A wandering Jew with or without Sartre: discussion of Clairre Katz’s “Can one still be a Jew without Sartre?”

Who is this Ahasverus with whom Freud so closely identified at this perilous time? He is perhaps the archetype of otherness and provides us with a primal typology of the psychology of the other. It is Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, who embodies the figure of the Jew as nomad, stranger, outsider: the uprooted, and as Sarah Hammerschlag (2010) argues in The Figural Jew, Ahasverus represents the antithesis of the French nation, of the Enlightenment’s Universal Man, and this is and remains the primal model for “the other” in Sartre’s existentialist critique.