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THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME XV SLICE IV
Jevons, Stanley to Joint
Articles in This Slice
JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY JOHN XIX. JEW, THE WANDERING JOHN XXI. JEWEL, JOHN JOHN XXII. JEWELRY JOHN XXIII. JEWETT, SARAH ORNE JOHN I. (Roman emperor) JEWS JOHN II. JEWSBURY, GERALDINE ENDSOR JOHN III. JEW’S EARS JOHN IV. JEW’S HARP JOHN V. or VI. JEZEBEL JOHN VI. or V. JEZREEL JOHN VI. or VII. JHABUA JOHN (king of England) JHALAWAR JOHN I. (king of Aragon) JHANG JOHN II. JHANSI JOHN (king of Bohemia) JHELUM (Indian river) JOHN I. (king of Castile) JHELUM (Indian town) JOHN II. JHERING, RUDOLF VON JOHN I. (king of France)JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835-1882), English economist and logician, was born at Liverpool on the 1st of September 1835. His father, Thomas Jevons, a man of strong scientific tastes and a writer on legal and economic subjects, was an iron merchant. His mother was the daughter of William Roscoe. At the age of fifteen he was sent to London to attend University College school. He appears at this time to have already formed the belief that important achievements as a thinker were possible to him, and at more than one critical period in his career this belief was the decisive factor in determining his conduct. Towards the end of 1853, after having spent two years at University College, where his favourite subjects were chemistry and botany, he unexpectedly received the offer of the assayership to the new mint in Australia. The idea of leaving England was distasteful, but pecuniary considerations had, in consequence of the failure of his father’s firm in 1847, become of vital importance, and he accepted the post. He left England for Sydney in June 1854, and remained there for five years. At the end of that period he resigned his appointment, and in the autumn of 1859 entered again as a student at University College, London, proceeding in due course to the B.A. and M.A. degrees of the university of London. He now gave his principal attention to the moral sciences, but his interest in natural science was by no means exhausted: throughout his life he continued to write occasional papers on scientific subjects, and his intimate knowledge of the physical sciences greatly contributed to the success of his chief logical work, The Principles of Science. Not long after taking
Jevons arrived quite early in his career at the doctrines that constituted his most characteristic and original contributions to economics and logic. The theory of utility, which became the keynote of his general theory of political economy, was practically formulated in a letter written in 1860; and the germ of his logical principles of the substitution of similars may be found in the view which he propounded in another letter written in 1861, that “philosophy would be found to consist solely in pointing out the likeness of things.” The theory of utility above referred to, namely, that the degree of utility of a commodity is some continuous mathematical function of the quantity of the commodity available, together with the implied doctrine that economics is essentially a mathematical science, took more definite form in a paper on “A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy,” written for the British Association in 1862. This paper does not appear to have attracted much attention either in 1862 or on its publication four years later in the Journal of the Statistical Society; and it was not till 1871, when the Theory of Political Economy appeared, that Jevons set forth his doctrines in a fully developed form. It was not till after the publication of this work that Jevons became acquainted with the applications of mathematics to political economy made by earlier writers, notably Antoine Augustin Cournot and H. H. Gossen. The theory of utility was about 1870 being independently developed on somewhat similar lines by Carl Menger in Austria and M.E.L. Walras in Switzerland. As regards the discovery of the connexion between value in exchange and final (or marginal) utility, the priority belongs to Gossen, but this in no way detracts from the great importance of the service which Jevons rendered to English economics by his fresh discovery of the principle, and by the way in which he ultimately forced it into notice. In his reaction from the prevailing view he sometimes expressed himself without due qualification: the declaration, for instance, made at the commencement of the Theory of Political Economy, that “value depends entirely upon utility,” lent itself to misinterpretation. But a certain exaggeration of emphasis may be pardoned in a writer seeking to attract the attention of an indifferent public. It was not, however, as a theorist dealing with the fundamental data of economic science, but as a brilliant writer on practical economic questions, that Jevons first received general recognition. A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold (1863) and The Coal Question (1865) placed him in the front rank as a writer on applied economics and statistics; and he would be remembered as one of the leading economists of the 19th century even had his Theory of Political Economy never been written. Amongst his economic works may be mentioned Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), written in a popular style, and descriptive rather than theoretical, but wonderfully fresh and original in treatment and full of suggestiveness, a Primer on Political Economy (1878), The State in Relation to Labour (1882), and two works published after his death, namely, Methods of Social Reform and Investigations in Currency and Finance, containing papers that had appeared separately during his lifetime. The last-named volume contains Jevons’s interesting speculations on the connexion between commercial crises and sun-spots. He was engaged at the time of his death upon the preparation of a large treatise on economics and had drawn up a table of contents and completed some chapters and parts of chapters. This fragment was published in 1905 under the title of The Principles of Economics: a Fragment of a Treatise on the Industrial Mechanism of Society, and other Papers.
Jevons’s work in logic went on pari passu with his work in political economy. In 1864 he published a small volume, entitled Pure Logic; or, the Logic of Quality apart from Quantity, which was based on Boole’s system of logic, but freed from what he considered the false mathematical dress of that system. In the years immediately following he devoted considerable attention to the construction of a logical machine, exhibited before the Royal Society in 1870, by means of which the conclusion derivable from any given set of premisses could be mechanically obtained. In 1866 what he regarded as the great and universal principle of all reasoning dawned upon him; and in 1869 he published a sketch of this fundamental doctrine under the title of The Substitution of Similars. He expressed the principle in its simplest form as follows: “Whatever is true of a thing is true of its like,” and he worked out in detail its various applications. In the following year appeared the Elementary Lessons on Logic, which soon became the most widely read elementary textbook on logic in the English language. In the meantime he was engaged upon a much more important logical treatise, which appeared in 1874 under the title of The Principles of Science. In this work Jevons embodied the substance of his earlier works on pure logic and the substitution of similars; he also enunciated and developed the view that induction is simply an inverse employment of deduction; he treated in a luminous manner the general theory of probability, and the relation between probability and induction; and his knowledge of the various natural sciences enabled him throughout to relieve the abstract character of logical doctrine by concrete scientific illustrations, often worked out in great detail. Jevons’s general theory of induction was a revival of the theory laid down by Whewell and criticized by Mill; but it was put in a new form, and was free from some of the non-essential adjuncts which rendered Whewell’s exposition open to attack. The work as a whole was one of the most notable contributions to logical doctrine that appeared in Great Britain in the 19th century. His Studies in Deductive Logic, consisting mainly of exercises and problems for the use of students, was published in 1880. In 1877 and the following years Jevons
See Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, edited by his wife (1886). This work contains a bibliography of Jevons’s writings. See also Logic: History.
JEW, THE WANDERING, a legendary Jew (see Jews) doomed to wander till the second coming of Christ because he had taunted Jesus as he passed bearing the cross, saying, “Go on quicker.” Jesus is said to have replied, “I go, but thou shalt wait till I return.” The legend in this form first appeared in a pamphlet of four leaves alleged to have been printed at Leiden in 1602. This pamphlet relates that Paulus von Eizen (d. 1598), bishop of Schleswig, had met at Hamburg in 1542 a Jew named Ahasuerus (Ahasverus), who declared he was “eternal” and was the same who had been punished in the above-mentioned manner by Jesus at the time of the crucifixion. The pamphlet is supposed to have been written by Chrysostomus Dudulaeus of Westphalia and printed by one Christoff Crutzer, but as no such author or printer is known at this time—the latter name indeed refers directly to the legend—it has been conjectured that the whole story is a myth invented to support the Protestant contention of a continuous witness to the truth of Holy Writ in the person of this “eternal” Jew; he was to form, in his way, a counterpart to the apostolic tradition of the Catholic Church.
The story met with ready acceptance and popularity. Eight editions of the pamphlet appeared in 1602, and the fortieth edition before the end of the following century. It was translated into Dutch and Flemish with almost equal success. The first French edition appeared in 1609, and the story was known in England before 1625, when a parody was produced. Denmark and Sweden followed suit with translations, and the expression “eternal Jew” passed as a current term into Czech. In other words, the story in its usual form spread wherever there was a tincture of Protestantism. In southern Europe little is heard of it in this version, though Rudolph Botoreus, parliamentary advocate of Paris (Comm. histor., 1604), writing in Paris two years after its first appearance, speaks contemptuously of the popular belief in the Wandering Jew in Germany, Spain and Italy.
The popularity of the pamphlet and its translations soon led to reports of the appearance of this mysterious being in almost all parts of the civilized world. Besides the original meeting of the bishop and Ahasuerus in 1542 and others referred back to 1575 in Spain and 1599 at Vienna, the Wandering Jew was stated to have appeared at Prague (1602), at Lübeck (1603), in Bavaria (1604), at Ypres (1623), Brussels (1640), Leipzig (1642), Paris (1644, by the “Turkish Spy”), Stamford (1658), Astrakhan (1672), and Frankenstein (1678). In the next century the Wandering Jew was seen at Munich (1721), Altbach (1766), Brussels (1774), Newcastle (1790, see Brand, Pop. Antiquities, s.v.), and on the streets of London between 1818 and 1830 (see Athenaeum, 1866, ii. 561). So far as can be ascertained, the latest report of his appearance was in the neighbourhood of Salt Lake City in 1868, when he is said to have made himself known to a Mormon named O’Grady. It is difficult to tell in any one of these cases how far the story is an entire fiction and how far some ingenious impostor took advantage of the existence of the myth.
The reiterated reports of the actual existence of a wandering being, who retained in his memory the details of the crucifixion, show how the idea had fixed itself in popular imagination and found its way into the 19th-century collections of German legends. The two ideas combined in the story of the restless fugitive akin to Cain and wandering for ever are separately represented in the current names given to this figure in different countries. In most Teutonic languages the stress is laid on the perpetual character of his punishment and he is known as the “everlasting,” or “eternal” Jew (Ger. “Ewige Jude”). In the lands speaking a Romance tongue, the usual form has reference to the wanderings (Fr. “le Juif errant”). The English form follows the Romance analogy, possibly because derived directly from France. The actual name given to the mysterious Jew varies in the different versions: the original pamphlet calls him Ahasver, and this has been followed in most of the literary versions, though it is difficult to imagine any Jew being called by the name of the typical anti-Semitic king of the Book of Esther. In one of his appearances at Brussels his name is given as Isaac Laquedem, implying an imperfect knowledge of Hebrew in an attempt to represent Isaac “from of old.” Alexandre Dumas also made use of this title. In the Turkish Spy the Wandering Jew is called Paul Marrane and is supposed to have suffered persecution at the hands of the Inquisition, which was mainly occupied in dealing with the Marranos, i.e. the secret Jews of the Iberian peninsula. In the few references to the legend in Spanish writings the Wandering Jew is called Juan Espera en Dios, which gives a more hopeful turn to the legend.
Under other names, a story very similar to that given in the pamphlet of 1602 occurs nearly 400 years earlier on English soil. According to Roger of Wendover in his Flores historiarum under the year 1228, an Armenian archbishop, then visiting England, was asked by the monks of St Albans about the well-known Joseph of Arimathaea, who had spoken to Jesus and was said to be still alive. The archbishop claimed to have seen him in Armenia under the name of Carthaphilus or Cartaphilus, who had confessed that he had taunted Jesus in the manner above related. This Carthaphilus had afterwards been baptized by the name of Joseph. Matthew Paris, in repeating the passage from Roger of Wendover, reported that other Armenians had confirmed the story on visiting St Albans in 1252, and regarded it as a great proof of the Christian religion. A similar account is given in the chronicles of Philippe Mouskès (d. 1243). A variant of the same story was known to Guido Bonati, an astronomer quoted by Dante, who calls his hero or villain Butta Deus because he struck Jesus. Under this name he is said to have appeared at Mugello in 1413 and at Bologna in 1415 (in the garb of a Franciscan of the third order).
The source of all these reports of an ever-living witness of the crucifixion is probably Matthew xvi. 28: “There be some of them that stand here which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” As the kingdom had not come, it was assumed that there must be persons living who had been present at the crucifixion; the same reasoning is at the root of the Anglo-Israel belief. These words are indeed quoted in the
Moncure D. Conway (Ency. Brit., 9th ed., xiii. 673) attempted to connect the legend of the Wandering Jew with a whole series of myths relating to never-dying heroes like King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa, the Seven Sleepers, and Thomas the Rhymer, not to speak of Rip Van Winkle. He goes even farther and connects our legend with mortals visiting earth, as the Yima in Parsism, and the “Ancient of Days” in the Books of Daniel and Enoch, and further connects the legend with the whole medieval tendency to regard the Jew as something uncanny and mysterious. But all these mythological explanations are supererogatory, since the actual legend in question can be definitely traced to the pamphlet of 1602. The same remark applies to the identification with the Mahommedan legend of the “eternal” Chadhir proposed by M. Lidzbarski (Zeit. f. Assyr. vii. 116) and I. Friedländer (Arch. f. Religionswiss. xiii. 110).
This combination of eternal punishment with restless wandering has attracted the imagination of innumerable writers in almost all European tongues. The Wandering Jew has been regarded as a symbolic figure representing the wanderings and sufferings of his race. The Germans have been especially attracted by the legend, which has been made the subject of poems by Schubart, Schreiber, W. Müller, Lenau, Chamisso, Schlegel, Mosen and Koehler, from which enumeration it will be seen that it was a particularly favourite subject with the Romantic school. They were perhaps influenced by the example of Goethe, who in his Autobiography describes, at considerable length, the plan of a poem he had designed on the Wandering Jew. More recently poems have been composed on the subject in German by Adolf Wilbrandt, Fritz Lienhard and others; in English by Robert Buchanan, and in Dutch by H. Heijermans. German novels also exist on the subject, by Franz Horn, Oeklers, Laun and Schucking, tragedies by Klinemann, Haushofer and Zedlitz. Sigismund Heller wrote three cantos on the wanderings of Ahasuerus, while Hans Andersen made of him an “Angel of Doubt.” Robert Hamerling even identifies Nero with the Wandering Jew. In France, E. Quinet published a prose epic on the subject in 1833, and Eugène Sue, in his best-known work, Le Juif errant (1844), introduces the Wandering Jew in the prologues of its different sections and associates him with the legend of Herodias. In modern times the subject has been made still more popular by Gustave Doré’s elaborate designs (1856), containing some of his most striking and imaginative work. Thus, probably, he suggested Grenier’s poem on the subject (1857).
In England, besides the ballads in Percy’s Reliques, William Godwin introduced the idea of an eternal witness of the course of civilization in his St Leon (1799), and his son-in-law Shelley introduces Ahasuerus in his Queen Mab. It is doubtful how far Swift derived his idea of the immortal Struldbrugs from the notion of the Wandering Jew. George Croly’s Salathiel, which appeared anonymously in 1828, gave a highly elaborate turn to the legend; this has been republished under the title Tarry Thou Till I Come.