utterance of Matt. xvi. 28 became “contaminated” by the legend of St Joseph of Arimathaea and the Holy Grail, and took the form given in Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris. But there is nothing to show the spread of this story among the people before the pamphlet of 1602, and it is difficult to see how this Carthaphilus could have given rise to the legend of the Wandering Jew, since he is not a Jew nor does he wander. The author of 1602 was probably acquainted either directly or indirectly with the story as given by Matthew Paris, since he gives almost the same account. But he gives a new name to his hero and directly connects his fate with Matt. xvi. 28.
Moncure D. Conway (Ency. Brit., 9th ed., xiii. 673) attempted to connect the legend of the Wandering Jew with a whole series of myths relating to never-dying heroes like King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa, the Seven Sleepers, and Thomas the Rhymer, not to speak of Rip Van Winkle. He goes even farther and connects our legend with mortals visiting earth, as the Yima in Parsism, and the “Ancient of Days” in the Books of Daniel and Enoch, and further connects the legend with the whole medieval tendency to regard the Jew as something uncanny and mysterious. But all these mythological explanations are supererogatory, since the actual legend in question can be definitely traced to the pamphlet of 1602. The same remark applies to the identification with the Mahommedan legend of the “eternal” Chadhir proposed by M. Lidzbarski (Zeit. f. Assyr. vii. 116) and I. Friedländer (Arch. f. Religionswiss. xiii. 110).
This combination of eternal punishment with restless wandering has attracted the imagination of innumerable writers in almost all European tongues. The Wandering Jew has been regarded as a symbolic figure representing the wanderings and sufferings of his race. The Germans have been especially attracted by the legend, which has been made the subject of poems by Schubart, Schreiber, W. Müller, Lenau, Chamisso, Schlegel, Mosen and Koehler, from which enumeration it will be seen that it was a particularly favourite subject with the Romantic school. They were perhaps influenced by the example of Goethe, who in his Autobiography describes, at considerable length, the plan of a poem he had designed on the Wandering Jew. More recently poems have been composed on the subject in German by Adolf Wilbrandt, Fritz Lienhard and others; in English by Robert Buchanan, and in Dutch by H. Heijermans. German novels also exist on the subject, by Franz Horn, Oeklers, Laun and Schucking, tragedies by Klinemann, Haushofer and Zedlitz. Sigismund Heller wrote three cantos on the wanderings of Ahasuerus, while Hans Andersen made of him an “Angel of Doubt.” Robert Hamerling even identifies Nero with the Wandering Jew. In France, E. Quinet published a prose epic on the subject in 1833, and Eugène Sue, in his best-known work, Le Juif errant (1844), introduces the Wandering Jew in the prologues of its different sections and associates him with the legend of Herodias. In modern times the subject has been made still more popular by Gustave Doré’s elaborate designs (1856), containing some of his most striking and imaginative work. Thus, probably, he suggested Grenier’s poem on the subject (1857).
In England, besides the ballads in Percy’s Reliques, William Godwin introduced the idea of an eternal witness of the course of civilization in his St Leon (1799), and his son-in-law Shelley introduces Ahasuerus in his Queen Mab. It is doubtful how far Swift derived his idea of the immortal Struldbrugs from the notion of the Wandering Jew. George Croly’s Salathiel, which appeared anonymously in 1828, gave a highly elaborate turn to the legend; this has been republished under the title Tarry Thou Till I Come.
Bibliography.—J. G. Th. Graesse, Die Sage vom ewigen Juden (1844); F. Helbig, Die Sage vom ewigen Juden (1874); G. Paris, Le Juif errant (1881); M. D. Conway, The Wandering Jew (1881); S. Morpugo, L’ Ebreo errante in Italia (1891); L. Neubaur, Die Sage vom ewigen Juden (2nd ed., 1893). The recent literary handling of the subject has been dealt with by J. Prost, Die Sage vom ewigen Juden in der neueren deutschen Literatur (1905); T. Kappstein, Ahasver in der Weltpoesie (1905). (J. Ja.)
JEWEL, JOHN (1522–1571), bishop of Salisbury, son of John
Jewel of Buden, Devonshire, was born on the 24th of May 1522,
and educated under his uncle John Bellamy, rector of Hampton,
and other private tutors until his matriculation at Merton
college, Oxford, in July 1535. There he was taught by John
Parkhurst, afterwards bishop of Norwich; but on the 19th of
August 1539 he was elected scholar of Corpus Christi college.
He graduated B.A. in 1540, and M.A. in 1545, having been
elected fellow of his college in 1542. He made some mark as
a teacher at Oxford, and became after 1547 one of the chief
disciples of Peter Martyr. He graduated B.D. in 1552, and was
made vicar of Sunningwell, and public orator of the university,
in which capacity he had to compose a congratulatory epistle to
Mary on her accession. In April 1554 he acted as notary to
Cranmer and Ridley at their disputation, but in the autumn he
signed a series of Catholic articles. He was, nevertheless, suspected,
fled to London, and thence to Frankfort, which he
reached in March 1555. There he sided with Coxe against
Knox, but soon joined Martyr at Strassburg, accompanied him
to Zurich, and then paid a visit to Padua.
Under Elizabeth’s succession he returned to England, and made earnest efforts to secure what would now be called a low-church settlement of religion. Indeed, his attitude was hardly distinguishable from that of the Elizabethan Puritans, but he gradually modified it under the stress of office and responsibility. He was one of the disputants selected to confute the Romanists at the conference of Westminster after Easter 1559; he was select preacher at St Paul’s cross on the 15th of June; and in the autumn was engaged as one of the royal visitors of the western counties. His congé d’élire as bishop of Salisbury had been made out on the 27th of July, but he was not consecrated until the 21st of January 1560. He now constituted himself the literary apologist of the Elizabethan settlement. He had on the 26th of November 1559, in a sermon at St Paul’s Cross, challenged all comers to prove the Roman case out of the Scriptures, or the councils or Fathers for the first six hundred years after Christ. He repeated his challenge in 1560, and Dr Henry Cole took it up. The chief result was Jewel’s Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae, published in 1562, which in Bishop Creighton’s words is “the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Church of Rome, and forms the groundwork of all subsequent controversy.” A more formidable antagonist than Cole now entered the lists in the person of Thomas Harding, an Oxford contemporary whom Jewel had deprived of his prebend in Salisbury Cathedral for recusancy. He published an elaborate and bitter Answer in 1564, to which Jewel issued a Reply in 1565. Harding followed with a Confutation, and Jewel with a Defence, of the Apology in 1566 and 1567; the combatants ranged over the whole field of the Anglo-Roman controversy, and Jewel’s theology was officially enjoined upon the Church by Archbishop Bancroft in the reign of James I. Latterly Jewel had been confronted with criticism from a different quarter. The arguments that had weaned him from his Zwinglian simplicity did not satisfy his unpromoted brethren, and Jewel had to refuse admission to a benefice to his friend Laurence Humphrey (q.v.), who would not wear a surplice. He was consulted a good deal by the government on such questions as England’s attitude towards the council of Trent, and political considerations made him more and more hostile to Puritan demands with which he had previously sympathized. He wrote an attack on Cartwright, which was published after his death by Whitgift. He died on the 23rd of September 1571, and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, where he had built a library. Hooker, who speaks of Jewel as “the worthiest divine that Christendom hath bred for some hundreds of years,” was one of the boys whom Jewel prepared in his house for the university; and his Ecclesiastical Polity owes much to Jewel’s training.
Jewel’s works were published in a folio in 1609 under the direction of Bancroft, who ordered the Apology to be placed in churches, in some of which it may still be seen chained to the lectern; other editions appeared at Oxford (1848, 8 vols.) and Cambridge (Parker Soc., 4 vols.). See also Gough’s Index to Parker Soc. Publ.; Strype’s Works (General Index); Acts of the Privy Council; Calendars of Domestic and Spanish State Papers; Dixon’s and Frere’s Church Histories; and Dictionary of National Biography (art. by Bishop Creighton). (A. F. P.)
