Wandering Jew - On Stage, and In Other Media

On Stage, and In Other Media

Fromental Halévy's opera Le juif errant, based on the novel by Sue, was premiered at the Paris Opera (Salle Le Peletier) on 23 April 1852, and had 48 further performances over two seasons. The music was sufficiently popular to generate a Wandering Jew Mazurka, a Wandering Jew Waltz, and a Wandering Jew Polka.

A Hebrew-language play titled "The Eternal Jew" premiered at the Moscow Habimah Theatre in 1919 and was performed at The Habima Theatre in New York in 1926.

There have been several films on the topic of The Wandering Jew. In 1933, the Jewish Talking Picture Company released a Yiddish-language film entitled The Eternal Jew. A 1934 British version The Wandering Jew, starring Conrad Veidt in the title role, and entitled The Eternal Jew, is based on the stage play by E. Temple Thurston, and attempts to tell the legend literally, taking the Jew from Biblical times all the way to the Spanish Inquisition. This version was also made as The Wandering Jew a silent film in 1923, starring Matheson Lang in his original stage role. The play had been produced both in London and on Broadway. Co-produced in the U.S. by David Belasco, it had played on Broadway in 1921. The play "Spikenard", (1930) by C.E. Lawrence, has the Jew wander an unhabitanted Earth along with Judas and the Impenitent thief. Still another film version of the story, made in Italy in 1948, starred Vittorio Gassman. A propaganda 'documentary' film made in Germany in 1940 and entitled Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), reflected National Socialist anti-Semitism, linking the legend with alleged Jewish malpractices over the ages. In the 1988 film The Seventh Sign the Wandering Jew appears as a Father Lucci, who identifies himself as the centuries old Cartaphilus, Pilate's porter, who took part in the scourging of Jesus before his crucifixion.

The British actor Donald Wolfit made his debut as the Wandering Jew in a stage adaption in London in 1924. Glen Berger's 2001 play Underneath the Lintel is a monologue by a Dutch librarian who delves into the history of a book which is returned 113 years overdue, and becomes convinced that the borrower was the Wandering Jew.