In the 14th century, the Jews of northern Europe—who had already suffered from massacres during the crusades and wholesale expulsion from England in 1290—faced a new problem: they were accused of spreading disease among Christians by poisoning the wells. Tzafrir Barzilay suggests that this libel began with rumors that lepers were deliberately spreading their condition through the water supply, which in turn gave rise to similar accusations against Jews:

In France the allegations convinced officials and rulers to change course and move from defending minority groups to acting against them. The accusations were a phenomenon unique to the later Middle Ages, appearing, flourishing, and declining during a single century.

Toward late June [1321], a month before the king ordered their arrest, such rumors triggered violence against Jews in the county of Anjou. Count Philip of Valois (later King Philip VI) described the events in a letter sent to Pope John XXII shortly afterward. He wrote that June 26, 1321 was an ominous day; a major solar eclipse was seen in Anjou and Touraine, turning the sun red as blood. This report is corroborated by other sources and astronomical data. Philip, who apparently accepted the eclipse as an apocalyptic sign, added that thunderstorms and earthquakes struck, fire rained down from the sky, and even a dragon flew through the air and killed many with its foul breath. He stated that “the inhabitants of the land believed that the end of the world had just come.”

In their panic, the people of Anjou suspected that local Jews had something to do with these ominous signs: “On the next day [June 27], in the said county [Anjou], our people began to attack Jews, because of sorcery that they performed against Christianity.” These suspicions may have been related to well-poisoning accusations, which were already widespread in the Touraine, close to Anjou. However, Philip insists that evidence for Jewish involvement in the plot was found only when suspicious Christians “examined carefully the houses of specific Jews,” probably in search of signs of sorcery.

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.