As today is the Fast of Esther, which precedes the holiday of Purim (celebrated on Saturday night and Sunday), we offer the short story “Haman and Mordecai,” written between 1905 and 1916 by the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. The story, in the words of the scholar Ruth Wisse, “uses the past to show up the corruption and smallness of the reality of present-day Jewry.” It begins thus (translation by Saul Henkin):

In the afternoon of the Fast of Esther, in one of the Jewish cities of our old home, a stagecoach came to a halt in front of a Jewish hotel. A passenger wearing a hat with three corners, like a hamantasch, sprang out. He looked like a rich magnate, with an angry, severe glare. Just behind him, out crept a Jew with a long caftan, a wide talis-kotn, a velveteen cap, a tousled beard, deep creases on his broad forehead, and the odd smile of a philosopher on his lips. He carried a very large bag and walked strangely, with long steps. His eyes never left the ill-tempered man in front of him.

“Do you have a room fit for my lord?” the Jew inquired of the hotel’s servant, an energetic young man with a dirty shirt and a yellow necktie. Once it had been the most antique of antiques—the necktie, that is—but over time it had lost its shine and form and taken on the look of a braid of Purim challah sprinkled with poppy seeds.

The servant greeted the travelers with great pomp, doffed his cap with fanfare, and led them inside the hotel. He opened the door to the biggest, best, most beautiful room: number 1, a room divided into two smaller chambers, as our travelers wished. The smaller antechamber was for taking off boots and hanging up coats. The lord, of course, took the large chamber, and the Jew took the antechamber. . . .

The Jew . . . made himself quite comfortable: he took of his velveteen cap (leaving his yarmulke on, of course), rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, and sat down on a stool by the door to his lord’s room. Not wanting the time to go to waste, he untied his bag, took out one of the small holy books, and engrossed himself in it. He bowed his head, closed an eye, chewed the tip of his beard, and nodded with his entire body. To the world, it all seemed contradictory. You couldn’t have it both ways: if this was a court Jew, how could he sit over a holy book? But what else could he be? If the two were complete strangers, why had he come with the lord? And what was he doing here on the Fast of Esther of all days?

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In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.