Arrested in 1949 on charges of “anti-Soviet crimes,” the great Yiddish author Dovid Bergelson was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in 1952. Bergelson had fled the Soviet Union in 1921 for exile in Berlin, but in 1926 began to take a more pro-Soviet stance, arguing that the USSR was the best place for Yiddish culture to flourish, and he moved to Moscow in 1934. Dara Horn writes:

[In the 1920s], Stalin’s effort to brainwash ethnic minorities involved the Soviet government’s financing of Yiddish-language schools, newspapers, theaters, and publishers, to the extent that there were even Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. During World War II, Stalin used these loyal Jews to his advantage by creating a “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” a group of Jewish celebrities, including Bergelson, tasked with drumming up money and support from American Jews for the Soviet war effort. After the war, Stalin announced that the committee he himself had created was actually part of a vast Zionist conspiracy. Bergelson and his co-defendants endured three years of torture in prison before pleading guilty to the crime of “nationalism” (read: Judaism). He was executed along with a dozen other Jewish luminaries.

For Horn, Bergelson’s work, and especially his 1913 novel Nokh alemen (rendered into English as “The End of Everything”)—which she deems one of the greatest of all Yiddish novels—can’t be entirely separated from his fate. The work tells the story of Mirel Hurvits, a “beautiful and intelligent young woman” from a respectable family who, indolent and self-absorbed, suffers from ennui and dissatisfaction with shtetl life as she moves through a succession of boyfriends:

Bergelson’s works were celebrated for being very “European” rather than “Jewish,” comparable with Chekhov rather than Sholem Aleichem. . . . The End of Everything . . . has been called the “Yiddish Madame Bovary,” and the comparison captures not only its heroine’s dissatisfactions but also Bergelson’s mastery of narrative indirection. . . . But that comparison belittles Bergelson’s originality by suggesting that a woman’s desires and small-town tedium are also Bergelson’s main subjects. Ostensibly they are, but the stakes are a lot higher when one is depicting a Russian shtetl in 1913, after decades of failed promises of Jewish emancipation and brutal anti-Semitic attacks, than they ever were for depicting small-town France. Suffice it to say that no one felt the need to execute Flaubert. . . .

The End of Everything is not so much about Mirel [as it is about] the end of East European Jewish life—and that fact places The End of Everything on the near end of a several-thousand-years-long chain of dead cities that precede it. All of the community’s motivations in the novel appear to Mirel, and perhaps to the reader, to be tedious conventions of bourgeois life. But those conventions—the imperative of marriage and child-rearing, for instance, or the emphasis on money as a means of risk-avoidance, or the traditional pieties maintained even by nonbelievers—are, in the context of Jewish culture, not merely examples of bourgeois pettiness that any individual might do without. Instead they are the cornerstones of a vast national project of preservation in exile. . . .

Bergelson, otherwise a master of subtlety, doesn’t hesitate to hit us over the head with this. The book ends with Mirel weeping in the night with no one to comfort her, deliberately recalling biblical accounts of Jerusalem’s destruction. Mirel goes into exile [from her shtetl] the day after Tisha b’Av, the summer fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple. The novel’s most powerful literary predecessor isn’t Madame Bovary. It’s Lamentations. Which means that, horrifically, The End of Everything and the end of Bergelson are not so different after all.

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.