(Jewish Group) The Purim Story Is All About Jews Being Charged With Dual Loyalty

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Purim is one of the more peculiar days of Jewish revelry; it is characterized by palace intrigue — jockeying for power, betrayal and sexual trickery — and hails Jewish victory over an avowed enemy. Laced with irony, the Book of Esther, also known as the Megillah, recounts the story of the Jews of Shushan in Persia. Owing to the courage and guile of Mordechai and his niece Esther, the Jews thwart the vizier Haman’s plot to annihilate them. In the end, it is the duplicitous Haman who hanged on the gallows reserved for the province’s Jews, turning a day of anticipated mourning into a blithe celebration.

While Jewish triumph ultimately defines the Purim story, the scripture’s paradoxical messaging also reveals it to be a deeply fearful one. Set against the backdrop of looming annihilation, Purim is the prototypical story of exile: In the face of moral uncertainty, the Jewish people use their own deft and fortitude to survive. Consequently, the Megillah emerges as a prism for the millennial Jewish struggle: Living in a land deemed not quite their own, a scattered and marginalized people are vulnerable to the machinations of those with power.

The fact remains that at the heart of Jewish blood-spill has been the dual loyalty canard, where the ‘Jew’ is seen averse to broader society. This perennial dilemma is reflected in Haman’s description of the Jews to Ahasuerus: “There is a certain people dispersed and scattered among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom, who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them.” The timelessness of this charge — Jews usurping the status quo in service of an occult global agenda — exposes the bloody roots of the dual loyalty trope that has persisted in repackaged stereotypes for time immemorial.


In the Middle Ages, Jews were targeted because of their religion; charges of deicide and conspiracies of Jewish loyalty to a cabal involving the devil legitimized pogroms and top-down persecution. And in the 19th century, the most infamous manifestation of this charge surfaced when, on the basis of contrived and shallow evidence, French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of treason by France’s military. While Dreyfus was later exonerated, his show-trial became a litmus test for national loyalty and the place of Jews within the state.

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[stevil]

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