Ahasver—The Enigma of a Name

I truly wonder whether David Daube's 1955 short article, or rather note, titled "Ahasver" would have successfully passed peer and editorial review at JQR 2010.^,1 The article spans two pages and lacks footnotes. It suggests a thesis but does not prove its point. From my very first encounter with this text it indelibly captured my attention, and perhaps even more—my imagination.

When asked to reflect on an article from the early decades of JQR, I wavered between two possibilities. A tempting alternative was a review by the Hungarian folklorist Bernhard (Bernát) Heller (1871–1943) of Louis Ginzberg's epic and learned Legends of the Jews (1909–28).² Heller's meticulously documented laudation would have enabled me to share with readers some of the core issues concerning Ginzberg's intellectual links with contemporary folklore studies that I have recently researched for an article to appear in a volume dedicated to the centennial of Ginzberg's Legends. The parallel emergence of the Legends from the pen of a European-born and educated scholar and JQR's transfer from London to Philadelphia certainly could serve as an illuminating point of departure for commenting on the sprouting of Jewish studies in North America and its continuous communication both with the fading Wissenschaft des Judentums in Central Europe and the yet unborn mad'e ha-yahadut in Jerusalem.

But Daube's "Ahasver" was too tempting an option, beginning with its seductive opening sentences: "At least from the early 17th century the Wandering Jew is called Ahasver. Why? At first glance a less suitable name could hardly be imagined." Who says scholarly articles cannot be poetic? Daube boldly opened his essay with an almost perfect double iambic octameter—the longest acceptable verse meter—in which he tacitly declared the article's genre as a riddle to be solved. Riddles very often start with a descriptive statement, often a startling and almost upsetting one, and then culminate in an explicit question. Here it is the question of all questions: "Why?" The question that lurks in dirges and lamentations: "Why he? Why me? Why now? Why here?" as well as in lyrical love poems of longing: "Why did you leave? Why are you so far away?" And indeed the question about the Wandering Jew must have echoed multiple "whys" for Daube, who was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1909 (the initial publication date of Ginzberg's Legends, and barely a year before the American rebirth of the JQR). He left his country of birth in 1933 and returned there to successfully rescue his family in 1936 before embarking on his doctoral studies at Cambridge, England. At the time of the writing of said essay, Daube was serving as professor of jurisprudence at the University of Aberdeen, a move that he later explained in his Jottings was a result of his disagreement with his Cambridge colleagues on the issue of the Nuremberg trials.³ He was, however, soon (1955) called to Oxford upon the death of his former teacher, as the Regius Professor of Civil Law. From there, in 1970, following his heart he suddenly wandered further westward to Boalt Hall (the law school) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he later wrote The Sudden in Scriptures, one of his numerous, momentous works.⁴

In the "Ahasver" essay Daube proceeds with a pseudo-logical argument: The name was unsuitable for the Wandering Jew since its first bearer in the Hebrew Bible was a pagan and his role in postbiblical legend made his name unfit for any Jewish child. A similar claim had been made by the above-mentioned Bernhard Heller in his entry on the Wandering Jew in the (German) Encyclopedia Judaica of 1928. However, Heller's conclusion was that a Jewish origin of the tale was therefore impossible, whereas, Daube's conclusion, as we will see below, was more nuanced. Daube's article continues in a distinctly poetic idiom, the figure of adynaton ("A form of hyperbole that uses exaggeration so magnified as to express impossibility," en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adynaton) extant in North...