Le Juif-Errant [“The Wandering Jew”]. Image of a young Frenchman directing away a pejoratively drawn Jew from his Christian town. With French lyrical text below.

(ANTISEMITICA).

Metz, Gangel & Didion, c. 1860

The poem demands: “You (the Jews) are guilty of such sin, otherwise why would God, ever so kind, have you so afflicted.” In the foreground of the image, there are three crosses on a mountaintop (Jesus was crucified and hung between two convicted thieves), a likely allusion to the original 13th century legend - wherein a Jew taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming.