The Wandering Jews (review)

Novelist and journalist Joseph Roth published The Wandering Jews in 1937. In his preface to a second edition, included in this English translation by Michael Hoffman, Roth declared that his original hope was to shed light on the plight of European Jews. Noting that the tragedy of Eastern European Jews was a slow suffering in a social quagmire, whereas Jews of Germany and Western Europe enjoyed much more freedom in terms of social mobility and employment, he could see that the perils of National Socialism meant that in spite of this greater freedom, “German Jews are doubly unhappy: They not only suffer humiliation, they endure it. The ability to endure it is the greater part of their tragedy.” Roth died in 1939; his comparisons among Jews of Germany, Austria, France, and Eastern Europe have become refocused through our post-World War Two historical lens. We can see only in terms of the ultimate tragedies of Jews at the hands of Nazis, or Jews in the throes of Stalinist Russia. What then, is the value of Roth’s study?

The Wandering Jews is the work of a writer who sees more than the documentary evidence. He sees the human costs of rules and regulations, the resilience of a people whose abilities are quashed by restrictive social and legal doctrine. Out of the description of the different conditions to which Jews were subject, one has glimpses of the kinds of lives led by Jews, and the pressures put upon individuals to retain their religious devotion. “Half a Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers.” Roth aimed to describe the reception found by Jews as they moved among the nation-states of Europe. His ultimate conclusion was a three part pessimism: First, that Zionism would only result in “a partial solution to the Jewish question”; second, that there is no true equality and freedom for Jews possible without individual nations’ “own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others.” And third, “It is—failing some divine intervention—hardly possible to believe that the ‘host-nations’ will find such freedom and such dignity.”

Admitting the impossibility of transcending our post-holocaust mind-set, it’s easier to see Roth’s book as a complement to the work of Roman Vishniac. The photographs in Vishniac’s Vanished World evoke both the spiritual fervor of pre-war Jewish existence and the sad and impoverished reality of so many lives perishing in shtetls. Roth’s work describes, in seemingly sweeping generalizations, how people are processed through the emerging bureaucracies of central Europe. As a people margin alized, Jews are forever on the move. When they have the wherewithal, Jews search for a place where the rhetoric of post-Enlightenment citizenship might accord with reality in socioeconomic terms. This is something which remains a mystery to this day. The world, says Roth, “never asks the wanderer where he’s going, only ever where he’s come from. And what matters to the wanderer is his destination, not his point of departure.” Only in America “. . . to some extent, the reality does correspond to the symbol [the statue of Liberty]. Not because they really are all that serious about liberty in the new country, but because they have people who are more Jewish than the Jews, which is to say the Negroes.”

Roth’s prescience is poignant. What he has grasped, through the study of his own people, are some truths that are larger than just Jewish questions. He penetrates to the heart of human relations in contemporary times. People are more easily aggrandized by the suffering of others than by any ideology, courtly, religious, or secular. And nowadays, the modern electronic idiom has allowed so many more people to be ethno graphically categorized that it’s easier than ever to identify others who can suffer for one’s own sins.