Of Jews and Jesuits in the Nineteenth-Century French and Spanish Feuilleton

The legend of Ahasuerus, a shoemaker cursed to wander until judgment day for refusing to help Jesus on his way to the crucifixion, began circulating in the thirteenth century. The tale has seen a multitude of variations since the Middle Ages, well documented in studies such as Marie-France Rouart's Le Mythe du juif errant (1988) and George K. Anderson's The Legend of the Wandering Jew (1965).¹ The character appeared in numerous works that were published prior to those examined here such as Christian Schubart's Der ewige Jude (1783), Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), William Godwin's St. Leon (1799), Jan Potocki's Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1797), George Croly's Salathiel (1828), Caroline Norton's The Undying One (1830), and Hans Christian Andersen's Ahasverus (1844), to name but a few. Ever since he first appeared, the wanderer has served as a conduit for the fears, controversies, and scourges of the age, bearing a heavy ideological burden that gradually had less to do with Jewishness or Catholic myth and more with the political vagaries of the states through which the wanderer traveled. As the fortunes of the Bourbon dynasties waxed and waned in France and Spain, the wanderer found his way into the longer prose narratives of the nineteenth century, helping to frame controversies over questions of royal and state power and the influence of the clergy over the lives of ordinary men. The ultimate outsider, with boundless knowledge and experience from over two thousand years of travels, he was called on to witness the chaotic passage from feudal to bourgeois society. Unlike the sometimes despised figures of folktale and legend or the countless wandering Jews of eighteenth-century chronicles whose wisdom and worldliness were sometimes admired, nineteenth-century wanderers tend to provoke pity rather than either revulsion or admiration. In some versions they have, owing to the emergence of a more secular and liberal age, logically become, as George K. Anderson suggests, humanized (202). For example, French versions of the myth, beginning with Quinet's Ahasvérus (1833), become more forgiving of the wandering Jew, in part because of the more positive view of Jews in general who were given full citizenship during the Revolution. However, there are numerous exceptions, such as J. Collin de Plancy's Légende du juif-errant (1852) and Antonio Bresciani's L'ebreo di Verona (1850).

What strikes readers of nineteenth-century versions of the tale is how diminished the Jew's role had become, despite appearing in the title of many works, and how important controversies surrounding the role of the Catholic Church, the abuses of ecclesiastical power, and the greed of monastic dynasties had become. Two serialized novels, one produced during the July Monarchy of Louis Phillipe in France and the other during the early years of the reign of Isabel II in Spain, inserted the legend of the wandering Jew into a propagandistic saga of Jesuit greed and perfidy. Comparing how the legend is dealt with in Eugène Sue's Le juif errant (1844) [The Wandering Jew]² to how it is treated in Estanislao de Cosca Vayo's El judío errante en España (1845–46) [The Wandering Jew in Spain], where it is all but eclipsed, sheds light on what Anderson referred to as the "regrettable" demotion of the Ahasuerus myth (232). But rather than doing the legend a disservice, novels like Le juif errant helped prolong the life of the legend, inspiring dozens of interpretations and translations and stimulating lively and rancorous debate that needed to take place in Spanish and French society in the mid-nineteenth century. Further, the reason for the success of the French version and the virtual disappearance of the Spanish version has to do with the differing fortunes of the political propaganda espoused in the two novels.

The Wandering Jew in France

On 25 August 1845, Sue completed his sprawling, drama-laden feuilleton Le juif errant, which was then published in the left-leaning Le Constitutionnel , which greatly benefited from the novel's instant success.^3...