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It is Sunday morning in Jerusalem. Rather than tackle yesterday’s crusty cholent pot awaiting me in the kitchen,  I have decided to pursue the solitary vice of Googling the title of my recent book, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence.  Within seconds I discover that as early as February 28, more than a week before the book was published, a lively discussion of its contents and character took place at Hashkafah.com between some young bloggers named “ChaimYaakov,” “Moshi,” and, as if by divine intervention, “Cholentpot.” Their interest in the subject would seem to have been sparked by the less striking coincidence that the last day of February was the first day of the New Moon of Adar - the merry month in which the holiday Purim is celebrated and which, as I discuss in my book, has also been the occasion for sometimes brazen acts of Jewish violence, from  fifth-century Syria to twentieth-century Judea.

Cholentpot, as I subsequently learned from viewing his profile, lives in New York and only next Purim will be old enough to drink legally. Responding to my book's jacket description and review blurbs posted by Amazon, he asks innocently “Where can I get a copy of this book from?” Fifteen minutes later ChaimYaakov checks in, noting that the book deals with medieval attacks by Jews “on Christian symbols such as the crucifix,” and other transgressions, both on Purim and other occasions, “that were often committed in full knowledge that their likely consequence would be death.” ChaimYaakov is not sure that he likes this. “Is this another book by a self-hating Jew?,” he asks, “as if pulling down a salem (“cross”) that was put up in front of a Jewish home is an act of violence that a Jew should expect being killed for.” He also is not sure what “reckless rites” I’m talking about.

“Is giving up someone’s life al kiddush hashem ( the sanctification of God's name))  reckless,?” he asks, adding parenthetically “maybe to a modern chaloni (“secular”) zionist, but really?” At this point Moshi leaps in to my defense. “I doubt it,” he writes, noting that the author is both Associate Professor of Jewish History at Israel's Bar-Ilan University and coeditor of the Jewish Quarterly Review.  He is also, I might add, both a cooker and consumer of cholent, though there is  admittedly some measure of self-hate involved in glutting oneself on that glutinous Sabbath repast.

Moshi, who seems to know ChaimYaakov pretty well, brings to his attention a passage from the blurb by Daniel Boyarin, in which Reckless Rites is described as “a book of tremendous importance that explores some of most significant themes in Jewish history, especially the relations between Jews and Christians and the question of Jewish passivity and meekness.” Boyarin, a professor at UC Berkeley, who has himself weighed in on these weighty issues, notes that my book “disputes scholarly and popular accounts” that ascribe meek submissiveness to Jews, “by showing that both Jews and Christians have had polemical and apologetic motives in making such representations.” Moshi, whose impressive command of English includes the subjunctive, comments: “I would think that you’d be a fan of this part.”

ChaimYaakov, however, is not buying it. “To attempt to paint us as a people of violence when all through history we have been set upon by murderous anti-Semites is disgusting. How many pogroms done by Jews has this author found?” In case ChaimYaakov and his partners in blog-battalah have not yet read my book (but are now reading this notoriously self-hating publication) I will respond that it depends on how you define “pogrom.” According to Webster’s Third New International it is “an organized massacre and looting of helpless people, usually with the connivance of officials.” Following this definition I have “found” only one Jewish  “pogrom” before the twentieth century, that perpetrated against thousands of Christians in Jerusalem (and their churches) after the Persian conquest of the Holy City in 614, an event presumably not included in the history curricula of even Brooklyn’s better yeshivas. Let me stress, however, that I did not discover the Mamilla massacre at Mamilla, well-documented in Christian chronicles (in which the numbers of casualties range from 30,000 to 90,000) since the seventh century, but rather revealed the ways in which it was downplayed and even covered up in twentieth-century Zionist historiography. 

II

Heinrich Graetz (1817-91), the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, was willing to allow for the possibility that as many as ninety thousand Christians had been killed during the Persian conquest of Jerusalem, but dismissed as “pure fiction” the claim of some chroniclers “that the Jews bought the Christian prisoners from the Persians, and killed them in cold blood.” Graetz acknowledged that the Jews also “relentlessly destroyed the Christian sanctuaries,” and asserted, perhaps with a hint of pride, that they “undoubtedly had a greater share” in the destruction of Jerusalem’s churches and monasteries “than did the Persians.” Simon Dubnow, the great Russian-Jewish historian who was killed by the Nazis in 1941, felt more strongly than had Graetz that the number of ninety thousand casualties was an exaggeration, but agreed with the latter that “in hostile acts toward the Christians, the Jews did not lag behind the Persians.” And he understood why: “The bitter resentment that had accumulated in the oppressed people for centuries had now found an outlet in atrocities.”

I often think about these two brave historians, not only when I pass through Mamilla (now the site of  mostly empty homes mostly owned by wealthy foreigners) on my way to the Old City, but especially when I pass the intersection of Graetz and Dubnow streets on a lonely hill near the Jerusalem Theater. Not far from that hill is a street named after another scholar, Samuel Klein (1886-1940), who had been a professor of historical geography at the Hebrew University after serving for twenty years as a rabbi in Bosnia and Slovakia. In 1935 Klein published (in Hebrew) a history of the Jewish community in Palestine from the close of the Talmud until modern Zionism, yet no mention was made in his otherwise comprehensive book of Jerusalem’s conquest by the Persians in 614, or of the anti-Christian violence that ensued.

Just over a decade later, another Eastern European émigré in Jerusalem, Michael Avi-Yonah, published (also in Hebrew) his now classic study of the Jews in Palestine under Roman and Byzantine rule, which by 1980 had appeared in its fifth edition, and by 1984 in its second English edition. Concerning anti-Christian violence during the Persian conquest of Jerusalem Avi-Yonah did not remain silent, as had Klein, but rather had the following to say: “Christian writers, including modern ones, have much to tell about the cruelty with which the Christians in Jerusalem were treated by the Jews. Such complaints have one basic source – the opinion that Jews have eo ipso less (sic) rights than Christians, and that the latter are allowed to do what is forbidden to the former.” 

These words, written with understandable bitterness by the Galician-born Avi-Yonah in 1946, were still left to stand some four decades later. They were presumably the justification for the omission from his narrative (in contrast to such predecessors as Graetz and Dubnow) not only the highest figures cited by medieval chroniclers for the total number of Christian victims, but also the lowest. Avi-Yonah’s grudging treatment of the events of 614 set the tone for other Israeli historians, both popular and professional. In 1968, for example, Teddy Kollek and Moshe Pearlman published their Jerusalem: Sacred City of Mankind, which was subsequently translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Pearlman had been director of the Israeli Broadcasting Service and then of the Government Information Service during the period in which Kollek, who later served as mayor of Jerusalem, had been director of the prime minister’s office. Their terse account of the violence in 614 reads like a shrewdly evasive press release: “With the capture of Jerusalem, many Christians were killed and churches damaged and destroyed.” There is no indication of how many were killed, nor by whom, nor who destroyed their numerous churches.  

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Some readers may by now be turning to their trusty  Encyclopaedia Judaica, or to its CD version, to see what  they are told there. Suffice it to say that the Roman and Byzantine sections of the long entry on “Jerusalem” in that encyclopedia, as well as those in the twentieth volume of the Hebrew Entsiklopedya ha-ivrit, both of which appeared in the early 1970’s, were written by Michael Avi-Yonah.  In both entries, as in Kollek and Pearlman’s book, we read that the Persian army besieged Jerusalem in 614 “with the help of its Jewish allies,” and in both the Jews vanish mysteriously from the narrative just after the conquest.

By contrast, Kay Prag’s Blue Guide to Jerusalem, published in 1989, informed its readers that “tradition locates the slaughter of Christian prisoners by the Jews and Persians at the Mamilla Pool,” and cautiously reported the number of victims as 33,000. Was this anti-Semitic? Perhaps according to the young Brooklyn bloggers at hashkafah.com, who would presumably also regard as “self-hating” the treatment of the events of 614 by Amos Elon in his Jerusalem: City of Mirrors (1990). Elon, like Teddy Kollek, was a Viennese expatriate in the Holy City (he has since relocated to Tuscany), but he had a rather different take on its seventh-century history. The Persians, wrote Elon, were aided in their conquest “by the Jews of the country-side, who rejoiced at this opportunity to get back at their Christian tormentors.” In contrast to the silence of most post-1967 Israeli publications on the matter of Christian casualties, Elon noted that “the most moderate accounting put the number of slaughtered at 33, 877.”

This was still, I might add, less than half the number of casualties reported by the evidently equally self-hating author of Esther in the ninth chapter of that book, as a result of the Jews “slaughtering and destroying” (or as the new JPS translation prefers: “slaying and destroying”) their enemies. Yet according to the aforementioned definition in Webster’s, there was no “pogrom” in the days of Ahasuerus, for although there was indeed, according to the book of Esther, an organized massacre of helpless people (including the sons of Haman) there was no looting – as the author proudly stressed no less than three times. Modern readers of Esther, however, may have mixed feelings about the abstinence from looting, for it was rooted, as scholars have noted, in the genocidal command to destroy both the people and property of Amalek. It was as a result of King Saul’s failure to observe this command with sufficient stringency, that, as the prophet Samuel informed him (I Sam. 15:28), his crown was to be taken away and  “given to another who is worthier than you” –a phrase later deliberately echoed, as scholars have also noted, in the account of Vashti’s refusal in first chapter of Esther.

Her reckless refusal (for reasons still obscure) to appear before the King is in turn echoed, as I discuss in my book, by Mordecai’s refusal (also for reasons never made clear) to bow before Haman. The inscrutability of their motives has not, of course, prevented Jewish and Christian exegetes or modern bible scholars from trying to make sense of their actions; and the explanations offered, whether by ancient rabbis or modern feminists, often say more about those who have put them forward than they do about the biblical text. As I have argued, the same is often true about attempts to explain (and sometimes deny) the record of reckless acts of religious violence on the part of Jews that is an indelible part of the history of their relations with their Christian and Muslim neighbors. That, however, is no excuse for responsible historians to stop trying.