In the late 1920s, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin began developing the idea that international law ought to criminalize attempts to slaughter en masse members of a particular people. He formulated the term “genocide” in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and his tireless postwar efforts led to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. While Lemkin has been the subject of numerous biographies and studies—and was made into something of a hero by Washington’s former UN ambassador Samantha Power—these have uniformly failed to note Lemkin’s enthusiastic involvement in the Zionist movement, depicting him instead either as a cosmopolitan without national loyalties or as having been influenced by such non-Zionist Jewish movements as the Bund. Now James Loeffler explains how Lemkin’s Zionism contributed to his ideas about genocide—and how Lemkin himself participated in covering up this part of his past:

Because their political horizon extended beyond Europe into the global sphere, [many pre-World War II] Zionists turned to international law in search of a middle way that combined [advocating for Jewish rights in both] Palestine and Eastern Europe, nationalism and internationalism, Jewish particularity and cultural pluralism into a vision of international law. . . . [B]y recognizing the Jewish people as a rights-bearing collective, [these] Zionist internationalists argued, international law could help tie together the global Jewish Diaspora into a coherent, legally recognized nation. . . .

[But why] would the man who invented the concept of genocide [based on] his Jewish past deliberately hide the political sources of his legal imagination? The answer is that Lemkin well understood that Zionist advocacy for international law risked accusations of politicization. He had already encountered Polish anti-Semitism, with its ideological fixation on Zionism as an anti-Polish conspiracy. . . .

It was not only Jewish-Polish relations in Eastern Europe but also Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine that followed Lemkin into the UN. . . . Desperate for Arab and Muslim votes, Lemkin evidently feared the politicization that would come if he or his law were publicly identified with Zionism. The disavowal of his past politics formed part of a larger attempt to dodge charges of Jewish nationalist politics that might imperil his project. . . .

Yet there were limits to his distancing from his prewar Zionist career. He freely acknowledged his past to Jewish journalists writing in Hebrew and Yiddish at the time. They, in turn, continued to identify his legal project as both a Jewish self-defense campaign and a contribution to global justice. More strikingly, he apparently maintained a warm friendship with one of the most controversial Jewish political figures of the day. In New York, Lemkin fraternized with Peter Bergson, otherwise known as Hillel Kook, the controversial militant right-wing Zionist activist who had staged a number of dramatic public spectacles during World War II to try to galvanize American Jews and their government to intervene to stop the Holocaust.

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.