The Wandering Jews (German: Juden auf Wanderschaft) is a short non-fiction book (1926–27) by Joseph Roth[1] about the plight of the Jews in the mid-1920s who, with other refugees and displaced persons in the aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the redrawing of national frontiers following the Treaty of Versailles, had fled to the West from Lithuania, Poland and Russia.
[4][5][1][6] Joseph Roth wrote the book for, "readers with respect for pain, for human greatness, and for the squalor that everywhere accompanies misery; Western Europeans who are not merely proud of their clean mattresses."
The book displays his "lifelong sympathies with simple people, the dispossessed guests on this earth and his antipathy to a selfish, materialistic, and increasingly homogeneous bourgeoisie.
"[7] Roth is warm to his subjects, with "the exception of the middle-class, assimilated, denying Jews in the West."
He regarded it as "something that contained multitudes, something not exclusive", and, according to his English translator Michael Hoffman, the Jews represented "human beings in their least packaged form" - "the most anomalous, individual of peoples", fissured by history and geography.