COMMENTARY: Purim Holiday Reminder That Hatred of Jews Didn’t Stop With Haman

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The author of Ecclesiastes had it right: “There is nothing new under the sun.” This is especially true when murderous anti-Jewish political and religious leaders continue to slither out, century after century, from under history’s rocks. The continuing appearance of evildoers confirms the belief that while our technology may […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The author of Ecclesiastes had it right: “There is nothing new under the sun.” This is especially true when murderous anti-Jewish political and religious leaders continue to slither out, century after century, from under history’s rocks. The continuing appearance of evildoers confirms the belief that while our technology may have improved since biblical times, the pathology of human hatred and bigotry remains unchanged.

I will be keenly aware of the realistic words of Ecclesiastes on Monday evening March 13 when the Jewish people celebrate the holiday of Purim by publicly reading the book of Esther in synagogues throughout the world. In 10 brief, brilliantly written chapters, Esther recounts how a prime minister was nearly successful in his genocidal plan to murder every Jew in the ancient Persian Empire that numbered 127 provinces.


It was only the personal intervention of Esther, the Jewish queen, and Mordecai, her politically astute uncle, that prevented their own deaths and the mass murder of their fellow Jews.

Each time the name of the villainous prime minister, Haman, is read, the congregation hisses, boos and shakes loud noisemakers to express their contempt for his monstrous plans to physically annihilate an entire people. In an ironic twist, the book of Esther concludes with Haman hanged for his crime on the same gallows he had built for Mordecai.

Purim, the Hebrew name for the dice thrown to determine the date for the slaughter of innocents, is, in fact, a raucous joyous holiday. But Purim’s festive costumes and special foods, its gaiety and carnival-like spirit, cannot conceal the terrifying grimness of the story.

Many scholars believe the book was composed in the 3rd or 4th century B.C. and perhaps referred to the reign of the Persian Emperor Xexres I (486-465 B.C.). Other scholars dismiss Esther as a work of fiction that mysteriously found its way into the Bible. What is not in dispute is that Jews have annually celebrated their deliverance from death for well more than 2,100 years.

For Jews, there is no mystery why the book of Esther was included in Scriptures; its sinister story is not fanciful fiction, but horrible history. Indeed, as the only biblical book without a specific mention of God, it represents the tragic prototype of all future attacks upon Jews and Judaism. Those attacks may have started long ago with Haman, the wicked Persian leader in the Purim story, but sadly, they have continued throughout the centuries, and include the cruel Roman Empire, the marauding Crusaders, the notorious Spanish Inquisition, the Czarist pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust.

Today, Haman, the would-be ancient killer of Jews, has his modern counterpart in another Persian leader who also wants to kill Jews: Mahmoud Ahmadnejad, the president of Iran, the modern name for Persia. Even though the two evil men are separated by thousands of years in time, they both share high political offices in the same country, and they have both engaged in murderous rhetoric aimed at the same group of people.

Haman: “The Jews do not obey the king’s laws, and it does not pay for the king to tolerate their existence as a people” (Esther 3:8).


Ahmadnejad: “The Islamic community will not allow its historic enemy to live in its heartland. The establishment of the Zionist regime (the modern state of Israel) was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world” (October 26, 2005).

Haman: “If it please the king, let a law be written that they (the Jews) be destroyed” (Esther 3:9).

Ahmadnejad: “As the Imam (Ayat Allah Khomeini) said, Israel must be wiped off the map” (October 26, 2005).

Haman: “He was disdainful of killing Mordecai, but once Haman learned Mordecai was a Jew, he resolved to kill all Jews in the empire” (Esther 3:6).

Ahmadnejad: “The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land” (October 26, 2005).

Sixty years ago in Nuremberg, Germany, Julius Streicher, the notorious Nazi anti-Semite actually compared himself to Haman. Like his lethal ancient mentor, Streicher was also hanged. As he went to his death the Nazi war criminal yelled: “Purim 1946 … Heil Hitler.”


MO/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

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