In 1969, only a handful of books about the Shoah were available in English. That same year, the great Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz reflected in the pages of Commentary on an academic conference on the Holocaust held the year before, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Much has changed since, but Dawidowicz’s essay remains thought-provoking reading for Yom ha-Shoah, which begins this evening:

Yad Vashem is, so far as I know, the last survivor of the folk tradition in East European Jewish historiography. Critical study of East European Jewish history began at a comparatively late date, in the last decade of the 19th century, when Simon Dubnov decided to devote his life to the history of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Dubnov’s first step was to collect basic raw data, primary-source materials, and—a mammoth task—to construct from these a vast chronology of events in Russian Jewish history. To compensate for the lack of Jewish national or municipal archives, Dubnov started a movement for what may be described as “folk” archives.

He sparked an extraordinary popular movement among thousands of Jews in the tsarist empire—university students as well as plain folk—who, following his guidance and instructions in Voskhod, a Russian Jewish periodical, accumulated for him huge amounts of documentary sources. Dubnov’s historical efforts, which coincided with the rise of secular national and socialist movements among East European Jews, succeeded in making plain people aware of the national uses of history. For activists in these newly stirring movements, Jewish history became the secular substitute for Judaism.

While Dawidowicz expressed serious doubts about whether the Holocaust survivors writing in this “folk tradition” she encountered at Yad Vashem could produce serious scholarship about the destruction of European Jewry, she had hope for the future:

Holocaust history will, I believe, be written in Israel. The younger Israeli historians, some associated with the Hebrew University, whose work is now beginning to be published, have impeccable academic credentials, sound historical training, and a professionalism that has sensitized them to the pitfalls of subjectivism. Furthermore, Israeli Jews have in abundance two qualities which American Jews lack but which Holocaust historiography requires. One is the ability to face death—its idea and its reality—and the other is a wholesome sense of Jewish identity. Handling the historical data requires both physical stamina and a heart strong enough to bear the anguish, endure the degradation, and transcend the defilement. It means being able to resist the natural desire to escape the victim’s fate. Few American Jews, I fear, can meet these standards.

No doubt the Dawidowicz of 1969 would have been surprised by how many American Jews would try to do so—with varying degrees of success. Her claim, however, is disproved by her own book, The War against the Jews (1975).

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.