Melmoth Irreconcilable? Supersessionism and Jewish and Christian Responses to the Wandering Jew Legend

Abstract

Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) draws from the legend of the Wandering Jew, infusing the figure with Faustian characteristics in an evolution already begun in William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799). Maturin’s Melmoth also reflects the anti-Judaism inherent in the Wandering Jew legend, especially supersessionism, which views Christianity as the true fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. The influence of supersessionism endures in discernible, but very different forms, in works influenced by Melmoth in French and in Yiddish. Drawing on Carol Davison’s analysis of Gothic antisemitism and Karen Grumberg’s important exploration of ‘Hebrew Gothic’, this essay discusses how Jewish writers, including Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981), a poet of Yiddish and Hebrew from Lviv, Polish-born Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch (1880–1957), and contemporary U.S. novelist Dara Horn (b. 1977) have appropriated and adapted the legend of the eternal wanderer in ways that could be seen as reflecting a distinctly Jewish response to the gothic.