A Purim primer

In 1927, a community of Marranos was interviewed in the Portuguese town of Braganza. Descended from forced converts to Catholicism, over the centuries they developed their own idiosyncratic ways of observing Judaism in secret.

Among their rites was a prayer to Esther, whom the Marrano women of Braganza identified with as a Jewish woman caught in an alien culture. Joachim Prinz writes that when their neighbors knelt and prayed to the Catholic Madonna, the Marrano women’s thoughts “were with Esther.” Such is the power of the Purim story, and the struggle of the woman dubbed “Santa Esther.”

The story from which the holiday of Purim originates is also — depending on who you ask — closer to comedy, satire, fairy tale and burlesque. But the ability of a Jewish woman to enter a royal court and use her position to save her people from annihilation might be the kind of desperate fantasy that Jews in all times have desired. Perhaps it is our discomfort with this fact that allows us to also turn the story into a farce and an excuse to party.

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The world is a stage
It should come as no surprise that the Purim story — set in a royal palace and filled with intrigue, secret identities and no small amount of adult themes — has a long tradition in the theater. In the Venice Ghetto in 1558, a Purim play was put on by the Jews there. Based on a script by the Marrano poet (and translator of Petrarch) Salamone Usque, Cecil Roth writes that it was such a success that the play was performed publicly the next year “before a select company of Venetian nobility and gentry.”

Irving Howe writes that centuries later, and even as the theater was looked at suspiciously in the Diaspora, the importance of Purim to the development of Yiddish theater cannot be overstated. At first, the general permissiveness of the holiday resulted in improvised “comic-heroic” performances; in time, Howe writes, and by the mid-19th century, “groups of minstrels, acrobats, and singers began to wander from shtetl to shtetl, half-welcomed and half-scorned as ragamuffins of the culture.” Try as the religious or czarist authorities might, the Purim shpiel was here to stay.

Purim and Pesach
One of the earliest Reform congregations in America was Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina. Their prayer book, compiled around 1825, included no prayers for Chanukah or Purim. Indeed, the congregation explicitly stated that most of what is now taken for granted on Purim, including attendance by children under the age of 5, “is most strictly prohibited.” By the late 20th century, though, Purim had found its place (along with Chanukah and Pesach) as among the most recognized Jewish holidays, complete with community outreach and bags of shalach manot.

Ruth Rubin, in her collection of Yiddish folk songs, also points out the obvious connection of Purim with the holiday that follows soon after, Pesach. One song, which takes place in a bakery just after Purim, declares (with excitement or exasperation?), “No sooner is Purim past,/Than the preparations for the matso baking gets under way.”

Too much fun
Before modern times especially, the reaction of Christians to Purim have been unsurprisingly negative. Stefan Reif writes that Byzantine authorities “resented the use of the biblical book and the Purim festivities as an indulgence in what they regarded as Jewish chauvinism and anti-Christian behavior.” At its most dangerous, the ignorance of Christians with the Purim story and its attendant celebrations led to accusations that the mock execution of Haman was, actually, a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Such accusations are only a step away from the blood libel, and as Simon Schama writes, as far back as the year 414, at the town of Inmestar near Antioch, a riot took place when Jews were accused of taking a Christian child for the purpose of a “Purim killing.” In Muslim lands, Islamic law forbade the ostentatious display of either Judaism or Christianity, and no doubt a public festival like Purim was seen as immensely threatening. Jews remaining Jews was bad enough; Jews having a good time of it was even worse.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi describes just how important the scroll of Esther was for Jews living under Christian and Muslim control in the Middle Ages. The book became a model for contemporary chronicles of persecution and of “Second Purims,” which were observed “to commemorate a deliverance from some danger or persecution.” Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna writes of a family in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811 who, after surviving a fire, instituted a second Purim in just this way. Similarly, Mark Cohen writes of the Jewish community of Cairo in 1524, and the difficulties they faced under a new governor there; this “Egyptian Purim” was commemorated up until the 1950s.

Where’s God in all this?
It is frequently pointed out that the scroll of Esther is the only biblical book not to mention God. This is no doubt the reason why it is also the only biblical book not found among the literary remains of the ascetic community at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Later, the Tannaitic and Amoraic sages were not only uncomfortable with making the observance of Purim obligatory, but they also challenged the scroll of Esther’s place in the Tanakh. (Only in later midrash do they allow their imaginations to add to the comedy and the burlesque.)

After all, a barely-avoided genocide being celebrated with costumes and drunkenness and jokes is itself a kind of celebration of life, a pious excess in which the children of survivors are the best symbols and are allowed to have the most fun. It also, perhaps, says something about Jewish humor as well, that the grimmest subject matter can be turned to farce, sexual innuendo, cross-dressing and the like. It is akin to Mel Brooks quipping, “Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.” PJC

Tim Miller is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.