PURIM 5771
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of Malca, z’l
The Book of Esther has always been for Jews an allegory depicting the Jewish life and the Jewish lot among the nations. It is a book that conveys love for Jews, and for the tie that unites them.
Purim became the symbolic name for Jewish deliverance, and whenever a Jewish community was saved from a horrible fate, from a pogrom, or from the exile which a Haman-like ruler tried to impose, the community would, Purim-like, celebrate.
Purim will continue to be celebrated as long as prejudice and hatred of the Jews exists, as long as the likes of Ahmadinejad and al-Qaeda will be around. We will celebrate their disappearance, just as today we celebrate so many other special Purims.
A happy Purim to all!
Baruch Cohen
(Baruch Cohen is the Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)
Purim—Encyclopedia Judaica Vol. 13. , pgs. 1305-1399
List of Special Purims
CITY OBSERVED ON DATE REASON FOR OBSERVATION
Della Paglia (Italy) 25th Av 1799 Saved from massacre
Avignon 28th Shevat 1757 Escaped danger of a riot
France 14th Adar 1191 Chief Jew-hater execute
Cairo-called Purim Mizraym 28th Adar 1524 Saved from extermination
Cunco (Italy) 5th Kislev 1799 Synagogue saved from destruction
Ivrea (Italy) 1st Shevet 1797 Escaped plundering during
revolutionary war
Lepano (Greece) 11th Tevet 1699 Saved during Turkish war
Medzibozs (Poland) 11th Tevet 1648-49 Saved by Chmielnicki’s bands
Prague 14th Heshvan 1620 Saved from sacking and riots
Rome 1st Shevat 1793 Ghetto saved assault and fire
Sevmide (Italy) 25th Tammuz 1809 Saved from earthquake
Tiberias 7th Elul 1743 Saved from danger of war
Vilna 15th Av 1794 Saved during Russo-Polish war
Vidin-Bulgaria 4th-5th Heshvan 1806 Saved by accusation that the ruler had been
poisoned by his Jewish physician
IRAN DECLARES WAR ON PURIM
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, January 12, 2011
Less than two years ago, the readers of the New York Times were being treated to Roger Cohen’s tribute to Iran’s supposedly kindly treatment of the remnant of a once-great Jewish community. Cohen’s rosy description of life inside the Islamist republic was widely scorned for his willingness to buy into the lies being peddled by the tyrants of Tehran. The Times columnist’s motive for trying to soften the image of that openly anti-Semitic government was to undermine support for sanctions or the use of force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The point was that if Iran’s eliminationist rhetoric about the State of Israel could be rationalized or its reputation for Jew-hatred wished away, it would be that much harder to forge an international consensus on the need to stop this regime for gaining nuclear capability.
In the intervening two years since Cohen’s fallacious pro-Iranian broadside, we haven’t heard much about the treatment of the small Jewish community there. But this week, via a report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, we learned that the Iranian news agency FARS has announced that the site of the Tomb of Mordechai and Esther in the city of Hamdan has lost its official status as a religious pilgrimage site. The FARS report says that Iranian children are now being taught that the site, which honors the biblical heroine Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai, who are the central figures in the story of the Jewish holiday of Purim, was “an arm of Israeli imperialism that impugns Iranian sovereignty.” FARS went on to say that the name of the shrine must be obliterated in order to teach Iranians to “beware of the crimes of the Jews.” It goes on to say that the site must become “a Holocaust memorial” to the “Iranian victims of Esther and Mordechai” and be placed under the supervision of the state religious-endowments authority. This is, of course, the same Iranian government that officially denies the fact of the actual Holocaust.…
The action against the tomb appears to be a response to a demonstration by Iranian students who called for its destruction in response to a false report that Israel was digging beneath the al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem. While we cannot know whether the Iranians will follow through on this threat and actually tear down the tomb or transform it into a center of anti-Jewish hate, it does provide yet another insight into the virulent nature of the attitudes of those in power there. Not satisfied with whipping up hatred against the State of Israel and the tiny, cowed remnant community that still lives there, the Iranians are now striking out against biblical Jews. The vicious nature of this regime is rooted in a view of Islam that apologists for Tehran have consistently sought to ignore. While the blow against Esther and Mordechai may be purely symbolic, it must be placed in the context of a long-running campaign of incitement against Jews and Israel that makes the possible acquisition of nuclear arms by this country even more alarming.
The Iranian war on Purim makes it even more imperative that they never be allowed to gain the power to do what the ayatollah’s ancient hero Haman attempted: the physical elimination of a Jewish population. Anyone who thinks that we can live with a nuclear Iran needs to consider the madness of allowing a government that thinks the Purim story should be reversed the power to do just that.
BADKHN BELT? JEWISH HUMOR WAS BORN IN 1661, PROF SAYS
Sue Fishkoff
JTA, March 3, 2011
The Chmielnicki massacres weren’t particularly funny. From 1648 to 1651, nearly 100,000 Jews were slaughtered throughout Ukraine by Bohdan Chmielnicki and his roving bands of Cossacks. It was arguably the worst pogrom in history, leaving hundreds of Jewish communities in ruins.
Yet according to Mel Gordon, a professor of theater arts at the University of California, Berkeley, those years of terror led to the canonization of what we now know as Jewish humor.… And it happened on one day in July 1661 when the badkhn—a kind of cruel court jester in East European Jewish life—was spared a ban on merrymakers.…
Gordon, who has authored numerous books on theater, cinema and popular culture, lectures widely on his badkhn theory at Jewish and non-Jewish venues. “Everyone says that Jews are funny because they suffered so much,” he said. “That’s ridiculous.…” Nor are Jews funny because they’ve “always been funny,” another common falsehood, Gordon says.… So it’s not genetic, and it’s not because of suffering or social marginalization, that led to this thing we call Jewish humor—it’s the badkhn.
The badkhn was a [central figure] in East European Jewish life for three centuries, mocking brides and grooms at their weddings. He also was in charge of Purim spiels in shtetl society. His humor was biting, even vicious. He would tell a bride she was ugly, make jokes about the groom’s dead mother and round things off by belittling the guests for giving such worthless gifts.… It’s that same self-deprecating tone that characterizes the Yiddish-inflected Jewish jokes of the 20th century, Gordon points out. Who is the surly Jewish deli waiter of Henny Youngman fame if not a badkhn, making wisecracks at the customer’s expense?
Before the 1660s, there were at least 10 different stock comic types in shtetl life.… One would rhyme, one would juggle, one might sing. Wealthy folks would hire a variety for their simchas, or festive celebrations. But in the summer of 1661, a decade after the Chmielnicki massacres and its resultant famines, leading rabbis from Poland and Ukraine—the “Elders of the Four Councils”—met in Vilna to discuss why such evils had befallen the Jewish people.
The elders decided the Jews were being punished by God. A return to strict observance was the only solution. Levity and luxury were to be avoided. As one of the new conditions, wedding festivities became much more somber, and holidays such as Purim and Simchat Torah less raucous. The traditional Jewish comics were outlawed.
During one discussion on July 3, 1661, Gordon relates, a rabbi asked his colleagues, what about the badkhn? He’s not really funny, the rabbi said. In fact, he’s abusive. The elders agreed, and the badkhn was exempted from the ban.… And that’s how the badkhn became the only Jewish comic permitted in the shtetls…and how his particular brand of sarcastic, bleak humor set the tone for what we know today as Jewish comedy.…
The badkhn’s role was secure from the 1660s to the 1890s and the beginning of the great Jewish migration to America and to the larger cities of Russia and Ukraine. Gordon’s father, who came to America in 1929 from the Polish shtetl Bielsk-Podlasky, remembers the badkhn of his youth. “He was always drunk in the cemetery, telling jokes to kids,” Gordon recalls. “He came out of hiding for Purim and weddings.”
Little remains of the badkhn today outside Chasidic communities, where they are the stars of the yearly Purim spiels.… But the badkhn’s influence is still felt in mainstream culture, Gordon says, from the Borsch Belt humor of the 1920s and ‘30s, to contemporary Italian and African-American comedians who trade in barbed insults and self-deprecation. “Even today, almost all Jewish entertainers have badkhn humor,” Gordon said. “Sarah Silverman is completely badkhn.…”
THE POPE, THE JEWS, AND THE PASSION
Robert S. Wistrich
Jerusalem Post, March 16, 2011
The virus of Jew-hatred at the heart of Western civilization is rooted in ingrained attitudes, many of them to be found in Christian theology, scriptural interpretation, art and literature. That legacy, which came to a climax in the Holocaust, has been the object of increasingly serious reflection by the Vatican and the Catholic Church during the past 50 years. Pope John XXIII initiated the first steps that culminated in the 1965 Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which stated that “what happened in Christ’s passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living without distinction or upon the Jews of today.”
Twenty years later, another important Catholic document about how to present the Jews and Judaism in Church teaching, noted that “Christian sinners are more to blame for the death of Christ than those few Jews who brought it about.” Pope John Paul II went a step further in robustly condemning anti-Semitism as a sin and by visiting Jerusalem in 2000 as part of his historic act of repentance towards the Jewish people.
So, at first sight the media publicity surrounding Pope Benedict XVI’s second volume about the life of Christ (“Jesus of Nazareth, Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection”) released last week, may seem surprising. What exactly is new here in the light of earlier Church pronouncements? Does the present Pope really offer an unprecedented or sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus? Is his book a significant contribution to the struggle against anti-Semitism?
I believe that the answer must be a qualified yes. Albeit Pope Benedict does not provide a sweeping absolution of all Jewish “guilt” for the Passion. The Jewish leadership of Jesus’ time and the supporters of the insurrectionary, Barabbas, still bear some responsibility for the crucifixion but it is relative and very much attenuated. More importantly, the cry of the Jerusalem crowd as presented in the Gospel of Matthew (27:25)—“His blood be upon us and on our children” (a somewhat implausible Jewish self-accusation for the death of Jesus with appalling historical consequences) is effectively contextualized by the Pope. So, too, are some of the passages in the Gospel of John which portray “the Jews” as sons of the Devil and sworn enemies of Christ. Benedict XVI does indeed seek to neutralize the potentially toxic anti-Semitism in these and other statements that resulted over the centuries in the savage persecution of Jews. Since his book will undoubtedly reach a wide audience (probably much greater than that of official Vatican documents like Nostra Aetate), that is surely to be welcomed.
For all too long there has been a serious discrepancy between what most Christian scholars would write today about the New Testament and what many lay Catholics and even some clergy—still influenced by long-standing anti-Judaism of the Church—continue to believe. Pope Benedict XVI’s most important contribution may well be to have begun the process of confronting (in a scholarly way) this considerable gap and refuting some of the anti-Jewish libels that have been constructed around the Gospel for nearly two thousand years. Not all these stereotypes are likely to disappear in the immediate future but the Pope has at least reaffirmed to Catholics world-wide not only that Jesus and his disciples were Jews but that there should be no room in Christianity for any denigration of the people of Israel.
No one can seriously doubt Benedict XVI’s commitment to improving Christian-Jewish relations despite a number of regrettable decisions and errors of judgment he made earlier in his papacy. There is still, however, a great deal that needs to be done. Parts of the New Testament, especially relating to the Passion narrative, despite the Pope’s new book, will doubtlessly remain a source for anti-Semitism.
More importantly, hatred for Israel has spread far and wide in our own day, well beyond the confines of the Church. The Islamic world, in particular, has become deeply infected by anti-Jewish stereotypes and myths like the blood libel, whose sources lie in the Christian Middle Ages. Some sections of the secular Left, too, have been contaminated by a crude hatred of Jews masquerading as “anti-Zionism.”
Perhaps the time has come for this Pope to speak out with the full authority of his office and his moral conscience, to denounce the almost daily incitement and slanders directed at the people of Israel from so many sources outside the Church. This would surely be consonant with the universal mission and concerns of the Holy See, as well as its desire for rapprochement with the Jewish nation. It would indeed be a timely jolt for the cause of Middle Eastern and world peace as well as promoting deeper understanding between peoples of different faiths.
(Robert S. Wistrich is professor of European history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
and author of A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.)
