The Wandering Jew as Monster: John Blackburn’s Devil Daddy

Abstract

Can we think of the legendary Wandering Jew as a monster? The figure does not easily fit the common definition of a monster and yet, the Wandering Jew is extraordinary. In the medieval and early modern sources of the legend, the Wandering Jew, who once sinned against Christ and is therefore doomed to be an immortal eyewitness to the Passion, serves as a model for the faithful. In his 1796 gothic novel, The Monk, Matthew Lewis creates a new strand of the Wandering Jew tradition, a gothic Wandering Jew, a being transformed from wonder to horror through association with centuries of antisemitic accusations against Jews as agents of conspiracy, ritual murder, nefarious magic, and disease. This essay argues that a variation on the representation of the gothic Wandering Jew, which began with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, further adapts the legend to make the Wanderer not a sign of redemption, but the monstrous cause of catastrophe not only for himself, but for those he encounters. This article, the first scholarly examination of John Blackburn’s 1972 Wandering Jew novel, Devil Daddy, situates it within the strand of the legend that represents the Wandering Jew as a monstrous source of destruction. Blackburn’s novel, written during a time of global concern over the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, portrays the Wandering Jew’s curse as a source of manmade global environmental catastrophe. In this way, the sin of the monstrous Wandering Jew becomes one not against Christ, but against humankind. Even as Devil Daddy explicitly references the horrors of the Holocaust, this representation of a monstrous Wandering Jew haunts the text, undermining its sympathetic representation of Jewish suffering.

1. Introduction

This essay situates John Blackburn’s Devil Daddy (Blackburn [1972] 2021) in the tradition of the gothic Wandering Jew begun by Matthew Lewis in The Monk (Lewis [1796] 2016). Instead of depicting the Wandering Jew as a wonder for the faithful and a sign of the End Times, Lewis’s depiction generates horror, transforming the Wandering Jew from marvel to monster. In Devil Daddy, Blackburn similarly evokes fear and disgust in his depiction of a Satanic plot through which the Wandering Jew’s body is transformed into a devastating bioweapon. Devil Daddy, indeed, stands out in the vast Wandering Jew tradition in the extreme to which Blackburn takes the monstrous possibilities of this legendary figure.

Although Blackburn was well known and well regarded in the 1960s and 1970s, his work has faded into obscurity. Devil Daddy has not been included in extant studies of the Wandering Jew tradition or in scholarly studies more generally. Reading Devil Daddy as part of the Wandering Jew tradition illuminates an unexamined but significant strand of the tradition that begins with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and that includes Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant. These works all connect the Wandering Jew to environmental catastrophe, including pandemic and nuclear war. This strand of the tradition, I will suggest, is also significant because of how it portrays the Wandering Jew’s curse as a type of contagion. The Wanderer becomes not a sign of redemption, as he is in medieval and early modern texts, but a monstrous sign of, or even source of, catastrophe.

Some of the works in this strand of representation, especially Devil Daddy, are also explicit in recognizing antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence. Because Blackburn portrays the Wandering Jew as the monstrous cause of catastrophic destruction, he ends up evoking, however unwittingly, antisemitic tropes as old and widespread as the Wandering Jew legend itself. Blackburn’s melding of literary, folkloric strands of the tradition with contemporary concerns about bioweapons creates a Wandering Jew who stands out in his horrifying monstrosity within a centuries-old tradition.

In her important 2004 Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature, Carol Margaret Davison (2004) traces the development of the gothic Wandering Jew, analyzing this figure’s significance in British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Davison builds upon and deepens earlier scholarship on the gothic Wandering Jew by Eino Railo (Railo 1964), Edgar Rosenberg (Rosenberg 1960) and George K. Anderson (Anderson 1965), but her study provides only a short concluding mention of twentieth-century treatments of the legend. With the exception of brief explorations by Karen Grumberg (2019) and by Lisa Lampert-Weissig. Davison’s insights into the development of the gothic Wandering Jew have not been extended to twentieth-century and twenty-first century adaptations. This essay begins this work by tracing how the gothic Wandering Jew becomes a monster of eco-horror.

2. Medieval and Early Modern Sources of the Wandering Jew Legend

In order to understand this development, we must briefly examine the longer Wandering Jew tradition, which reaches back to oral transmission that predates its medieval written sources. According to legend, as Jesus made his way to the place of crucifixion, he stopped in front of a man’s home and asked to rest there for a moment. The man harshly refused him, taunting Jesus to hurry to his demise. Jesus responded by cursing the man to an eternal life that will only end at the Second Coming. Since that time, the man has been unable to die, or even to rest. He roams the earth, telling all he meets of his experience during the Passion.1 He is known by many names, including Cartaphilus, Ahasuerus, Buttadeus, and Isaac Laquedem. In German, he is “der ewige Jude” (the eternal Jew). In English and many Romance languages, he is known as “The Wandering Jew” (Baleanu 1991, p. 22). His story has been told in oral and written form in many languages and adapted across hundreds of works of literature, drama, visual arts, and music.

Over the centuries, these adaptations have developed into numerous strands that emphasize different aspects of the legend or otherwise alter it, as in the associations of the Wandering Jew with nefarious magic or with environmental catastrophe that we will examine here. There is also a significant strand of the legend created by Jewish authors and artists that reimagines the legend from a perspective that takes into account many centuries of lived Jewish experience.2 Within these strands, authors and artists often reference works created centuries earlier, as in Stefan Heym’s (1981) novel Ahasver or Blackburn’s Devil Daddy. While the overall tradition is chronologically continuous, the patterns within this tradition are like an interconnected web. Study of the tradition often therefore requires connecting texts written years or even centuries apart.

We can discern the representation of the Wandering Jew as a monster in some of these strands. The Wandering Jew does not easily fit a common definition of a monster as “an imaginary frightening creature, especially one that is large and strange”.3 And yet, the Wandering Jew is extraordinary. He cannot die. In this sense, he fits the now obsolete definition of “monster” as “[s]omething extraordinary or unnatural; an amazing event or occurrence; a prodigy, a marvel” (OED). In the medieval and early modern sources of the legend, the Wandering Jew, a still-living eyewitness to the Passion of Christ, serves as a model for the faithful. In these sources, his existence also links back to one of the etymological roots for “monster”, the Latin “monere”, meaning “to warn” (Weinstock 2014, p. 1).

The most influential of these medieval sources is the Chronica majora of Matthew Paris (d. 1259), a world chronicle produced in the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. In the Chronica, the Wandering Jew is an ascetic and deeply pious convert to Christianity. Of utmost importance in Matthew’s account is what Cartaphilus means to Christians. Matthew sees the Wandering Jew as one of the wonders of the world and as great proof of the Christian faith.4 Matthew’s Wandering Jew is a marvel, and his presence and testimony are meant to inspire belief in Christ and in Christian teachings. Matthew Paris believed that the End Time was nearly at hand. The Wandering Jew was one of many signs of the truth of Christian prophecy and a future Matthew awaited in both hope and fear.

The Wandering Jew’s role as a miraculous Christian wonder is echoed in the legend’s other most influential early written source, the anonymously authored (Anonymous 1602) Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit namen Ahasverus (A Brief Description and Narration Regarding a Jew Named Ahasuerus), which was widely copied, translated, and distributed. In this version of the legend, the Wanderer is not one of Pilate’s porters, but a Jewish shoemaker and family man. As a consequence of his action against Christ and Christ’s curse, Ahasuerus has been forced to abandon his family, his home, and Jerusalem, the place of his birth. He wanders the earth, telling all he meets of his encounter with Christ. The fact that the Wandering Jew must leave Jerusalem emphasizes how the tale has been traditionally interpreted, as Ahasuerus’s fate is seen as representing the more general fate of the Jewish people, doomed to the diaspora for alleged offenses against Christ. And yet, even in jaded times, the Kurtze Beschreibung author declares that news of the Wandering Jew can still inspire wonder (Lampert-Weissig 2024, p. 47). This declaration echoes Matthew Paris’s assertion that the Wandering Jew is a miraculous Christian sign. The dual interpretive purpose that the Wandering Jew’s curse serves—as marvel and as punishment—reflects aspects of the monstrous as in an early but now obsolete definition of the monster as “something extraordinary or unnatural, an amazing creature or occurrence, a prodigy, a marvel” (OED). “Monster” is also linked to the Latin “monere” to warn. The Wandering Jew, indeed, not only inspires Christian faith but also warns of punishment for offenses against that faith.

3. The Gothic Wandering Jew

This element of alarm and warning intensifies in gothic representations of the Wandering Jew, where he becomes a source not of wonder, but of horror. In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), the Wandering Jew is a “mysterious stranger” of “majestic presence” with “large, black, and sparkling” eyes (Lewis [1796] 2016, p. 130). One familiar with Matthew Paris’s account or with the Kurtze Beschreibung might expect to find only penitence in those eyes. Instead, they radiate a range of other frightening emotions. The character Raymond describes his encounter with the Wandering Jew, whom he at first only knows as “the Stranger”:

There was in his eyes an expression of fury, despair, and malevolence, that struck horror to my very soul. An involuntary convulsion made me shudder. The Stranger perceived it. ‘Such is the curse imposed on me…I am doomed to inspire all who look on me with terror and detestation. You already feel the influence of the charm, and with every succeeding moment will feel it more. I will not add to your sufferings by my presence’.

(Lewis [1796] 2016, p. 130)

With a focus on piercing eyes in keeping with a contemporary fascination with mesmerism, Lewis transforms the Wandering Jew. The fear the Wandering Jew evokes is intensified by disgust. He is transformed from wonder to monster.

Lewis’s Wandering Jew does not mention the Passion. He reveals his curse by uncovering his forehead, branded with a cross, as part of a ritual he conducts to dispel the Bleeding Nun. The power of the branded Cross alone does not suffice to complete this task. The Wandering Jew also performs rituals that evoke witchcraft and Satanic rites (Lewis [1796] 2016, p. 132) and that appear to involve the blood of Christ contained in a chalice, which evokes the Mass (and perhaps also the Holy Grail), as demonstrated by the passage below:

The first thing which He [the Wandering Jew] produced was a small wooden Crucifix; he sank upon his knees, gazed upon it mournfully, and cast his eyes towards heaven. He seemed to be praying devoutly. At length He bowed his head respectfully, kissed the Crucifix thrice, and quitted his kneeling posture. He next drew from the Chest a covered Goblet: with the liquor which it contained, and which appeared to be blood He sprinkled the floor; and then, dipping in it one end of the Crucifix, He described a circle in the middle of the room. Round about this He placed various reliques, sculls, thighbones, &c; I observed, that He disposed them all in the forms of Crosses. Lastly, He took out a large Bible, and beckoned me to follow him into the Circle. I obeyed.

(Lewis [1796] 2016, p. 132)

Compelled by this ceremony and the powerful effect of the “burning cross” emblazoned on the Wandering Jew’s brow, the Bleeding Nun confesses her own story of broken vows, debauchery, and murder as well as her own death at the hand of an illicit lover. The Wandering Jew tells Raymond what he must then do to escape the Bleeding Nun’s haunting, explaining as well that “she was doomed to suffer during the space of a century. That period is in the past” (Lewis [1796] 2016, p. 136). The Bleeding Nun’s extended punishment seems a miniature version of the Wandering Jew’s. Its much shorter duration underscores the enormity of the Wandering Jew’s crime. As Carol Davison puts it, “Jewish crime still clings to him” even after many centuries (Davison 2004, p. 102).

In The Monk, Lewis combines the idea of the Wandering Jew’s curse as vengeance against him and the Jewish people with a long—and not unrelated—prejudicial association between Jews and witchcraft.5 The connection between the Wandering Jew and nefarious magic is picked up in later texts inspired by the legend, including William Godwin’s St. Leon (Godwin [1799] 2003), in which a Wandering Jew figure has become doomed through his own greedy magical practice. He seeks to pass his immortal curse to another.6 Charles Maturin’s ([1820] 2008) immortal Melmoth similarly tries to transfer his curse in the Wandering Jew-inspired gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer ([1820] 2008). In later works, we can also discern the influence of Lewis’s Wandering Jew as a practitioner of dark magic in the manipulative and vile Jewish mesmerist, Svengali, in George Du Maurier’s ([1894] 2009) Trilby and even in the hypnotic glance of Bram Stoker’s famous vampire, Dracula, whose London lair reeks of “ole Jerusalem” (Stoker [1897] 1997, p. 201).7

4. The Gothic Wandering Jew and Environmental Catastrophe

These texts—The Monk, St. Leon, Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula and Trilby—form an important strand of representing the Wandering Jew that draws upon a centuries-old Christian association between Jews and magic. If we include alongside these representations Coleridge’s uncanny immortal, the ancient Mariner, we can also discern a related strand in the tradition that associates the Wandering Jew not with dark magic but with disease and environmental catastrophe. Coleridge’s ([1797/8] 1912) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, composed between 1797 and 1798, is not explicitly about the Wandering Jew. Coleridge transforms the curse of immortality into a punishment for a sin against the natural world rather than a crime against the Savior. This change is encapsulated in the lines “Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung” (Coleridge [1797/8] 1912, ll. 141–2). The Mariner is cursed because he kills the albatross that had provided good fortune to him and his fellow sailors as they traversed a dangerous sea.

Importantly, in Coleridge’s poem, the curse negatively affects not only the sinner, but those around him. In accounts such as the Kurtze Beschreibung, those who meet Ahasverus experience a marvel that leaves them stronger in their Christian faith. The wedding guest’s encounter with the mariner, who like Lewis’s Wandering Jew has an uncanny “glittering” glance, leaves him “sadder and wiser” but also “stunned” and “forlorn”. More ominously, the undying Mariner brings mass death to his two hundred fellow sailors. Coleridge’s adaptation of the Wandering Jew legend becomes, as Simon Estok has suggested, a form of eco-horror (Estok 2023). As a result of his transgression, the Mariner is visited by the terrifying figure of Life-in-Death, with skin “as white as leprosy…Who thicks man’s blood with cold” (Coleridge [1797/8] 1912, ll. 192–94). Life-in-Death is a spectre of contagion who brings suffering everlasting. In Coleridge’s adaptation of the legend, the Wandering Jew does not solely cause suffering for Christ, but causes others to suffer as well. His potential for harm seems as endless as his cursed lifespan. This is a monstrous version of the Wandering Jew’s immortality, void of its delayed but promised redemptive culmination.

A Wandering Jew who brings catastrophe figures centrally in Eugène Sue’s 1844 Le Juif errant. The novel recounts the tragic demise of a Protestant Rennepont dynasty through a Jesuit conspiracy. The plot’s mastermind, the priest Rodin, wants to steal the Rennepont fortune to fund global Jesuit domination. Despite the novel’s title and the connections between the Wandering Jew and Jewess to the Renneponts, the immortal pair make only relatively brief, albeit highly atmospheric and stylized appearances. Their efforts to save the Renneponts are ineffectual. The most consequential of their actions, indeed, is not really an action at all but an effect of the Wandering Jew’s very being. Sue’s Wandering Jew brings plague with him wherever he goes.

Sue makes the direct link between the Wandering Jew and plague in a chilling scene. Lit by moonlight and buffeted by wind, the Wandering Jew stands atop Montmartre in Paris, surveying with dread the city below.

‘No!’ said the traveller, ‘it will not be. The Lord surely will not suffer it. Twice is quite enough. Five centuries ago, the avenging hand of the Almighty drove me hither from the depths of Asia. A solitary wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death, than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could have produced. I then entered this city, and it was decimated. Two centuries ago, that inexorable hand which led me through the world again conducted me here; and on that occasion, as on the previous one, that scourge, which at intervals the Almighty binds to my footsteps, ravaged this city, attacking first my brethren, already wearied by wretchedness and toil!’.

(Sue 1940, 2: 233)

Although the Wandering Jew pleads with God to prevent him from carrying disease, he nevertheless causes a cholera epidemic that ravages Paris. Sue sets his novel in 1832, the year of an actual devastating cholera epidemic that he (and much of his initial readership) had survived. The novel innovates and emphasizes the connection between the Wandering Jew and disease. An 1845 edition includes a foldout map that marks in bright red the path taken by both the Wandering Jew and the historical cholera pandemic between 1817 and 1832. In an explanatory note, Sue directly connects the 1832 Parisian cholera outbreak to the fourteenth-century bubonic plague pandemic, calling both “inexplicable phenomena” (Sue 1940, 2: 237; Sue 1845, 2: 255). In the fourteenth century, however, many Christian Europeans did not find the Black Death inexplicable: they blamed the epidemic on the Jews. Jews were said to have murdered Christians by poisoning wells. These false accusations led to mass executions of Jews in cities such Strasbourg (see Cohn 2007; Barzilay 2022).

By linking the plague in Le Juif errant with actual historical epidemics, Sue sensationalizes recent history. His vivid descriptions of the chaos and stench of the 1832 epidemic, some inspired by actual headlines of the time, only heighten the novel’s evocation of fear and disgust. Although elsewhere in Le Juif errant Sue sympathetically references the suffering that contemporary Eastern European pogroms have caused to Jewish communities, his depiction of the Wandering Jew as a monstrous agent of mass death counteracts this sympathetic representation.

We find a different but equally compelling association between the Wandering Jew and environmental devastation in Walter M. Miller’s ([1959] 1982) science fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Canticle chronicles human history after a nuclear apocalypse through focus on a Catholic order that strives to safeguard relics of scientific knowledge from before the nuclear deluge so that humanity can one day be ready to rebuild an ethical civilization. In the novel’s opening, the Wandering Jew, a figure both irascible and comically endearing, aids a young monastic novice in the discovery of a pre-apocalyptic relic. The Wandering Jew, called Benjamin, appears in all three parts of Canticle, offering a commentary that is often cryptic, but which reveals to the reader clues about knowledge he has gleaned both through his encounter with Christ for whom he still waits (“It’s not Him” he grumbled irritably at the sky”(Miller [1959] 1982, p. 152)) and from his centuries of distanced observation of human history after the nuclear holocaust.

In Canticle, human history is cyclical. As humans make technical gains, it is clear that they are doomed to repeat violent, catastrophic mistakes that destroy life and the environment. The novel’s Wandering Jew, while comic and appealing, also never truly tries to share his knowledge with the other characters. This opacity is problematic, even monstrous, as the Wandering Jew allows others, even his friends, to endure in ignorance. I see this opacity as emblematized and amplified by the novel’s use of untranslated Hebrew printed using Hebrew letters. While the novel’s numerous Latin passages are often translated immediately afterwards in the text, the Hebrew, including a line from the Shema, the central Jewish declaration of faith, is not.8 Rather than sharing his knowledge, the Wandering Jew in Canticle chooses to keep his distance. His passivity implicates him in the novel’s endless cycles of destruction, making his sin not something caught in the past, but ongoing.

5. The Gothic Wandering Jew in Devil Daddy

The dire threat posed by weapons of mass destruction is frequently at play in the novels of John Blackburn (1923–93), an acclaimed and prolific author of horror, thriller, and mystery novels who also skillfully blended these genres together. Blackburn “is widely considered an important figure in British horror fiction in particular, a transitional figure between the older style of weird fiction practiced by Dennis Wheatley and the later type of horror fiction written by the popular author James Herbert” (Harris-Fain (2002, p. 99) cited in Schober (2014, p. 1181)). Actor Christopher Lee, well known at the time for his roles in Hammer films productions, adapted Blackburn’s 1968 novel Nothing but the Night into a 1973 film of the same name. Although the film was neither a critical nor commercial success, the involvement of Lee and another popular actor, Peter Cushing, indicates Blackburn’s prominence as an author at the time (Schober 2014, p. 1182). Despite this popularity during his lifetime, Blackburn’s novels have only recently begun to receive scholarly attention, possibly because they were long out of print and difficult to access until a recent series of reprints by Valancourt books (Schober 2014, p. 1181).

In his novels, Blackburn draws on the calamitous Second World War, during which he had served as a radio officer, and on Cold War fears of weapons of mass destruction. Biological weapons created by malevolent and often unhinged individuals feature in his first, career-launching first novel A Scent of New-Mown Hay (Blackburn 1958) and in many of his other works, including Devil Daddy. The page-turning plots of these works follow the investigations of a cast of recurring characters, including Charles Kirk, a general in the British intelligence service and Sir Marcus Levin, a Nobel Prize winning scientist. Born Marcus Davuidov Levinski, Levin is a Jewish survivor of the Battle of the Warsaw ghetto, a forced labor camp, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, becoming a leading physician and specialist in epidemiology after the war (9). Levin thwarts human-caused biological threats in several of Blackburn’s novels besides Devil Daddy, including A Ring of Roses (Blackburn [1965] 1968), The Young Man from Lima (Blackburn 1968b), Nothing but the Night, and The Face of the Lion (Blackburn 1976). The novels all reference Levin’s Holocaust experiences, but Levin’s Jewish identity is most significant in Devil Daddy. Devil Daddy centers around a plot by a coven of London Satanists that is ultimately foiled by Marcus and his wife, Tania, a former Soviet operative whom he is depicted as first meeting on the trail of a bio-engineered plague in A Ring of Roses. Obsessed with success and bent on suppressing any memories of his past, Levin has his life upended when he encounters his doppelgänger, a man named John Batterday. Batterday turns out to be the immortal Wandering Jew.

Early in the novel, Levin finds himself under suspicion for the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, Elsie. Ultimately, it is revealed that this crime was committed by Batterday, who was drugged and compelled to rape Elsie by a coven of Satanists. By forcing Batterday to sin, the Satanists believed they could kill him and steal his immortality. Rather than making the Satanists immortal, however, their actions doom them. Batterday’s cells are toxic to mortals, causing a precipitous descent into old age and death. This new disease, dubbed “Rampant Progeria”, can be transmitted even through a small cut. Contact with the Wandering Jew’s cells sickens Elsie, accelerating her aging into death, and her body transforms into that of an elderly woman in a process that horrifies and repulses her caregivers. Transmitted to the Satanists as they sought immortality by ingesting the Wandering Jew’s body, the contaminant from his cells threatens a biological apocalypse. Catastrophe is prevented only by Marcus’s heroic actions and supernatural intervention by the Wandering Jew’s long-time companions, a flock of avenging geese known as the Sieben Pfeifer (Seven Whistlers). These geese attack and destroy the contaminated Satanists as they deliberately attempt to spread their disease at a Guy Fawkes celebration.

In this contribution unique to the Wandering Jew tradition, Blackburn adds a pseudo-scientific biological component to the original legend. As Marcus investigates Rampant Progeria, it becomes irrefutably clear to him that Batterday is not an alien from outer space, as a colleague suggests, but the Wandering Jew. This is only reinforced by scientific “isotope tests” that show that “Mr John Batterday had been born in the same century as Jesus Christ” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 153). Christ’s curse upon the Wandering Jew has altered the structure of his cells; they protect him against aging and other threats to his human body. These “defence cells” have a “structure and behavior pattern quite unknown to earthly science” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 130). As Marcus Levin and his colleagues race to understand and contain Rampant Progeria, they come to understand the pathogen as a “monster” (p. 78), a “horror” (p. 90) and a “beast” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 104). Blackburn’s Wandering Jew is lethal down to his very cells.

Blackburn’s treatment blends this pseudo-scientific element with the traditional story of sin and penitence found in early sources such as Matthew Paris’s Chronica and the “Kurtze Beschreibung”. Even before Tania discovers Batterday’s true identity, she recognizes him as someone in whose “past there had been an event which would always haunt him. Not something that had been done to him, but a happening in which he had been actively involved or had even instigated. An incident that would haunt his memory for eternity”( Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 16). Batterday himself admits “I once did a very foolish thing” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 46) and his portrayal as self-isolating and melancholy is in keeping with a tradition that emphasizes the Wanderer’s curse as one of tormented memory.9

Batterday’s memory also seems to hold other misdeeds besides his infamous insult to Christ. In an early scene, Tania witnesses a hidden side to Batterday on a visit to his home with her acquaintance, Professor Henson, who turns out to be a member of the Satanic cult stalking the Wanderer. She is momentarily alone with Batterday, a man she had thought monkish and asexual. She suddenly realizes that “he was craving her body like an alcoholic craves drink” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 20). This frightening, monstrously lustful aspect of Batterday’s character is connected to his association with Satan. Blackburn further embellishes his portrait of the Wandering Jew by drawing on a folkloric figure of the Germanic and English traditions, the Wild Huntsman or Herne, thought to lead nocturnal flights of malevolent spirits. There are folkloric origins for the connections Blackburn makes. Nineteenth-century scholar Karl Blind ([1880] 1986) argued that the Wandering Jew legend was actually inspired by Germanic myth about Wodan, also associated with the Wild Hunt, and medieval sources link Herne to Satan. In modern witchcraft, Herne is connected with the “Horned God” (Durrant and Bailey 2012, pp. 95–96). In Devil Daddy, the Wandering Jew and the Wild Huntsman are one and the same. An elderly vicar later explains to Tania the following:

Satan inhabits the souls of his chosen servants, and Herne once served him well. And Herne has so many hunting grounds, hasn’t he? His usual haunts are the Black Forest and the Forest of Fontainebleu, Windsor Great Park, and the Welsh mountains, where he does not follow dogs but geese, the Gabriel Hounds, but he has many others and many other names, as I’m sure you know. We call him Herne, to the French he is Salathiel, to the Germans, Hubert. But the creature is also Cartaphilus; Johannes Buttadeus, the Undying One.

(Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 127)

Through this mashup of German and British folklore, Blackburn emphasizes what has, in the literary Wandering Jew tradition, been a rather tenuous link between the Wandering Jew and Satan.

Blackburn further reinforces this Satanic connection through a depiction of Batterday’s collection of fictional artworks by Bosch, Cranach, and Dürer featuring the Wandering Jew. Henson views these art works with Tania and remarks on a painting of the Wild Hunt and also another of the Passion, which features a Herne-like figure that the Wandering Jew refuses to name. Batterday’s art collection was perhaps inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Lost Leonardo” (Ballard [1964] 2009), which depicts the Wandering Jew as stealing and retouching famous paintings of the Passion in order to render himself more positively. John Batterday’s motives for collecting these images is unclear, but like the retouched paintings that Ballard depicts, they seem to serve the Wandering Jew’s quest for personal redemption.

John Batterday does regret his past actions. He always wears gloves in an effort to protect others from his contagion, but Blackburn’s emphasis on Herne and the Wild Hunt, the rapacious sexuality that Tania senses in Batterday and his toxic body makes this Wandering Jew a malevolent, frightening figure. The melding of folklore with a modern-day Satanic plot conjures the associations to dark magic found in works like The Monk and St. Leon. Blackburn adds the plague element that is present in adaptations like those by Coleridge and Sue. All of these frightening elements combine in Devil Daddy, whose Wandering Jew, however unwillingly, is undeniably a monster. The cover to the novel’s first UK edition features an oddly positioned and male arm and grasping hand, with its webbed fingers ending in goat hooves instead of human fingernails. The perversely hybrid image resembles an actual photograph, capturing the novel’s blend of science and the supernatural, a combination that stands out as especially horrific within the Wandering Jew tradition.

Blackburn wrote Devil Daddy at a time of heightened public concern about biological weapons. Agents of biological warfare were researched, developed and tests by the Germans, the British and the Americans during the Second World War and the US and the USSR continued this work afterwards, only officially halting with the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty in 1972 (Schober 2021, pp. 6–7). Batterday’s pathogenic cells are supernatural, but they play into very real fears.

The Second World War, of course, also haunts the novel through Marcus and his past experiences during the Holocaust, including the brutal death of his sister, evoked for Marcus by the terrible assault on Elsie. As Adrian Schober notes of Blackburn’s Nothing but the Night, the possible insertion of an anti-Semitic subtext” seems “at odds with Blackburn’s sympathetic treatment” of Marcus as a Holocaust survivor (Schober 2014, 1195 n. 6). Nothing but the Night features a cabal of elderly people who abuse their power over a care home to transfer their “souls” into the bodies of vulnerable children. This plot, again a mixture of pseudo-science and the supernatural, could be seen as evoking antisemitic conspiracies exemplified by the spurious tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which accuses Jews of plotting global domination. For the cabal in Nothing but the Night, intent on immortality, “the Wandering Jew was not a figure of pity but of deep envy” (Blackburn (1968a, p. 183), cited in (Schober (2014), 1195 n. 6). This line from Nothing but the Night seems to be an imaginative seed for Devil Daddy, which also draws on legend and folklore with antisemitic elements, even while the novel references the catastrophic results of nations and individuals acting on antisemitic beliefs during the Holocaust.

In his essay on Nothing but the Night, one of the only scholarly investigations of Blackburn’s novels, Schober’s observation about the tension between Blackburn’s representation of a cabal and his sympathetic portrayal of Marcus is relegated to a footnote. The question of antisemitism is more central to Devil Daddy, not only because it is a novel about the Wandering Jew legend, but also because it portrays the Wandering Jew and Marcus as doppelgängers. This resemblance is central to a key plot point. As a renowned disease expert, Marcus is asked to help Elsie, but when she sees him, she identifies Marcus as her attacker and screams out “Devil Daddy!” This reference to her favorite novel, Wuthering Heights, is the only way she can respond to the trauma she has experienced. Now under suspicion, Marcus must not only attempt to cure Elsie, but to clear his name, heightening the tension of the plot.

While never fully resolved in the novel, the resemblance between Marcus and Batterday is, however, more than just a plot point. It is uncanny. Tania Levin ponders this strange likeness, as shown in the following quotation:

Where dress and bearing were concerned the two men had nothing in common. But the flesh was their bond and ‘as like as two peas’ was an accurate cliché to describe their features. While Tania watched her host smile down from the doorway, she felt that she was seeing her husband’s face reflected in a glass.

(Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 14)

The observation that “the flesh was their bond” evokes the famous trial scene in Act IV, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare 2005), where the Jewish moneylender Shylock demands his “bond”, the “pound of flesh” pledged in surety to him by the Christian merchant Antonio. Marcus shares with Batterday not only a striking likeness, but a common heritage. Like Shylock, they are both Jews. The Wandering Jew’s current false identity as Batterday, a derivation of a traditional name for the Wandering Jew, Johannes Buttadeus, is a man born in Riga, Latvia, in 1925, who obtained British citizenship in 1946 (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 60). He seems, like Marcus, to be a Jewish war refugee.

During the novel’s climactic conclusion, Marcus finds a resemblance between the aggressive chants of a group of rowdy English schoolchildren to chants he had heard in Poland in 1941 as Russian forces withdrew and the SS marched in. For Marcus, that day marks the beginning of his journey through the “abominations” of the Holocaust, to his life in England with Tania. The novel explicitly links these Holocaust experiences to the Wandering Jew legend through Marcus himself: “Before he ever knew his Doppelgänger”, the narrator explains, Marcus “had sometimes mocked himself in terms of the legend” thinking of himself as “a wandering Hebrew, a hiking kike, a yid with a yen to travel. During some of those journeys he had imagined he had witnessed the worst abominations that the dark angel, the Fallen Star of the Morning, could devise” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 176). The paintings in Batterday’s collection show the Wandering Jew in league with Satan, party not only to the torment of Christ, but also of innocent men and women of the past.

Even while the novel represents Batterday as remorseful and careful about infecting others with his deadly essence, this deadliness is central to the novel’s depiction of him. In this way, Devil Daddy relies on the very same elements found in antisemitic Wandering Jew adaptations like The Monk. The Satanists in Devil Daddy with their perversions of the Catholic mass involving sulphur and human urine are also key to evoking the reader’s fear and disgust, of course, but the displacement of fear and disgust away from the Wandering Jew is not complete. Blackburn’s Wandering Jew is himself a major source of fear and disgust as well. Although like Sue’s Wandering Jew, Blackburn’s is “released” into death, unlike Sue’s Wandering Jew, who dies peacefully and at peace beneath a statue of the Savior, John Batterday is beaten and literally gnawed by the Satanists, who dispose of his body in a pig sty. The pigs, who will normally eat anything, instinctively avoid this deadly corpse. Even though the Wandering Jew has been allowed to die, he dies in the midst of filth and his remains so abject, deadly, and repulsive that nature itself seems to recoil from them.10

Much of this fear and disgust around the Wandering Jew is conveyed through the voice of a supercomputer that Levin consults to try to solve the mystery of “Rampant Progeria”. An imagined precursor of what is now called artificial intelligence, the computer is described as the “most modern and sophisticated” in London and “a vast memory store… with almost every fact known to man…implemented in its circuits” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 136). Levin consults the computer on the mystery of John Batterday’s body, which has been found half-eaten, ostensibly gnawed by pigs. The computer, oracle-like, refers Levin to a range of authors from the Wandering Jew tradition including “Beranger, Quintet [Quinet], Croly, Lew Wallace, Caroline Norton, Eugene [Eugène] Sue” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, pp. 136–37). The computer does not explain, to Levin, or to the reader, that all of these writers have adapted the Wandering Jew legend. The scientists believe the computer to be presenting what would now be called an AI “hallucination”. By the novel’s end, the reader and the scientists recognize the computer’s oracular power.

Blackburn’s portrayal of an evil Wandering Jew turned ethical, who tries to shield humanity from his toxic body, does not erase the antisemitic traditions that it draws upon. Indeed, the Wandering Jew’s repentance only seems to underscore the depth of his sin against Christ, linked for centuries to the idea that the Jewish diaspora is a form of punishment. In addition to this tradition of divine vengeance against “Christ-killers”, the novel also, unwittingly or not, perpetuates the antisemitic association between Jews as disease. This includes the dangerous libel, present since the Middle Ages, that Jews actively seek to infect others. Chilling examples of this accusation appeared as National-Socialist propaganda during World War II. These include in the infamous 1940 film Der ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew] a pseudo-documentary that intercuts images of Jewish men in traditional religious garb with clips of disease-carrying rats. Both types of vermin, the film advocates, require extermination. A lesser-known but equally evil equation between Jews and disease comes from a children’s book, Ernst Hiemer’s (1940) Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher (The Mongrel).11 This piece of propaganda draws on Hitler’s equation of Jews with contagious and deadly disease in his 1933 book, Mein Kampf. Pudelmopsdackelpinscher equates Jews with a variety of pests, including bedbugs and locusts, and finally equates “the Jew” to typhus bacilli as shown in a ghostly image of the Volksgifter (poisoner of the people).

What is the relationship between Marcus Levin and his doppelgänger? The novel’s conclusion offers no clear answers. In the novel’s final scene, Levin lies recovering in a hospital bed, half-dead from his efforts to allay biological catastrophe. He is wracking his brain to recall lines from William Cowper’s famous 1773 Christian hymn, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”, as a way of processing his terrifying experience. “Sir Marcus Levin, K.C.B., F.R.S, and Nobel Prizewinner” finds himself “irritated” because he does not “know what to say, and it was a situation he disliked” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 178). He is unable to rest until he can remember the “exact words? ‘Something…some force…somebody moving in a mysterious way his wonders to perform’” (Blackburn [1972] 2021, p. 179). Although he behaves heroically in the terrifying climax of the novel, Marcus does not seem a hero here, displaying the irritability and vanity he has shown frequently throughout the work. The repetition of all of Marcus’s commendations and titles also emphasize their role as a kind of mask or costume draped over a vulnerable man.

On one level, this final scene shows a man of science grappling with the supernatural. Marcus would not have averted catastrophe without avenging the flock of geese, the mysterious Sieben Pfeifer. But on another level, Marcus’s inability to remember that key missing word (“God”) stands out. God and his mysterious ways are the supernatural key to the entire novel: the Wandering Jew, cursed by the Son of God. Like the Wandering Jew, who initially (and in this novel for centuries after) scorned Christ, Marcus cannot recall the name of God. God may indeed be a tormentor, with mysteries that include atrocities, but the alienation of the novel’s two Jewish characters—Batterday and Levin—seems connected not to their actions, but to their Jewish identities. This portrayal of a fundamental alienation from God continues the alienation and isolation at the core of the Wandering Jew’s curse, a curse that for centuries was read as extending to the entire Jewish people. Even as Blackburn seems to be trying to address a catastrophic actual consequence of this prejudice through his portrayal of Marcus, his novel uses antisemitic tropes to generate horror through a monstrous Wandering Jew.

6. Conclusions

To conclude, let us return to Schober’s question about Blackburn’s “insertion” of antisemitic tropes in Nothing but the Night. The question of Blackburn’s intentions cannot be answered. What we can learn from his works, however, is that when authors and artists adapt the Wandering Jew legend, earlier elements in the tradition, including antisemitic elements, can have an enduring impact even when they are not explicitly referenced. As we have seen, antisemitic tropes have been part of the Wandering Jew tradition throughout its history and were cultivated and heightened in the gothic treatment of the figure begun in Lewis’s The Monk. Blackburn brings together elements from the tradition of the gothic Wandering Jew. The most significant of these is how, since Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the effects of an immortal curse are not limited to the cursed transgressor, but also can cause harm to those he encounters. In medieval and early modern versions of the Wandering Jew legend, the Wanderer serves as a sign of the faith. His longed-for redemption can mean redemption for all. In the strand of the tradition we have traced, through Coleridge, Sue, and Miller, the Wandering Jew is associated not with salvation but with destruction. In Devil Daddy, the Wandering Jew’s curse represents the threat of manmade global environmental catastrophe and perhaps even the annihilation of humanity. In this way, the sin of the monstrous Wandering Jew becomes one not against Christ, but against humankind. Even as Devil Daddy explicitly references the horrors of the Holocaust, a representation of a monstrous Wandering Jew nevertheless haunts the text, undermining its sympathetic representation of Jewish suffering.