The Seba library treats Wandering Jew in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Nietzsche, Friedrich, M.H. Abrams).
Ahasuerus is the Wandering Jew, whose main characteristic was that he had to wander restlessly over the earth till the end of the world. The fact that this particular name occurred to the author justifies us in following his trail.
Jung identifies Ahasuerus as the archetypal Wandering Jew and uses the analysand’s spontaneous association to the name as a portal into the dynamics of unconscious personality formation.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
so that, truly, I am almost the eternal Wandering Jew, except that I am neither eternal nor a Jew. … I have sat on every surface, like weary dust I have fallen asleep upon mirrors and window-panes: everything takes from me, nothing gives, I have become thin — I am almost like a shadow.
Nietzsche’s Shadow self-identifies with the Wandering Jew as the figure of absolute rootlessness and existential depletion, making the legend a phenomenological type for nihilistic drifting.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
wandering, symbolism of, 205; see also journey Wandering Jew, see Ahasuerus
Jung’s own indexing in Symbols of Transformation formally cross-references the Wandering Jew to Ahasuerus and to the symbolism of wandering and journey, confirming the figure’s systematic placement in his symbolic lexicon.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Hegel’s path, on the other hand, is the Romantic way along an inclined plane back toward the point of origin … the figure of the circuitous journey homeward … Hegel developed into the sustained vehicle for his Phenomenology of the Spirit.
Abrams situates the Romantic circuitous journey homeward as the structural dialectical counterpart to the Wandering Jew’s aimless perpetual motion, providing a literary-philosophical context for the depth-psychological stakes of rootlessness versus return.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside