Occurring in 1775 at the height of the European Enlightenment, the Lisbon earthquake was the great natural disaster of the century, killing thousands and destroying over 80 percent of the city’s buildings. It also left its mark on the history of ideas, as Henrik Bering writes in his review of Mark Molesky’s This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason:

In an apocalyptic sermon published the year [after the earthquake], Father Gabriel Malagrida, a prominent [Portuguese] Jesuit, interpreted the earthquake as God’s punishment for the sins of the Lisboans. . . . [T]heologians like Britain’s John Wesley went on the offensive and seized on the earthquake as evidence of divine intervention. Abroad, Lisbon did indeed have a reputation as Sin City, King José setting a bad example with his predilection for taking nuns as mistresses. . . .

Up until then, writes Molesky, the feeling among the leading figures of the Enlightenment had been one of “smug self-satisfaction.” [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz had spoken of a benevolent deity who had created “the best of all possible worlds,” an attitude reflected in the conclusion of [Alexander] Pope’s Essay on Man: “whatever is, is right.” That optimism was badly shaken. Voltaire, who was living in comfortable semi-retirement in Switzerland with his chubby niece Madame Denis and Luc, his pet monkey, went into a deep funk: “Leibniz does not tell me . . . why the innocent and the guilty suffer alike this inevitable evil.” He wrote “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” a bitter denunciation of an evil world with a tepid acknowledgment of God’s existence stuck on at the end.

The young [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau would have none of this and wrote Voltaire a long letter accusing him of inconsistency. Rousseau got around the problem by dividing evil into natural and moral categories, says Molesky, which enabled him to attack his fellow men while retaining his faith. Thus he tears into the Lisboans for having built such tall buildings and crammed so many people into them, and for hanging around trying to save their belongings rather than fleeing. Besides, he adds high-handedly, by dying at this point, “some no doubt escaped greater misfortunes.”

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.