In 1946, the Haganah sent the then-twenty-three-year-old Shlomo Hillel undercover to his native Iraq, where he promoted Zionism among local Jews and helped small numbers to sneak out of the country. A year later, Hillel, who died on February 8 at the age of ninety-seven, returned to Mandatory Palestine, but wanted to do more to help his brethren. Clay Risen writes:

As he watched ships full of Jews arrive from Europe—one carried his future wife, Temima—he decided that Iraqi Jews deserved the same opportunity. But Iraq forbade them to emigrate, and the British had severely limited how many Jews could move to Palestine. Hillel would have to act in secret. With the Haganah’s support, he found American pilots who had a cargo plane and an itch for adventure. “Someone in the United States had told two of them, ‘Look, . . . there are some crazy people who are willing to pay a lot of money to smuggle Jews to Palestine,’” Hillel said in a 2008 oral history.

One morning in August 1947, the three men flew to Iraq, where they had initially planned to rendezvous with about 50 Jews in the desert. It would have been much easier to leave from the Baghdad airport, but they knew that Iraqi guards would check the plane. Then Hillel had an idea. He had watched planes taxi to the end of their runways, then wait five minutes before takeoff while their engines warmed up. If he had the Jews hiding just off the edge of the runway, they could use that brief window to hurry aboard, and the Iraqi authorities would never know.

When the War of Independence made these operations too dangerous, Hillel grew even more ambitious, setting up what would become known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, an effort that brought some 124,000 to Israel from Iraq, where they faced increasing violence and anti-Semitism. Hillel later spent many years in the Knesset, and held various ambassadorial positions. But bringing Jews to their homeland remained his life’s work:

In 1977, as interior minister, he decreed that Jews in Ethiopia, who had long been excluded from aliyah, would be included. Over the next several years some 120,000 Ethiopian Jews—almost the entire Jewish population in the country—moved to Israel.

Among them was a young woman named Enatmar Salam. She met Hillel’s son, Ari, in college, and they fell in love. It was only after they married and had three daughters that they realized Ari’s father had made their relationship possible.

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.