Galit Hasan-Rokem Joban Transformations of the Wandering Jew in Joseph Roth’s Hiob and Der Leviathan 1 This essay addresses the encounter of a traditionally acquired biblical image of Job with the painfully accumulated experience of modernity in the work of Joseph Roth, which repeatedly enlists and creatively transforms the figure of Job and other elements from the Book of Job. A personal attitude towards bibli- cal figures marks the authorship of many modern authors, both those who were initiated into Scripture in early childhood and those who learned about such figures later. The backlighting of fictional figures by the aura of biblical individuals endows their individual fates with an extra portion of the surplus of meaning that has been identified as the hermeneutic potential of all litera- ture, in particular of the Holy Writ and of texts engendered under its inspira- tion.2 Joseph Roth was born in Brody, in the Austro-Hungarian province of Gali- cia, in 1894; he died in 1939, at the age of 44, in Paris, barely three months before the German assault on Poland. His death was technically due to over- consumption of alcohol. An East European Jew who wrote in German, his work accommodates the complexity of West and East; modernity and tradition; reli- gion, secularity and even profanation; Jewish, German, European. In certain works Roth’s incorporation of Job into his fictional world strongly alludes to a later literary figure, of European rather than ancient Near Eastern provenance, 1 Much of the research for the present essay was conducted under the generous auspices of Williams College, where I was fortunate to spend the fall of 2012 as the Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor. Special thanks to Alexandra Garbarini, Edan Dekel and Sarah Hammer- schlag for their friendship and inspiration. The final stages of thinking and writing took place in the spring of 2014, when I had the great pleasure to serve as Bildner Visiting Professor at the Bildner Center for Jewish Life at Rutgers University. I am grateful to Yael Zerubavel for her invitation, the intellectual esprit with which she led our research group on “Contested Memo- ries”, and our friendship of many years. Numerous friends and colleagues have commented, added and critiqued. Very special thanks to Ilana Pardes for her advice and to her and Leora Batnizky for their patience. 2 See for example Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth 1976; and Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophical Herme- neutics and Biblical Hermeneutics,” in: From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, transs. Kathleen Blarney and John B. Thompson, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1991, 89– 101, 97. DOI 10.1515/9783110338799.147, © 2018 Galit Hasan-Rokem, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 148 Galit Hasan-Rokem namely the Wandering Jew. The interpretative association of the Wandering Jew with Roth’s Joban figures, though rather clearly substantiated by the au- thor’s own linguistic and thematic associations interwoven in the texts, has garnered little attention in the relevant scholarship. I shall investigate Roth’s communicating of bold imbrications of historical and metaphysical levels of experience in his work by focusing on the nexus of Job and the Wandering Jew, roughly correlating to the generic modes of myth and legend in folk literary scholarship.3 This particular nexus in Roth’s texts draws attention to an oscilla- tion between the universal and the particularly Jewish aspects of suffering and revelation – the two primary themes of the Book of Job. The emphatic bridging of the particularly Jewish and the universal in Roth’s work in general is proba- bly what has led some scholars to emphasize his literature as “European” rather than belonging to a particular nation.4 Whereas Job is explicitly accounted for in the title of one of Roth’s major novels – namely Hiob, from 19305 – the Wandering Jew needs to be teased out from his texts, although this usually requires no great effort. Michael Hof- mann’s translation of Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft6 as The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of a Vanished People7 – the same phrasing appears in Jona- than Nierad’s Hebrew translation8. – has at least in name spelled out the pres- ence of this figure in Roth’s work.9 In the present essay the considerable inter- 3 See Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2000, 146–149. 4 Schönborn, Sibylle, “Zwischen Lemberg und Marseille: Joseph Roths Europa als ‘Dritter Raum,’” in: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca 7 (2007): 49–56. 5 Roth, Joseph, Hiob. Roman eines einfachen Mannes, Marixverlag, Wiesbaden 2010 (originally published in 1930). English translations include Roth, Joseph, Job. The Story of a Simple Man, trans. Dorothy Thompson, The Overlook Press, Woodstock 1982; and Roth, Joseph, Job. The Story of a Simple Man. trans. Ross Benjamin, Archipelago Books, Brooklyn 2010. My quotes are as a rule from the later translation. 6 Roth, Joseph, Juden auf Wanderschaft, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2000 (originally pub- lished in 1927; second edition, with new preface, 1937). 7 Roth, Joseph, The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of a Vanished People, trans. Michael Hofmann, W. W. Norton & Co., New York 2011. ,תורףזוי םידדונםידוהי לאירוא:ישארךרוע;דארינןתנוי:תורעהףיסוהותינמרגמםגרת 8 תואטמס:םילשורי,טוגהטיד:םוגרתתכירע;ןוק .1102, 9 Victoria Lunzer-Talos has drawn attention to an essay in which Roth directly addressed the Wandering Jew under the sobriquet most often applied to him both in the written and the oral tradition in the German language, the Eternal Jew; see Victoria Lunzer-Talos, “Der Segen des ewigen Juden: Assimilation und Exil,” in: Joseph Roth: Ein europäisch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und österreichischer Universalist. Conditio Judaica 82, eds. Johann Georg Lughofer and Mira Miladinović Zalaznik, De Gruyter, Berlin 2011, 23–38. This particular essay by Roth, entitled “The Blessing of the Wandering Jew,” was published in Die Wahrheit, in 1935, and reflects on Joban Transformations of the Wandering Jew 149 pretive potential of the linking, shadowing and echoing of these two figures, Job and the Wandering Jew in Roth’s work is emphasized. The relevance of this potential is heightened by the fact that much of Roth’s work wrestles with the timeless Joban question of the meaning of human suffering, albeit in the historically specific context of the author, who was constantly both pushed away from and pulled back to his East European Jewish – yet not only Jewish – native culture as he strove to forge for himself a universal (understood by Roth to be German) identity. 1 Job, the Biblical Sufferer I shall first introduce each of the two figures in some of their earlier contexts, with special reference to aspects most relevant for the present discussion. The inclusion of Job in the biblical canon may be surprising, since however much we wish to sympathize with Job’s behavior as a natural reaction to his immense suffering we are confronted with a substantial text that reproduces the dis- course of a character who is often angry and who rants irreverently and rebel- liously; moreover, over the course of the eponymous book’s 42 chapters he speaks more than half of the time. Perhaps even more surprising is that Job’s identity as an Israelite is more or less denied and that he apparently lives rather far from the Holy Land, Canaan, Israel or Palestine – namely in the wonderful land of Oz, Erets Uts. Despite all this, he inhabits a separate book in the Hebrew Bible (TANAKH), which is mainly devoted to the history of one people, Israel, and which is viewed as a sacred history. Job’s foreign identity may even be reflected in some of the unusual language of the Book of Job. Uts as an ethnos – e.g. in the genealogical lists of Genesis – is presented by the biblical authors as belonging to the offspring of Shem and thus as closely relat- ed to the Israelites, albeit with emphasis on the lineage not from Jacob but rather from Esau. Hence Job’s identity remains significantly ambiguous.10 The the rise to power of the Nazis; see Joseph Roth, “Der Segen des ewigen Juden: Assimilation und Exil,” in: Werke in sechs Banden volume 3, Kiepenhauer & Witsch, Köln 1989, 527–532; originally published in Die Wahrheit 13.30 (1935), 4–5. See also Mark H. Gelber, “Zur deutsch- zionistischer Rezeptionsgeschichte: Joseph Roth und die Jüdische Rundschau,” in: Von Fran- zos zu Canetti: Jüdische Autoren aus Österreich. Neue Studien, eds. Mark H. Gelber, Hans Otto Horch, and Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1996, 201–209, 203, n. 5. 10 Genesis 10:23 “The descendants of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash.” Unless otherwise indicated all Bible quotes are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV); cf. also Jeremiah 25:20: “all the kings of the land of Uz.” 150 Galit Hasan-Rokem rabbis of late antiquity who created the Talmudic-midrashic corpus, usually termed Rabbinic literature, treated Esau mostly as the typological personifica- tion of Rome and Christianity.11 They also debated the status of Job’s book, expressing divergent views that ranged from the claim that Job was one of three wise men of the ancient Near East (the others being Noah and Daniel)12 to the assertion that “Job did not exist at all – he was a mere parable.”13 While we cannot really know whether Job’s non-Hebrew identity in the Bible was intended to express the undeniable universality of the Hebrew God, it is clearly the effect of the book and it was so also for the rabbis.