said that they are our collective memory, divided into the myriad memories of generations and generations of individual readers. I want to add that, as if the knowledge were embedded in their genes, libraries understand that the walls that surround them are mere scaffolding and that their place is the wide, open world of those readers who, in desert plains, first recorded their experience and imagination on hand-held clay tablets. Because of the power that reading grants us, to see with the eyes of others and speak with the tongues of the dead, because of the possibilities of enlightenment and of witnessing and of wisdom that libraries hold, our fears invented for us, as readers, the image of the ivory tower, of the Sleeping Beauty castle that keeps us bound by pretty words, far away from the world of reality. The contrary, of course, is true. Don Quixote’s reading may make him see windmills as giants and sheep as enemy soldiers, but these, as he himself secretly guesses, are only imaginary constructs, metaphors to better recognize the true suffering of flesh and blood, and the imperative to be just in an unjust world. Madame Bovary finds in books the ideal romances that she will never find in life, but that lying perfection lends her the strength to refuse un-happiness and subservience as her lifelong lot. Children know that Little Red Riding Hood isn’t real and that wolves don’t habitually haunt the woods, but the frightening story confirms an ineffable knowledge that childhood is a dangerous place where dark things roam and nothing is as it seems. Books force us to look upon the world.

But whether we wander to lose or to find ourselves, in libraries and on roads, depends on our own will, not on the hostile or welcoming cities that lie behind and before us. We can allow ourselves to be anchored in a shallow page, never moving forward or, like the Wandering Jew, steer forward with the flow, on and on, towards the enlarging horizon. “For my part,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most charitable of men, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”