Jews may aptly be called "wanderers on the earth," as Deasy
does (Bloom too thinks that they have "Wandered far away over
all the earth"), because for three thousand years their
history as a people has been defined by expulsion, exile, and
yearning for a homeland. Deasy is also thinking of the
legendary figure of the "wandering jew" who, because he
"sinned against the light"
(by taunting Christ on the way to the crucifixion, or striking
him, or denying his divinity), was condemned by God to wander
the earth until the second coming of Christ at the end of
time. This mythical figure was sometimes identified as a man
named Ahasuerus, a bit of lore that shows up in the Citizen's
mouth when he reviles Bloom in Cyclops: "Ahasuerus I
call him. Cursed by God."
In Calypso Bloom accurately thinks of his people
living from "captivity to captivity." Jewish
national identity begins in Exodus with the twelve
tribes of Israel living as slaves in Egypt in the second
millennium BCE and being delivered from their bondage by
Moses, who leads them back to their ancestral homeland. The
second part of Kings records another captivity, when
the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE conquered the
northern kingdom of Israel and resettled some thousands of
Samarians, who became known as the Ten Lost Tribes, in
northern Mesopotamia.
A still more culturally resonant exile, addressed in many
books of the Hebrew Bible, occurred in the 6th century BCE
when the Babylonians of southern Mesopotamia grew in power,
conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and deported
many thousands of Judeans to
Babylon. When the Persians ruler Cyrus the Great
defeated the Babylonians, he allowed the Hebrews to return to
the land of Israel and build the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
But in the first century AD, the Romans again destroyed the
temple and again drove the Jews out of their homeland.
These disastrous encounters with the Egyptian, Assyrian,
Babylonian, and Roman empires were followed by the long
European diaspora with its history of racial discriminations,
persecutions, massacres, and explusions, including Spain's
exile of all its remaining unconverted Jews at the end of the
15th century. Most of these Spanish Jews went to north Africa,
where they did not encounter markedly better treatment. In Cyclops
Bloom complains that Jews are "At this very moment . .
. sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle."
Gifford says of this that "Jews were not technically slaves in
Morocco in 1904, but the Moslem majority did subject them to
'compulsory service'; both men and women were compelled to do
all servile tasks, even on the Sabbath and holy days, and
these services could apparently be bought and sold in the
Moslem community."
The legend of the Wandering Jew goes far back in medieval
history and even has antecedents in late antiquity, when
certain Christian writers described the diasporic Jews as "a
new Cain," condemned to be "fugitives and wanderers upon the
earth" as a result of their criminal betrayal of Christ. This
history is well detailed in Salo Wittmayer Baron's A
Social and Religious History of the Jews: Citizen or Alien
Conjurer (Columbia UP, 1967). By the 13th century,
stories of an immortal Jew who had spoken to Jesus were
widespread in Europe, and from the 14th century to the present
day this figure has appeared in many different works of
literature.
Mulligan mockingly calls Bloom "The wandering jew"
in Scylla and Charybdis, explicitly introducing this
analogue into Joyce's story about a peripatetic Jewish
protagonist, and the Citizen's execration of Ahasuerus makes
clear the religious condemnation implicit in the figure. Circe
too plays on the anti-Semitic resonances, linking Bloom
with the far less acceptably Jewish Reuben J. Dodd: "Reuben
J Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand
open on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung
a pilgrim's wallet from which protrude promissory notes and
dishonoured bills." But Oxen of the Sun uses
kinder language to present the same mythical figure: "Of
Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had
fared."
Moses too was a wandering Jew, and his frequent association
with Bloom joins in the recuperative work of bringing positive
qualities to this mythic figure. In Aeolus Moses
appears as a Jewish leader whose rousing call to national
identity symbolically figures Ireland's own longing for the
restoration of its homeland. Joined with the nostos
theme of Homer's Odyssey, Moses gives homelessness a
good name.
The verb "wander" recurs incessantly in this novel. On
Christian lips it is charged with moral opprobrium, attached
to souls who lack a spiritual center in God: "by the power of
God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked
spirits who wander through the world for the
ruin of souls" (Hades); "And careworn
hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many
who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with
contrition" (Nausicaa); "for him too a word of pardon
even though he had erred and sinned and wandered"
(Nausicaa); "Thrust syphilis down to hell and with
him those other licensed spirits. Time, gents! Who
wander through the world" (Oxen of the Sun).
But when it enters the orbit of Bloom, "that vigilant
wanderer" (Oxen of the Sun), and Stephen,
"wandering Ængus of the birds," the word
gathers positive associations from minds devoted to exploring
the varieties of experience.
