Talk:Judaism and violence/BookOfEstherPurimDraftText

Purim and the Book of Esther
The Book of Esther, one of the books of the Jewish Bible, is a story of palace intrigue centered on a plot to kill all Jews which was thwarted by Esther, a Jewish queen of Persia. Instead of being victims, the Jews of Persia killed 75,000 Persians (Esther 9:16) including Haman, an Amalekite that led the plot to kill the Jews. The annual Purim festival celebrates this event, and includes the recitation of the biblical instruction to "blot out the remembrance [or name] of Amalek". Scholars - including Ian Lustick, Marc Gopin, and Steven Bayme - state that the violence described in the Book of Esther has inspired and incited violent acts and violent attitudes in the post-biblical era, continuing into modern times, often centered on the festival of Purim.
 * Lustick, Ian, For the land and the Lord: Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, Council on Foreign Relations, 1988. pp ix-xi.
 * "Of decisive importance to Jewish fundamentalists is their belief that contemporary political developments are part of an unfolding cosmic drama that will determine, depending on the willingness of Jews to act decisively on its behalf, whether God's redemption of his people Israel, and of the whole world, will or will not soon reach its completion…. The massacre in the Hebron mosque on the Jewish holiday of Purim is a tragic, but telling, example. Preceded by a rash of killings of Jewish settlers by Muslim fundamentalists … it is not in the least a conincidence that the massacre took place on the Jewish holiday of Purim.  For most Jews Purim means listening to .. the Book of Esther .. .It is an occasion for  merry-making, games, charity and the exchange of gifts.  But as Goldstein sat reading that same book on Purim even in 1994, it is almost certain he identified Yasir Arafat with Haman, the arch-enemy of the Jews of ancient Persia, and the killing of Jewish settlers over the previous months with Haman's murderous designs. Accordingly, he [Goldstein] focused on often-ignored verses at the end of the book [of Esther] which, for Jewish fundamentalists, capture the essence of the story under contemporary circumstances and contain a divine imperative to act.  Acording to the Book of Esther the Jews are saved by the king who reverses Haman's evil decree and declares instead that Jews may do unto their enemies what their enemies had intended to do unto them 'to stand up for themselves, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might assault them, with their little ones and women' (Esther 8:11)….By mowing down Arabs he believed wanted to kill Jews, Goldstein was re-enacting part of the Purim story."


 * page 16: "This book deals not only with the theme of Amalek and responses - Christian as well as Jewish - to the book of Esther over the centuries, but also with Jewish violence connected with the holiday of Purim, from the early fifth century to the late twentieth."
 * page 19: "The first [part of this book] is devoted .. to the book of Esther … Was it a book that promoted cruel vengance…? Since according to Jewish law the Amalekites, including women and children, had to be utterly destroyed, thinking about Amalek involved … thinking about the possibilities of, and justifications for, Jewish violence. [The second part of this book includes discussion of] one specific form of Jewish violence over many centuries - the descration of the cross and other Christian images…. [chapter 8 is] devoted to violence against Christians, sometimes within the context of the Purim festiviy, in the 5th-7th centuries. Chapter 9 carries the subject of Purim violence into the medieval and early modern Europe, especially against the background of the often violent rites of Carnival."
 * page 19: "The first [part of this book] is devoted .. to the book of Esther … Was it a book that promoted cruel vengance…? Since according to Jewish law the Amalekites, including women and children, had to be utterly destroyed, thinking about Amalek involved … thinking about the possibilities of, and justifications for, Jewish violence. [The second part of this book includes discussion of] one specific form of Jewish violence over many centuries - the descration of the cross and other Christian images…. [chapter 8 is] devoted to violence against Christians, sometimes within the context of the Purim festiviy, in the 5th-7th centuries. Chapter 9 carries the subject of Purim violence into the medieval and early modern Europe, especially against the background of the often violent rites of Carnival."


 * Bayme, Steven, "Saddam, Haman, and Amalek", in Jewish arguments and counterarguments: essays and addresses, KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2002: pp 75-80:
 * "For many centuries Purim has been a source of both joy and embarassment for Jews. … Still others have challenged the doctrine of violence associated with the holiday… Martin Luther, for one, accused the Jews of bloodthirsty and vengeful spirit in the Book of Esther… [Luther] reflect[s] the close association of Purim with the biblical doctrine of war against the Amalek. The theme of Jewish violence against Haman and his supporters, the doctrine of Amalek, has caused Jews the greatest discomfort with the Book of Esther and the holiday with which it is associated…. Judaism teaches that violence is justified under certain circumstances - particularly defense against agression … Amalek, the rabbis argue, is the eternally irreconcilable enemy who represents a value system that promotes murder … Herein lies the enduring relevance of Purim. Agression must be stopped and evil eliminated…. The meaning of Purim is relevant to the question of the war in the Persian Gulf today [2002]…. [Saddam Hussein's] unprovoked Scud missle attacks against entirely civilian targets in Israel are reminiscent of Amaleks's treacherous attacks upon the … Israelites...."


 * The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition Michael David Coogan (Ed), p 708:
 * "Jews and Christians have also been troubled by the story's [Book of Esther] enthusiastic account of the violence of the Jewish community's response to their enemies, which involved not only self defense but also the slaughter of women and children, including the sons of Haman.  The bloodthirsty language, however, derives from the story's symmetric pattern of reversals.."


 * Gopin, Marc, Between Eden and Armageddon: the future of world religions, violence, and peacemaking, Oxford University Press US, 2000, pp 52-53:
 * "I have known many Orthodox rabbis, for example, who would be happy to ensure that a holiday such as Purim, with its obligatory reading of the Book of Esther, which cluminates with the slaughter of the people - including their children - who tried to exterminate the Jewish people, would never be used to justify the killing of anyone today.  They certainly  are deeply ashamed by Baruch Goldstein's mass murder at the Hebron mosque, which was inspired in part by Purim…. They can and do give moralistic sermons, and they can and do interpret the story in less violent terms…. The hermeneutic give and take of Purim is but one example of the way in which a deeply embedded tradition will not disappear even when many people reject its implicit message of violence….  It is not likely [that Purim would diminish in importance] in the current climate of religious revivalism, but it is possible that the violence of the story could be overshadowed with time by the numerous benevolent characteristics of the holiday, such as aiding the poor…. Jewish empowerment allows for a new hermeneutic that could centralize the violence of the story.  If the political situation were to rapidly deteriorate, it is conceivable that Purim could become for radical Jews what Ramadan has become for radical Muslims in Algeria, a killing season….  Even the most radically pacifist Jews that I know do not eliminate this holiday, although they do not really know what to do with sacralized violence yet, and are now only evolving a spiritual and ritual reworking of traumatic and violent episodes."


 * Nirenberg, David, Communities of violence: persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton University Press, 1998page 220:
 * "There is evidence … that Jews could use ritual violence to criticize the Christians in whose lands they dwelled An obvious example is Purim, on which see E. Horowitz, The Rite to Be Reckless ..; and for a late medieval Iberian example, S. Levy, "Notas sobre el 'Purrim de Zaragoza", ''Anuario do Filologia 5 (1979): 203-217."


 * Gonen, Jay Y., Yahweh versus Yahweh: the enigma of Jewish history, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp 63-64:
 * "In 1994, on Purim day, Jewish physician Baruch Goldstein burst into an Arab Mosque in Hebron … and sprayed Arab worshipers who were kneeling in prayer with bullets from an automatic weapon. Twenty-nine Palestinians were killed before the enraged crowd tore him to pieces.  It was a shameful day in Jewish hisotyr, the memory of which should be injected into all future Purim celebrations as a sober reminder of the potential barbarism that is hidden within the old myths of vengeance wrought by the Sons of Israel upon their enemies…. [Baruch's] memorial plaque affirmed that 'he was murdered for the sanctification of the Name…'. In this manipulative phrasing the old Jewish ethos of martyrdom, the sanctification of the Name, was given new meaning - messianic, activist, and murderous…. Purim celebrations in Israel in 2001 were again blotted by ugly incidents. As Jewish hotheadedness increased … harassments of Palestinians took place.  During Purim it was a mitzvah, or good deed, to sock it to the modern Amalekites…  In Jerusalem dozens of Jews gathered in the Sabath Square, pelted cars with stones, tried to set a minibus on fire, and threw various objects at residents of the Arab quarter.  In Zion Gate Jews beat up Palestinians, calling them 'dirty Arabs' and 'terrorists'.  One drunken Jew who wounded an Arab in the eye subsequently attacked the police as he was arrested.  There was no loss of life in these incidents, but this cannot be said about the Baruch Goldstein precedence of violence that was deliberately injected into the Purim ritual.  And if it has become a Purim commandment to drink and then attack Arabs, how should the Arabs react?"


 * Robins, Robert S. and Post, Jerrold M., Political paranoia: the psychopolitics of hatred, Yale University Press, 1997, pp 162-163:
 * "On February 25, 1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein walked into the mosque atop the Tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron and fired his automatic weapon into the worshipping Muslims, killing or wounding at least 130 of them … Also on the night before … Goldstein had read … from the Book of Esther which tells the story of the Jewish festival of Purim…. Purim [Baruch's] friend explained 'is a holiday to kill the people who are trying to kill the Jews'"  … For most Jews Purim is a joyous celebration of deliverance. But for some it is a celebration of violence, commemorating an uprising of the Jews against their enemies, a day of righteous wrath when 'the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto them that hated them' (Esther 9:1)."


 * Hunter, Alastair G. "Denominating Amalek: Racist stereotyping in the Bible and the Justification of Discrimination" in  Sanctified aggression: legacies of biblical and post biblical vocabularies,  Jonneke Bekkenkamp, Yvonne Sherwood (Eds), Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003, pp 102-106.
 * One illustrative quote from p 103: Hunter quotes Arthur Waskow:  "on hearing of the murderous attack by Baruch Goldstein": "I know at once that this is no isolated crazy, this 'Baruch Goldstein' who has murdered forty of my cousins.  I know at once, he has decided on this Purim to 'blot out the memory of the Amalek' not with a noise maker but with a machine gun… So then, in our generation, for some Jews the Palestinians become Amalek."


 * Boustan, Ra'anan S., Violence, Scripture, and Textual Practice in Early Judaism and Christianity, BRILL, 2010, p. 218
 * "..Christians had grown apprehensive at what they perceived, not without reason, as the ill-will that Jews harbored against the Christian Church… Such concerns are already reflected in the legislation pased in 408 CE against the alleged Jewish practice of burning Haman in effigy on 'a form made to resemble the sainted cross' during the festival of Purim, which the authorities suspected was a gesture of ridicule aimed at the Savior himself…. And, indeed, a verse parody in Jewish Aramaic .. .which features Jesus Christ amid a host of Israel's enemies … justifying the punishment of Haman and bewailing their own cruel fates, may suggest that the dim view of Purim taken by Christian authorities was far from baseless."

Other scholars, including Jerome Auerbach, state that evidence for Jewish violence on Purim through the centuries is "exceedingly meager", including occasional episodes of stone throwing, the spilling of rancid oil on a Jewish convert, and a total of three recorded Purim deaths inflicted by Jews in a span of more than 1,000 years. In a review of historian Elliot Horowitz's book Reckless rites: Purim and the legacy of Jewish violence , Hillel Halkin pointed out that the incidences of Jewish violence against non-Jews through the centuries are extraordinarily few in number and that the connection between them and Purim is tenuous.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow and historian Elliot Horowitz state that Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, may have been motivated by the Book of Esther, because the massacre was carried out on the day of Purim but other scholars point out that the association with Purim is circumstantial because Goldstein never explicitly made such a connection.

Publishers

 * Princeton University Press
 * Oxford University Press
 * Yale University Press
 * KTAV Publishing House
 * Univ of Wisconsin Press

Occupations of authors

 * Ian Lustick - professor at University of Pennsylvania
 * E. Horowitz - Professor at Bar Ilan University
 * Marc Gopin - Director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.
 * Robert S. Robins - Professor at Tulane University
 * Jay Y. Gonen - Professor at University of Cincinnati
 * Boustan, Ra'anan S - Professor at UCLA
 * Jerrold M. Post - Professor at The George Washington University
 * Steven Bayme - National Director of Jewish Communal Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, and holds the rank of Adjunct Professor at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University.