Discovered in the city of Norfolk in what had once been a moat, and donated to Oxford in 1755, the so-called Bodleian Bowl bears a Hebrew inscription that puzzled British Hebraists for centuries. Rebecca Abrams explains what is now known about this remarkable artifact, and offers a brief history of the Jews of England in the Middle Ages:

Standing almost 25 centimeters high and weighing in at a hefty five kilograms, the bowl has a long Hebrew inscription encircling the rim and is impressively decorated with hoof-shaped feet, birds, flowers, stags, and fleurs-de-lys. . . . The marquis of Northampton, writing in 1696, thought the bowl “a great mystery” and described it as a “rabbinical porridge pot,” intended by its users to symbolize the biblical pot of manna. . . . It is now generally agreed that it was in all likelihood used to collect charitable donations. The Hebrew inscription also puzzled scholars with its tantalizing mixture of abbreviations, missing letters, and words without clear meaning. A credible translation for the inscription reads:

This is the gift of Joseph, son of the holy Rabbi Yeḥiel, may the memory of the righteous holy one be for a blessing, who answered and asked the congregation as he desired, in order to behold the face of Ariel as it is written in the law of Jekuthiel, “And righteousness delivers from death.”

Property deeds and other documents, which came to light in the 19th century, reveal that Joseph was a leading member of the Jewish community in Colchester in the 13th century, and the eldest son of Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris, a leading talmudic scholar in . . . France and the head of the renowned Paris yeshiva. Joseph had spent time in prison (we don’t know for what, exactly) and on his release made a vow to emigrate to the Holy Land, an intention he began to realize in around 1257.

Before his departure, Joseph put his affairs in order, transferred his property on Stockwell Street, Colchester to his brother Samuel and presented the bowl as a gift to the local Jewish community, possibly to thank them for raising money to help fund his journey. Joseph left England in 1260, . . . traveling first to France and Greece, then on to the land of Israel, where he subsequently died. He was buried not far from Haifa in a graveyard at the foot of Mount Carmel, alongside many other eminent rabbis.

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.