Once I wandered into the prewar Ghetto of Venice--a small and uninviting quarter where the Jews were formerly made to live by law, and where a few still resided because they were too poor to live in a better place. I thought of this dark race, its long and painful history, and the words of Charles Lamb rose in my memory: "The Jew is a piece of stubborn antiquity compared to which Stonehenge was in its nonage." I saw the Wandering Jew shambling through the centuries. I pondered on his meaning. And these were my thoughts:
They could not altogether escape their strange destiny, which took them out of their native land and forced them to wander through half the world. It was their own stubborn conservatism which brought them among strange peoples, still clutching tightly to their own worn-out creed and not as missionaries of Jesus' loftier development of it. Thus instead of bringing light as they might have done, had they responded to the sacred call, they brought merely physical goods, for their cosmopolitanism found its full scope in creating and financing the import and export trade of many countries.
In a curiously distorted and obviously inferior manner, the Jews have played a historic role which is an indirect reflection of the higher role they could have played as the first wholly Christian nation. They carried earthly goods to the different nations when they might have carried unearthly ideas.
The legendary story of the Wandering Jew has a profound esoteric significance. Even the Jewish claim of being a chosen race also possesses a similar significance, albeit it is one which the Jews themselves have failed to grasp. If they are no longer a chosen race, it is for them to reflect why this is so.
The more cultured among the early Christians understood that the Overself--whom they called Christ--was the real object of their worship, the ultimate goal of their mystical endeavour, and that the man Jesus was but its Voice--like those other voices with which the Word periodically breaks its silence for the guidance of bewildered mankind.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 5 : Comments On Specific Religions > # 147
