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No. 12. | Vienna, 21 March 1902. | 6th Year

Purim Thoughts.

By Arthur Schwarz (Vienna).

On the face of it the affair is not especially glorious. Because in one of the numerous Jew-riots which we have had to endure in the course of time we were not beaten to death, but on the contrary did the beating to death ourselves, we still celebrate a festival to-day, after two thousand three hundred and some years. And what a festival! Nothing of quiet reflection, nothing of earnest thought. A Jew has done his duty if he gives a banquet in honour of the late Haman family, a kind of belated funeral feast for the blessed or unblessed Persian antisemites. The figures of Queen Esther and of the gallant Mordecai play only a subordinate part in it; the main thing is and remains that the Jews of that day gave their — reputedly very numerous — enemies a sound thrashing, and when we think of that thrashing we forget that things have sometimes gone rather otherwise. A Bramarbas as a Jew is hard to imagine, and Purim, this Bramarbas among the Jewish festivals, could well bear to have its original idea called back to memory. The idea is clear and simple.

". . . There was a certain Jew in Shushan the royal city, whose name was Mordecai." Not one word too many. We know this royal city of Shushan, of which the ancient Greeks said that it was empty of men and full of cowards. We know, too, what manner of ruler Xerxes I was: he let his wives and favourites rule for him, and the only independent act of his that history has handed down to us is that once, in a fit of megalomania, he ordered the sea to be whipped. Yet the numerous Jews living in the wide Persian empire felt themselves happy under his rule. They had been emancipated under Cyrus and Darius, the predecessors of the first Xerxes. As always in the later course of our history, it was only a seeming liberation. And as always, the intoxication of equality did its work even then: it made us blind to the danger.

But in the midst of the pleasure-mad capital of the Persian shadow-king, among the many thousands of Israelites seized by the giddiness of pseudo-emancipation, there was only one who was a man as a Jew: "Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite." That was a man who knew his forefathers and was proud of them; no decadent epigone, but the self-assured grandson of vigorous ancestors, who even in the Persian diaspora faithfully preserved the memory not only of his people but also of his narrower tribal kinship. To regard Haman as the father of all antisemites has by now become a commonplace; but that Mordecai, as the Esther scroll depicts him, is one of the best representatives of the Jewish type — of that nobody thinks. Certainly the Purim narrative is no dithyramb, for the most far-reaching changes in the situation of the Jews are related in an almost dry tone, without any trace of enthusiasm. And just as little is Mordecai a hero; but the calm, sober deliberation that distinguishes him has remained the outstanding characteristic of our race. Mordecai is noble and charitable towards his orphaned kinswoman, disinterested in the discovery of the plot against the king, proud towards the upstart Haman, modest and reserved at Esther's elevation to queen; but always and everywhere true to his race. He sees the danger to his fellow-countrymen approaching, but it is not precipitate action, rather cool waiting and then, in the hour of need, resolution and courage, that lead him to victory. And even on the highest rung of fortune, as the all-powerful minister of a powerless master, he remains to his own people what he had been: a faithful friend and a helper ready for sacrifice.

That is not the conventional paragon of virtue of a romantic concoction, into which some have sought to stamp the whole narrative; that is the warm-blooded hero of a true-to-life drama. And if it were in fact only a drama and not reality, we could be all the prouder of that unknown author who knew how to hold up before his people such an ideal of Jewish manhood. For there was a time which drew from the story of Mordecai courage and enthusiasm for the defence of its national possessions. That was the time of the Maccabees. When the armies of Antiochus Epiphanes marched against Judæa, it was not least the Purim narrative that roused the Jewish people to desperate resistance. But it was not — as our historians assert — the miraculous deliverance in general that filled the people with trust in God and confidence for the future — that we have never lacked.