Hanukkah may have come and gone, but since it’s still December I hope it’s not too late to share Cambridge University Library’s “fragment of the month” from the famous collection of Jewish manuscripts known as the Cairo Genizah. To understand this fragment, one must be familiar with the now-forgotten Aramaic text on which it is based, Marc Michaels writes.

Megillat Antiochus [the “Scroll of Antiochus”], as it is mostly known (though it has gone by various names) is an interesting pseudo-biblical book. Jews read Esther on Purim, Ruth on Shavuot, the Song of Songs on Passover, Ecclesiastes on Sukkot, Lamentations on Tisha B’av, and Jonah on Yom Kippur. A book for every occasion. But nothing on Hanukkah.

To fill this gap, someone living in the Land of Israel between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE wrote this Aramaic version of the Hanukkah story, modeled on the book of Esther. Yemenite and Italian communities, among many others, even included it in their Hanukkah liturgies at various points. It even appears in the 1949 Hebrew-English Birnbaum siddur. Around 1100, a scribe copied (or composed) an adaptation of the book in rhymed Aramaic verse, which was later found in the Genizah:

The poem starts like the megillah with a reference to the villain of the piece, King Antiochus IV, the Seleucid ruler, described here as king of Greece. However, it then misses out all of the establishing information about the king, his greatness, and his cities. . . . Instead, our poem leaps to a repeated refrain from the megillah and the prime cause of the difficulties chronicled: the three decrees that were imposed upon the Jews and that led to their revolt.

Those three decrees banned the observance of the Sabbath, the marking of the new moon, and circumcision.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.