Some 150 Jews live in Malta, making up under .o4 percent of the population. The tiny island nation has been a home to Jews since at least the 1st century CE, although some evidence suggests that Jews first arrived with Phoenician merchants as early as the 9th century BCE. But while Malta gave refuge to Jews in the 15th and 20th centuries, it has also been the site of much persecution, and from the 16th through the 18th centuries had the dubious distinction of being the only European country where large numbers of Jews were slaves. Gail Dubov writes:

Mdina, [a] walled city. . . was Malta’s medieval capital, when one-third of its population was Jewish. A sign [now] marks the old Jewish silk market on Carmel Street. In medieval times, Jews were responsible for supplying the oil in the street lamps, exempting them from guard duty. . . .

The Catacombs of St. Paul date back to Roman times. Recently reopened, they were early burial tombs of Christians and Jews, surprisingly well preserved. Carved menorahs can be seen etched in the limestone archways and tomb walls. One, a burial spot of a husband and wife who died 2,000 years ago, displays a menorah in the stone above them, proclaiming that a Jewish couple had been buried there. . . .

Jewish families arrived [in Malta] from Spain in the 15th century, fleeing the expulsion and Inquisition. But eventually many were forced to convert to Christianity. To this day, family names with Jewish origins like Michallef, Ellul, Hellul, and Azzopardi dominate the island. Napoleon arrived [in 1798] and seized the island, freeing Jewish slaves. It was the British who ruled from 1800, establishing English as an official language and [the modern-day capital of] Valletta as an important crossroads to the Middle and Far East. Jews from Gibraltar, England, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, North Africa, and other Mediterranean cities immigrated to Malta and established businesses.

[More recently, Malta], was the only European country to welcome Jews without visas during World War II.

Today, Dubov notes, the island “has a fine kosher restaurant.”

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.