In the two or three years immediately after World War II, Eastern Europe’s political order was still in flux, the iron curtain was somewhat flimsy, and many Jews in the Soviet Union were trying to leave for the West. Yankel Lepkivker was one of four Lubavitch Hasidim who attempted to do so by crossing the border into Romania. They were caught by Romanian police, handed over to the MGB (precursor to the KGB), and interrogated and tortured. Lepkivker insisted at first that he was a not a Hasid, aware of Soviet hostility. Dovid Margolin writes:

The interrogator did not buy it. “For someone who claims not to know anything or anyone, what do you have to do with Mordechai Dubin, a major leader of this Chabad conspiracy?” Lepkivker had no idea what he was talking about. “On Purim of 1947 you were in Moscow, and you went to the chief rabbi’s home, and there you and Dubin were whispering with each other.” Yankel once again insisted he did not know what the interrogator was referring to. Then the interrogator pulled out a photograph.

Yankel recognized himself in the photo, which had obviously been taken with a hidden camera. It showed him sitting at a table set for the holiday with an old, white-bearded man whispering into his ear. While he’d heard of Mordechai Dubin, the once-famous and powerful hasidic member of Latvia’s parliament, it was the Soviet secret police who informed him of his interlocutor’s identity on that Purim day in Moscow.

The picture was taken at a clandestine Purim feast, where Dubin taught Lepkivker a niggun, or wordless sacred tune, which the latter would sing for the rest of his life, and teach to his children. You can listen, and read the rest of Lepkivker’s story, at the link.

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.