Yair Mintzker is a professor in the Department of History and head of Yeh College. His latest book “I, Wandering Jew: A Five-Century History of Our Modern Condition” was published in March 2026 by Princeton University Press.
How did you get the idea for this project?
It started with a 400-year-old mystery no one has ever been able to solve. One of the most famous stories in European history is the legend of the Wandering Jew. According to an anonymous German pamphlet published originally in 1602, when one of Martin Luther’s students went home to Hamburg during winter break, he met a strange man in one of the city’s churches. The man was tall and barefoot, his name was Ahasversus, and he was a Jew. He told the student that he had been born 1500 years earlier and that he was cursed by Jesus to eternal wandering after refusing to help him as he was led to his crucifixion. After the publication of the anonymous pamphlet, the story about this “Wandering Jew” spread like wildfire all over Northern Europe. Ever since, many have even claimed that they saw the same person as well. For reasons that were originally unclear even to me, I developed an obsession with this story and its mysterious origins. I wanted to know who composed the 1602 pamphlet and where, why they named the Wandering Jew Ahasverus, and in short: what they were trying to do or achieve with it.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
And so the journey began. I examined every copy of the original pamphlet I could lay my hands on. I travelled to Hamburg, and to other German cities, and to literally dozens of other places where we have reports about sightings of this mysterious man. In the process, I wrote not only what I found out – including even the answers to my original questions – but also how I did it.
The book is consequently as much a memoir as a history book. With me as his or her guide, the reader meets an unforgettable, Wandering Jew–like character who appeared out of nowhere in Israel in the 1950s; a nineteenth-century novelist who was the first Jew to favorably describe the Wandering Jew; an eighteenth-century German scholar who saw the Wandering Jew emerging from a devastating fire in Frankfurt; and finally the man who likely inspired the 1602 pamphlet.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
The book raises a long series of questions about Judaism and Christianity, fact and fiction, the deep past and the present political moment. Because it combines memoir, detective story, and history, the book also raises fundamental questions about the relationship between an author and his academic work.
Why should people read this book?
One of my favorite lines by Ralph Waldo Emerson is that there are certain works of literature that make us “recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” I, Wandering Jew is a work of history, for sure. But it’s also my own story: of how I began to discover strange affinities between my own personal story and that of the Wandering Jew; how and why I became so obsessed with it. Put differently: I quickly realized that I wasn’t only writing a book; I was also, as it were, walking into the pages of one. Beyond the story itself, which is really quite amazing, readers of the book should expect to learn a great deal about how reality shapes stories, and how stories, everywhere and always, help shape life.
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