The Jewish holiday of Tu b’Shvat is, strictly speaking, a tax deadline: fruit that ripen prior to this date are considered to be part of the previous year’s crop for the purposes of various tithes. But 17th-century kabbalists invested the day with mystical significance, and thereafter it became a date symbolizing Jews’ connection with the Land of Israel, before being repurposed again as the basis for a tenuous sort of Jewish environmentalism. This transformation of the date described in the Talmud as “the new year for the trees” may seem commonsensical, but Etan Golubtchik argues that in fact it is antithetical to the day’s meaning. As he explains, the idea of a human obligation to subdue and cultivate nature, rather than to leave it wild and untrammeled, is deeply rooted in Jewish theology, beginning with God’s commandment to Adam “to work and to guard” the Garden of Eden and further evidenced by the rabbis’ description of an encounter between the 1st-century sage Rabbi Akiva and the Roman provincial governor Turnus Rufus:

When Turnus Rufus challenged Akiva by asking why there is a commandment to circumcise one’s son if God’s creations are perfect, “Rabbi Akiva brought Turnus Rufus grains of wheat and some bread, and said, ‘These grains of wheat are God’s handiwork, and the bread is the handiwork of man. Is the latter not greater than the former?’” In both breadmaking and circumcision, man is expected to take the resources provided by nature and improve upon them. Here Akiva articulates a central tenet of Jewish philosophy: the natural environment made by God provides the resources for man to build upon. Man is expected to use these resources in order to take care of himself and those in need, as well as to create religious structures, like the tabernacle and Temple, in which to worship God.

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.