Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock is the author of some 100 books, most of them works of fantasy and science fiction, genres to which he was a leading contributor in the 1960s and 70s. He was also the son of a Jewish mother, and Jewish characters and themes play important roles in a few of his works. One of them is the Pyat Quartet, an attempt to reckon with the Holocaust and 20th-century totalitarianism, about which Michael Weingrad writes:

The quartet is not fantasy literature but, at around 2,000 pages, it is a historical fantasia as ambitious as any novelistic project of our time. Darkly brilliant, the first book in the series, Byzantium Endures, shuttles between Kiev, Odessa, and Saint Petersburg during the first two decades of our own twentieth century. This is the rail-crossed, blood-soaked landscape of some of the greatest works of modern Jewish literature. Yet to an extent more extreme than any character one encounters in the works of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, I.J. Singer, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and others who seem (especially Babel) to haunt the novel, Moorcock’s protagonist is a self-hating Jew.

In fact, the phrase may not quite be applicable since it is not clear how much of a self Colonel Maxim Pyatnitsky really possesses. Though “Pyat” is utterly convinced that he is of noble Cossack stock, and despite the near-constant stream of anti-Semitic and racist jeremiads delivered by this profoundly unreliable narrator, it is clear to everyone he meets that he is a Jew.

While Weingrad finds some of this engaging, it ultimately crashes against Moorcock’s limited moral horizons and “pretension to political significance” in the second half of the series:

Moorcock seems to think that his depictions of Pyat’s orgies with Hitler and pages-long fulminations against the Jews tell us something about the real nature of the modern West. But Nazism wasn’t a form of sexual dysfunction, as Moorcock seems to propose, and Pyat isn’t symbolic of anything except his own sociopathy.

Indeed, Weingrad suggests these literary failures stem from a blinkered moral vision apparent in some of the author’s other writings:

It is not just that Moorcock is unable to credit Christianity as a coherent moral response to the “world’s pain,” viewing religious faith as sinister hypocrisy. It is also that he requires a conservative enemy—Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in fiction, Reagan and Thatcher in politics—upon which to project his own moral flaws and distract from his own philosophical incoherence.

Moorcock’s Jewish identity . . . is mainly concerned with the Holocaust, disdainful of religion, and (in his online musings) taken up with sniping at Israel accompanied by a disinterest in getting to know that country firsthand. In this regard, he is typical of many assimilated and left-leaning Jews in both England and America.

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.