The Wandering Jews

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The Wandering Jews is a masterful work by Joseph Roth, a truly extraordinary writer. To read this work is to become its messenger. In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of a Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings as though awakening the memory of enlightened wanderers. Everything is here: the love of an engulfed Jewish world, beautiful and moving; the passion for the wisdom of its inhabitants; the quest of the sacred by its brothers and sisters seeking a bright spot, a little peace, and, above all, the burning words that endure while all else has vanished into the madness and despair of mankind.

The Wandering Jews shows a side of Joseph Roth that has not yet been seen in English: the essayist, the analyst of contemporary life, the marshaler of arguments (and to a lesser degree, of facts and figures), the rhetorician, the pas sionate, orderly, and mobile “argufier.” Admirers of Roth’s fiction may be surprised at the brilliance and forcefulness of the intellect at work here — I know I was. The distinguished German critic Walter Jens describedThe Wandering Jews as the best book on its subject in German. I am astonished that, in three-quarters of a century, there seems, until now, to have been no English translation of it.

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