Yiddish Ghosts of Purim Past

Aviezer Ravitzky, a renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy, was once asked what he considered the hardest mitzvah to observe. Without pausing to think, he gave a surprising answer: “Celebrating Purim after the Holocaust.” What Ravitzky meant, I believe, was that it is, or perhaps should be, difficult to celebrate Purim after a plan similar to Haman’s actually came to pass.

I always think of the destruction of European Jewish civilization on Purim, not only because of its devastating resonance with Haman’s decree but also because it reminds me of the rich culture that was destroyed. In the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern Europe, Purim was a favorite holiday. Not only was it an opportunity for play, laughter, and tomfoolery, Purim was also the holiday that corresponded most directly with the experience of golus—life in exile at the mercy of foreign kings and ministers. The story of Purim came alive every year through whimsical public performances of the Purim spiel, and the Jews in the audience saw the protagonists of the Megillah re-created in their own image: speaking Yiddish and dealing with the same kind of tzuris.

The tradition of the Purim spiel was part of the fabric of Jewish community life in Eastern Europe for centuries. It was this tradition that inspired Yiddish authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to use the Megillah story to plead with Jews in Eastern Europe that something about their situation had to change.


Two works of Yiddish literature, both titled Zerubavel, offered creative retellings of elements of the Purim story without trying to hide the fact that they were actually talking about their own time and place.

In 1887, Moshe Leib Lilienblum published the play Zerubavel or the Return to Zion. It was a dramatic adaptation of events described in the books of Esther, Daniel, and Ezra, culminating in the building of the second Jerusalem Temple by the returnees from the Babylonian exile under the leadership of Zerubavel. Lilienblum, a leading member of the early Zionist Hibat Zion movement, set out to use the example of return from exile in biblical times as a model that the Jews of his own time should follow. Although he usually wrote in Hebrew, he made a point of writing the play in Yiddish, with the hope that it would be performed in Jewish theaters.

Lilienblum’s play begins on Purim: In the first scene a number of high-ranking Jews are sitting in Zerubavel’s house in Babylonia, raising their glasses and singing songs of praise for God, who delivered the people from Haman’s treachery. But then Mordechai himself begins to speak. He is not happy at all and is in no mood to celebrate. “This whole affair with Haman left me very distressed,” he says. “It showed me just how downtrodden, unhappy, unprotected, unsure of our future we are here.” The fact that one Haman was unsuccessful is no guarantee that other Hamans won’t follow. And the fact that God preformed a series of unlikely miracles this time around does not mean that Jews can rely on miracles in the future. Mordechai’s sober warnings lead Zerubavel to the conclusion that the Jews must return to the Land of Israel.

While Lilienblum presented Mordechai as a positive character, the novelist and playwright David Pinsky portrayed Mordechai as a passive schemer in a novella he also called Zerubavel (1905). Pinsky had been deeply shaken by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and publicly called for Jews to undertake their own defense, since the latest pogrom had made it abundantly clear that the state’s military and police would do nothing to help the Jews. In Pinsky’s story, Zerubavel is furious that Mordechai wants to rely on Esther’s beauty and sexual wiles to save the Jews instead of arming them and teaching them to fight. A people that hangs its trust “on a woman’s nightgown,” he says, is pathetic. He is also irate that the Jews are fasting and mourning, which will only make them weaker when facing their enemies.

In Pinsky’s Zerubavel, the title character represents his own younger and more combative generation of Jews, while Mordechai stands for the older generation of golus Jews, passive and resigned to humiliation, trusting only in God—along with schemes and bribes—to save them. It is a dark and unforgiving work, which really castigates the book of Esther itself as partly responsible for the Jews’ distorted way of thinking about their predicament in exile.


Writing thirty years after Pinsky, the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger echoed the same conflict between “old Jews” and “new Jews” in his Songs of the Megillah. Blending the Eastern European shtetl and the biblical story of Esther in the tradition of the Purim spiel, Manger describes how an elderly tailor tells his young apprentices that Queen Esther commanded all the Jews to fast and pray in hope of thwarting Haman’s decree. In response, the apprentices declare that they have no intention of fasting: Rather, they will break their enemies’ bones if anyone tries to attack them. The old tailor doesn’t protest. He just sits sadly by the sewing machine and weeps over his own sad life and over the young tailors “whose heads are full of nonsense.”
Unlike Lilienblum and Pinsky, Manger did not use the Megillah story to promote an ideology. Instead, he used it to sketch a portrait of Jewish life in Eastern Europe at his time, presenting a gallery of types and characters without choosing sides. In his introduction, Manger wrote that he wanted to make people laugh and cry at the same time, which is, perhaps, what Professor Ravitzky found so hard.