For those of us unaware, the Book of Esther is a Biblical story about a Jewish triumph over xenophobia, and is the basis for the Jewish festival of Purim. Scholars estimate that somebody composed the book in or around 475 B.C.E., and it may be the oldest evidence that we have (even if the tale itself was likely fictional) that Jews were aware of a phenomenon that we now call anti-Judaism: the antagonist, a politician by the name of Haman (not to be confused with the no less loathsome Adolf Hamann or Joachim Hamann), plotted to exterminate all of Persia’s Jews as revenge for the Benjaminite, Mordecai, refusing to bow down to him.
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not the first to notice the similarities. Already in the spring of 1933, Jewish adults were drawing parallels between Haman and the Third Reich’s head of state. Quoting Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s ‘Who Was “Hitler” Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945’, pg. 264:
Around the same time, Jews also drew analogies between Hitler and Haman.⁹² References to “Haman Hitler” and “Hitler, the modern Haman,” appeared already in 1933 in the American Jewish press.⁹³ Jews in Germany made similar comparisons, with the Frankfurt Jewish press declaring that “today, Haman is […] educated, has studied anthropology, and determined that the Jews are a foreign race.”⁹⁴
By the time of Hanukkah in December 1933, Jews compared Hitler to Antiochus, who, according to one rabbi, had tried but failed to “persuade the Hebrews to exchange the […] principles of Judaism for […] idolatry.”⁹⁵ This hopeful sentiment was encapsulated in Philip M. Raskin’s 1933 poem, “A Jew to Hitler,” which included the following stanzas:
Hitler, we shall outlive you
As we outlived the Hamans before you;
Hordes of slaves may crown you chief
Throngs of fools—adore you …Hitler, we shall outlive you
However our flesh you harrow;
Our wondrous epic shall only add
The tale of Another Pharaoh.⁹⁶
Haman’s plot to annihilate Persia’s Jews was doomed before it began. Queen Esther revealed her Jewish heritage to King Xerxes, who, in turned, had Haman hanged, ironically in the very gallows that Haman had originally intended for Mordechai. This tale (along with other Biblical stories) was a good source of comfort for Jews, sustaining their morale and giving them hope that they would have the last laugh in the face of an increasingly difficult situation. The Fascists did not fail to take notice of this:
In 1935, Aufbau opined that “today there is once again a Haman who reminds us that we are Jews.” See “Zur Feier am Heinedenkmal,” Aufbau, Feb. 1, 1935. According to The Sentinel, [Fascist] newspapers cited Jewish analogies between Haman and Hitler as evidence that Jews were “planning to murder Hitler in the same way.” See “Two Jews Brutally Murdered in German Provinces,” Sentinel, April 21, 1933.
A famous legend is that the head of state himself implicitly equated himself with Haman in a radio address that he gave in January 1944. Although it is likelier than not that he was indeed aware of the similarities, the radio address does not necessarily substantiate this rumour. In event of an Allied victory, Adolf Schicklgruber anticipated Purim festivals not merely celebrating his death but the ‘death’ of Europe as a hole.
Quoting Jo Carruthers’s ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, pg. 5:
Hitler’s citation of Purim is, in fact, to invoke common understandings of Purim as a triumphal, bloodthirsty carnival that signifies Jewish vindictiveness. As such, his reference to Purim posits Jews as aggressors—anticipating the ‘destruction of Europe’—and as such he performs Haman’s rôle in asserting himself as the protector of civilization.
As I outline below, Hitler is not explicitly placing himself in a binary conflict with the Jews or proclaiming his animosity towards them. Instead, like Haman, he paints the Jews as enemies of the state, destructive and dangerous, and appeals to self‐defence in order to justify attack.
[…]
Hitler explicitly aligns this Russian annihilationist agenda with Jewish objectives: ‘This aim is also the openly admitted intention of international Jewry.’ He then goes on to warn that, ‘Unless Germany is victorious’, the ‘bearer of this culture’ will perish.
Then comes his famous reference to Purim: ‘Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim festival.’ Purim is therefore a celebration of destruction, and it is cited as proof of Jewish aggressive intention.
[…]
Hitler’s reference to Purim demands that it be read in the light of Esther 3:8: Haman’s strategy of misrepresenting the Jews to the king as a ‘certain people’ whose laws are ‘diverse from those of every people’ and counter to those of the empire.
It is with reference to Purim, then, that Hitler not only inhabits the rôle of accuser, but does so by disquietingly replicating Haman’s iconic rôle as enemy of the Jews.
In any event, whether he anticipated it or not, Jews celebrated Purim by taking their anger out on effigies of Adolf Schicklgruber and actors impersonating him, rôles that were traditionally reserved for Haman. Quoting Jo Carruthers’s ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, pgs. 2–3:
Towards the end of the war, the Jews of Casablanca instituted ‘Purim Hitler’ (a ‘Little Purim’ or Purim Katan in Jewish tradition, a local festival that imitates Purim in its celebration of a specific and local reprieve from threat or slaughter).
Purim Hitler was celebrated on the second day of Kislev to commemorate the Allied forces landing on that date in Morocco in 1943, saving the Jewish community. They celebrate by reading Megillat Hitler (now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.), a scroll modelled on Esther that functions as a palimpsest, the biblical story overwritten with new historical significance as the story of threat and reprieve becomes specific to the Casablanca experience of celebration.
[…]
Toby Blum‐Dobkin describes a celebration of Purim at the Displaced Persons Centre in Landsberg, Germany, in [1946]. Having collected the testimonies of survivors, including her father Boris Blum (inmate 114520, Mojdanek), Blum‐Dobkin explains that the inmates at the camp organized traditional celebrations: a reading of the Megillah (scroll of Esther), school performances, banquets, literary parodies, and a carnival.
Her father explains that ‘I saw in my imagination a Jewish carnival for the defeat of Hitler: the hanging of Hitler instead of Haman’ (Blum‐Dobkin 1979: 53). The camp is filled with images of hanging Hitlers and, in the tradition of dressing‐up common to Purim, one inmate dressed as Hitler himself.
Yehuda Fogel adds this:
And […] it all culminated with a public burning of Mein Kampf. The Lansberger Lager-Cajtung exuberantly reported:
At seven o’clock in the evening, at the sports field, there took place the public symbolic burning of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The flames, which licked at the black night sky, carried far, far, over mountains and seas, this tiding: Am Yisrael Chai! Jews live on, will live! Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out, has lost his “kampf,” his battle, and we Jews, although we have paid dearly, have won the battle. So Haman ended, so Hitler ended, so will end all the enemies of the Jews.
(It may strike some as a little hypocritical that Jews would burn the books of somebody who endorsed burning ‘enemy’ literature, but keep in mind that the German Fascists were privileged oppressors who burned books in an ambitious attempt to erase cultures and ideas from existence. Some Jews burned a Fascist book as a crude means of coping with their trauma, knowing full well that it would not be the beginning of the end for antisemitism.)
For many Jews, Haman is not merely an individual, but a symbol for anti-Judaism and antisemitism. His probable ahistoricity is trivial; he personifies phenomena that their victims would physically destroy, were it that easy. Hence, the substitution of Haman with Adolf Schicklgruber was a logical one.
Of course, there were also important differences between Haman and Adolf Schicklgruber, and as Jo Carruthers showed, a few Jewish writers even discouraged the equivalences, if only because they were too misleading: Haman was far less successful in his plot to massacre Jews. Nevertheless, the similarities were irresistibly noticeable and they helped give the Book of Esther a modern-day relevance.
As seen in my excerpt, Haman was not the only Biblical antagonist in whom Jews saw protofascist tendencies: they also likened Adolf Schicklgruber to Pharaoh (from the Book of Exodus) and Antiochus, who were both less exterminatory than Haman but still very troublesome for Jews. Still, other Jews turned to scripture to cope with the situation in general or its aftermath. The Book of Job, for example, would not necessarily answer their suffering, but it gave them much to think about over the decades.
May your Purim this week be joyous.