The author of a much-studied, psychologically penetrating exposition on repentance, as well as important talmudic commentaries, Jonah ben Abraham of Girona (ca. 1200–1263) is known to posterity as Rabbeinu Yonah—not simply Rabbi Jonah, but our teacher Jonah. Tamar Marvin describes his legacy:

Rabbeinu Yonah is known for two seemingly contradictory habits of mind: the zeal of his public activity and the sincerity of his piety⁠. Often fêted with the appellation he-ḥasid, “the pious,” generally reserved in his period for the rare ascetic, mystic, or other such spiritually disciplined individual, Rabbeinu Yonah reversed his own highly public criticisms of Moses Maimonides with great humility. At the same time, he was an advocate of involvement in public affairs, exhorting householders to greater religious observance and railing against rampant sexual impropriety.

[As a young man], Yonah pursued a unique course of education. Despite his proud Sephardi lineage, a tradition in which he would largely work halachically, Rabbeinu Yonah sought his education in France. . . . While in Provence, Rabbeinu Yonah seems to have become involved in the currents of Kabbalah washing through the region. . . . The cross-pollination of tosafistic [i.e., of the French talmudic dialecticians of the school of Rashi] and kabbalistic modes of learning with Rabbeinu Yonah’s Sephardi background apparently encouraged his [own] creativity.

[Later in his life], Yonah was impelled to enter the contentious debate over Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed at the behest of his teacher Rabbi Solomon of Montpellier. Often portrayed as a reactionary, Rabbi Solomon was in actuality, like most Provençal Jews, a moderate who displays great respect for Maimonides generally. Rabbeinu Yonah [proved] a worthy opponent for the Maimonidean loyalists.

This controversy over Maimonidean rationalism and Judaism’s proper relationship with Islamic and Greek philosophy would embroil much of Provençal (and Spanish) Jewry during the 13th century. According to some contemporary sources, Jonah would later regret his harsh condemnations of the Maimonideans, an experience that led him to produce his monumental study of repentance.

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.