c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(RNS)-The biblical Book of Esther is a literary gem, a sweeping study of monumental conflicts, tremendous courage and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

It tells the 2,500-year-old story of how a villainous prime minister, Haman, nearly carried out his evil plan of murdering all the Jews of Persia. Only the vigilance of Mordecai, a Persian Jew, and the timely intervention of his niece, Queen Esther, foiled Haman’s diabolical scheme.

On Monday evening (March 4), this masterpiece will be read in synagogues throughout the world as Jews celebrate Purim, the joyous and boisterous holiday commemorating Esther’s heroic actions that saved her people. The costumes, parodies and special pastries give the holiday a carnival air, but the festivities of Purim mask a dreadful reality that echoes down through the centuries of Jewish history: the specter of mass murder.

The Book of Esther is a thoroughly secular story. The name of God does not appear anywhere in the text. Haman’s potential victims are not called”Hebrews”or”Israelites,”but simply”Jews.”And deliverance does not come from heaven but rather from the successful actions of desperate human beings facing certain death.

And Haman is a thoroughly modern anti-Semite. His venomous plans to kill Jews are accurately echoed in the 20th-century writings and policies of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Indeed, Haman and Hitler could be said to be soulmates in evil.

Haman bases his hatred of Jews on a personal incident. As a faithful Jew, Mordecai will not bow down to Haman nor to any human being, only to God. Haman, the prime minister, is outraged at Mordecai’s disrespect and projects his anger upon an entire people:”Haman was seized with fury,”the Book of Esther tells us.”He was not content with murdering Mordecai, but made up his mind to wipe out all the members of Mordecai’s people, the Jews.” With malevolence, Haman presents a murderous plan to his weak king, Ahasuerus:”There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples … of your kingdom; and their laws are diverse from those of every other people, and they ignore the royal edicts. It is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them. If it please the king to decree their destruction, I am prepared to pay 10,000 talents of silver to the king’s treasury. … And the king said to Haman … `Keep the money, and you can have the people too; do what you like with them.'” Hitler, too, loathed Jews. In his 1923 autobiography,”Mein Kampf,”Hitler described his feelings as a young man in Vienna:”Wherever I went I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity,”he wrote.

Four years earlier, Hitler had already formulated his heinous anti-Semitic program of annihilation:”… a systematic, legal campaign against the Jews … but the final objective must be the complete removal of the Jews.” Neither Haman nor the Nazis had any scruples about killing women and children.”The edict (to kill the Jews of the kingdom) was signed in the name of the king … and letters were sent to every province of the realm ordering the destruction, slaughter, annihilation of all Jews, young and old, women and children,”the Book of Esther tells us.

Similarly, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, gave a secret speech to Nazi leaders in October 1943:”Never speak about what I am telling you in this intimate circle. We had to answer the question: What about the women and children?”he said.”I did not feel I had the right to exterminate the men … and then allow their children to grow into avengers, threatening our sons and grandchildren. A fateful decision had to be made: This people (the Jews) had to vanish from the earth.” Some of Haman’s advisers and friends-the Bible calls them”wise men”-warned that he”shall not prevail against Mordecai. Far from it, once having begun your policy, you will fall and fall again” In 1938, after the infamous Kristallnacht assault on German and Austrian Jews, an anonymous pastor wrote to Hitler with a warning:”I, as a Protestant Christian have no doubt that … such reprisals will evoke the wrath of God against our people and Fatherland, if there is a God in heaven.” The Purim story ends with an ironic twist. Haman’s plot is thwarted, and he is hanged on the same gallows he had constructed for Mordecai. At the end of World War II, a similar irony attended the death of Julius Streicher, a Nazi journalist who was notorious for writing vicious anti-Jewish screeds and was regarded as a key player in selling Hitler’s”final solution”to the German people.

Convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremburg Trials, Streicher was sentenced to die in October 1946. When his time came to approach the gallows, Streicher acknowledged the dark symmetry between Haman’s actions as recorded in the Book of Esther and his own. Before the noose was placed around his neck, he shouted,”Purim Feast, 1946!” MJP END RUDIN