Errare humanum est. Re-writing the Myth of the Wandering Jew after the Shoah
Errare humanum est. Re-writing the Myth of the Wandering Jew after the Shoah

Summary/Abstract: Man is dumbfounded when faced to this tragedy and vocabulary is not sufficient to express the horror of the tragic series of events defined as “the Holocaust”. The common call for silence has been epitomized by Adorno’s dictum “no poetry after Auschwitz”. The importance of this catastrophe is evident in the simple fact that whenever one pronounces the determinative article ‘the’ in front of the word ‘Holocaust” one knows exactly what we are trying to talk about, and nobody detects in this word the sacrificial connotations implied by such name in ancient times, which, alluding to some sort of providential finality, might result limiting and offensive when faced with the millions of Jews who died without a reason in which to foresee any providential design. Rather, this word, with its apocalyptic sound, immediately conjures up in our minds at once the Hebrew word Shoah “ruin, calamity, desolation” and the Yiddish hurban which alludes to the long history of Jewish catastrophes by designating the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Jews that followed it (Rosenfeld 1965: 4).

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