In his book The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the story of two Jewish families who helped open China to international trade, making fortunes in the process. Sarah Abrevaya Stein sums up their rise in her review:

They dealt in silks, spices, cotton, jewels, carpets, opium, metals, and horses; they built buildings, docks, and railways. Their reach extended from their home, Ottoman Baghdad, across the British empire and Qing dynasty, throughout South and East Asia and beyond. They built company towns with schools, stores, and hospitals, where they trained young men to join their mercantile ranks. They commanded their own ships and forged relations with other merchants as well as with representatives of states. Over centuries, the Sassoon family crafted a global empire, which was navigated for generations in the family’s native tongue, Judeo-Arabic.

The Kadoorie family would come to exceed the Sassoons in wealth, but their mercantile roots grew in soil tilled by the Sassoons. Four Kadoorie sons joined the migratory flow of young men who journeyed from Baghdad to Bombay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (and well beyond) in the employ of the Sassoons. Most of these entrepreneurial merchants would never command more than middling wealth, but the Kadoories broke from the norm. Through investments in rubber, real estate, stocks, and electricity, the Kadoories built an empire of their own, which—whether through shrewdness or chance—proved more durable than the one that spawned it.

Stein finds Kaufman’s account filled with color, but sometimes lacking in accuracy and historical context. And while both the Sassoons and the Kadoories produced their share of playboys and bon vivants, they also produced some heroic figures, who, when Shanghai was flooded with European Jewish refugees, rose to the occasion:

Some 18,000 of these displaced souls reached Shanghai, and the brothers Kadoorie (along with an initially reluctant Victor Sassoon, whom they pressured into helping) were their greatest benefactors.

Horace Kadoorie, the youngest of the brothers, was indefatigable in helping his fellow Jews. He sponsored a youth association that offered refugee children recreational opportunities, vocational courses, and job placements. He supported a summer camp, built a school in the family’s name, and converted the family’s Rolls-Royce into a school bus. Even when wartime food shortages became severe, Horace still managed to serve refugee children one meal a day. (Later, when the family had resettled in Hong Kong, he repeated his generosity with hundreds of thousands of Chinese women, men, and children who had sought refuge in the then British-controlled city.)

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.