S.Y. Agnon’s Forgotten Purim Parody

A humorous tale published by the teenage S.Y. Agnon, using the penname “Mazal Tov,” appeared in a Purim supplement to a Kraków newspaper in 1908 but was not later included in his collected works — translated for the first time from Hebrew by Jeffrey Saks.

“Those Who Err All Their Days, and One Man Who Erred Not At All”—A Tale in Honor of Purim

They were both mistaken in a matter of halakhah.

Such is the way of the world: shrewd men commonly have ugly wives, while the wives of fools are fair. When the husband looked at his wife and saw how repulsive a creature she was—how ugly her countenance, how displeasing her face—he said in his heart: this proves that there is no wiser man in the world than I. And when his wife looked at him and saw what a fool he was, she supposed that there was none more lovely than herself. Through error they raised daughters instead of sons, and in error they married off one of those daughters.

They imagined that the young man they had chosen for her was truly a great gem, the like of which does not exist: a prodigious scholar, God‑fearing, and possessed of many other virtues. But they looked into it and soon found that he had nothing in this world but his folly. He read heretical books, burying his head in them all day long, and his heresy preceded his fear of Heaven. Not only this, but he was a coarse and lustful fellow—may the Merciful One save us—running after temptation and indulging in crass talk. And they found proof for their estimation when they saw erotic poetry falling from his lap.

When they realized this, it would have better suited them had he never been born rather than see what had come of him. He could forgo a few drops of his blood, but not these drops of ink with which his poems had been written. How beautiful this poem was in his eyes! How excellent it was! How he delighted in it! Each time he recited it he sounded the rhymes into his own ears with real feeling:

Oy! Oy! Oy! Hadassah!
So beautiful, so very fair.
My love for you has not ceased,
Entangled in the thicket’s snare.

Great is my love for you,
Hadassah—forever and a day.
For your sake even my lawfully married wife,
I shall divorce at once and without delay…

The words were still upon his lips when his wife flung herself upon him. All ten of her fingernails were sunk into him, raking the skin of his face. She struck him, and a voice burst forth from her throat, crying: “Just who do you say you’ll divorce? Take care lest I ‘divorce’ your soul from your body, you sinful scoundrel! Who is this whose heart drives him to chase foreign women? First I’ll bash in your skull—and the skull of your beauty as well!” Nor did her fury subside until she seized the page on which the poem was written, bundled it together with his pile of other papers lying before her, tore them to bits, and treated them with every manner of disgrace.

In vain did the husband seek to argue in his own defense: that he never chased after women, that he had no connection whatsoever with another, and that it was not his intention—God forbid—to divorce his wife. Rather, this poem spoke of none other than Queen Esther—she who is called Hadassah.

He then began telling her how much labor he had invested in this work, and how he had nearly completed a stage-play for the Yiddish theater, in which the beautiful tale would be told: how a certain man fell in love with Esther before King Ahasuerus had taken her to wife, but she, in her modesty, paid the man no heed. On account of his great heartbreak the man cast himself into the sea, where a great fish happened by and swallowed him whole. And for the banquet that King Ahasuerus made on the day he married Esther, fishermen hooked this great fish and hauled it up. As King Ahasuerus sat with his new queen, making merry together, a dish full of fish was set before them. When Esther stabbed her fork into one of them, a heavenly voice rang out, and a man leapt forth—the very man who had drowned himself in the sea because Esther had not yielded to him. A scandal ensued, and here began those fine and fascinating matters.

In the end, the poet’s wife was appeased. When she saw that her husband was innocent, she regretted her earlier deeds. She had been a fool, and she had erred in thinking that this Hadassah over whom her husband strayed in thought was an actual woman of flesh and blood.

But the husband could not be consoled. It pained him to see his hard work go down the drain. Had he produced his play for the Yiddish stage, his renown would have gone out into the world and his name would have been sung in praise. This, indeed, is a matter in which there is no error…

—Mazal Tov

Afterword by Jeffrey Saks

Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes (1887–1970)—later, Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon—began his literary career in the newspapers of his native Galicia. Starting in 1904, dozens of short stories, poems, and even brief journalistic reports on events in his town of Buczacz flowed from his adolescent pen in Yiddish and Hebrew. Agnon signed his writings under various literary names: “One of the Townsmen,” “A Galician,” “A Zionist,” at times with initials: Sh. Y. Cz., or—as in the story presented here—“Mazal Tov.” Almost none of these writings were later anthologized in editions of Agnon’s collected works. The mature author apparently regarded them as “unripe fruit” and did not attempt to refine or restore them in his later writings.

This story appeared in the Kraków Hebrew newspaper, HaMitzpeh (March 13, 1908), pp. 4–5, in a special Purim parody supplement playfully titled HaChutzpah. It bears several features characteristic of Purim‑spiel literature: the element of turn-about and reversal, double identity and mistaken recognition, and fish (of the Pisces season at that time of year)—here in a variation upon the Book of Jonah and the well‑known Talmudic legend of “Joseph Who Honors the Sabbath” (Shabbat 119a). This early tale also shows Agnon’s penchant for intertextuality, weaving in allusions to the biblical and rabbinic texts. In keeping with the Purim genre, there is also a light whiff of provocation—bold, playful, and faintly erotic. Is Hadassah the husband’s lover? Or is Hadassah in fact his fictional stand-in for the biblical Queen Esther?

Beyond the glimpse it affords of the raw talent of a tyro artist, the significance of this story lies in the fact that it was the last to be published while Agnon still dwelled in Europe. A few weeks after Purim 1908, the young Galician Czaczkes left his land, his birthplace, and his town, and set sail upon the heart of the seas on his way to become “Agnon” in the Land of Israel.

Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, Director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program, is Director of Research at Agnon House in Jerusalem and editor of the journal Tradition.

S.Y. Agnon, né Czaczkes, around 1908.	Purim supplement to HaMitzpeh newspaper (Kraków, March 13, 1908): Agnon’s story begins at bottom.

Do We Cut Off or Bury One’s Head in the Sand?

Review: Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence

In 2017, the erudite and eclectic scholar Elliott Horowitz unexpectedly passed away. His oeuvre is exceptionally diverse, having authored more than seventy-five articles and reviews and five books, with topics ranging from studies on Italian art, Jews and coffee, the significance of the beard among Jews, comparing and contrasting Jewish and non-Jewish biblical exegesis, and Jewish violence (see his Academia page for most of them). Seven additional articles appeared on this site, in a similar vein as his others, covering Bugs Bunny, nude imagery in the Haggadah, Isaiah Berlin, Saul Lieberman, among others. He regularly used the “Molkho Institute for Absurdly Abstruse Research” to identify his affiliation in his email signature. Jewish violence was a long fascination of Horowitz. Beginning in 1994, with an article in the Hebrew journal Zion, he revisited the issue in no less than six articles that culminated in his 2006 book, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey). Horowitz documents how the conclusion of the Purim story, culminating in the Jews massacring 75,800 people over two days, was used as a justification for Jewish violence against non-Jews throughout history. Horowitz revisited this topic on this website, “Modern Amalekites from Adolf to Avigdor.” In a later article, he also identified the Biblical story of Dinah as another source for this type of violence.

While arguably, the violence at the end is only a minor part of the story, for some, that aspect has clouded everything about the Book of Esther and Purim. First, Horowitz looks at how non-Jews viewed the Book. Some had a very negative view due to the Jewish revenge. They considered that motif un-biblical (read non-Christian). Horowitz goes through each character and how first non-Jews interpreted their actions. For instance, Mordechai was treated rather harshly by many of these commentators, as was Esther, due to her passivity. What is especially fascinating is how these non-Jewish understandings sometimes crept into Jewish thought. Thus, Horowitz documents Jews parroting these rather un-Jewish, as it were, interpretations.

Horowitz then tackles the overarching theme of Amalek and how this has been understood throughout history. Some hold there is no obligation to destroy Amalek today, while others are willing to label any perceived enemy of Jews as deserving of the harsh consequences of Amalek. Some of these examples are rather disturbing.

After dealing with the Book of Esther specifically, Horowitz focuses on the Jewish practice of Purim. Specifically, he deals with Jewish violence or violent acts on Purim directed at non-Jews. He provides a discussion of the stereotype of the “mild” (read the wimp) Jew, including its origins and whether it is borne out by history. He then discusses numerous diverse examples spanning from the 5th century until today of Jewish violence. Some are not physical violence. Instead, it is host desecration or general enmity of non-Jewish symbols, while other, most recently Barukh Goldstein, is physical violence in its worst form.

Horowitz is compelling in the scope of this idea and how prevalent this is. It is especially telling when tracing and seeing how systematically Jews have decided to sweep these under the rug these examples; it demonstrates that censorship is not limited to any one group, and even amongst supposedly dispassionate scholars; they too can fall prey to their own biases.

To play down some of these incidents, we have Jewish historians who decided to avoid discussion of such matters or, at times, downplay their significance. However, in light of the many examples here, it is challenging to ignore such examples. Indeed, Shaul Magid noted in his review that Horowitz’s book “seems to elicit a kind of cognitive dissonance among peers, as if to say ‘this simply cannot be true’ even given the detailed evidence and argumentation to the contrary. This is often because of the audacity of the thesis and the way it challenges how we understand the present.” Hillel Halkin’s review of Commentary magazine is one example that fails to adequately address Horowitz’s thesis and his substantial evidence. Halkin claims that the book is a distortion of history and places too much emphasis on too few examples. In the next issue, Horowitz responded to Halkin’s criticism, noting Halkin’s misreading of some texts and inability to present any contrary evidence. In his inimical style, Horowitz invokes the Godfather to prove his point.

Halkin remained obsessed with Horowitz’s book and, a year later, returned to it and attempted to compare it and Michael Stanislawki’s book (A Murder in Lemberg), to Ariel Toaff’s Pasque di Sangue that seemingly argued Jews regularly killed non-Jewish children.”, which is riddled with methodological errors and has been entirely discredited (here). This time, not only Horowitz took issue with Halkin. Three scholars, Allan Nadler (who previously wrote a very positive review of Reckless Rites and presciently noted that Horowitz is a “scrupulously honest voice, dealing in exemplary fashion with an important subject that has been ignored by scholars precisely because of its extreme delicacy. In his execution of narrating the repercussions of Haman’s execution, Horowitz has enriched us with a model of historical scholarship. Anything but reckless, “Reckless Rites” is a rare gem of academic work that will make a real difference”), Elisheva Carlebach, and Naomi Gratz, derided Halkin’s attempt to tar Stanislawki and Horowitz. Perhaps it is best to view Halkin’s criticism through the prism of his long history of minimizing Israeli responsibility for violence, Horowitz being but one example. Indeed, Halkin himself seemingly accepted Yigal Amir’s murder of Yitzhak Rabin. Halkin claims that Amir’s error was not in the assassination itself; instead, “What made Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination exceptionally atrocious was not it’s being a murder, but it’s being a cataclysmic political blunder.” Hillel Halkin, “Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning,” Commentary Magazine, January 1996. Halkin, however, was willing to criticize one person affected by Rabin’s murder, his son. Halkin, under the pseudonym Philologos, pokes fun at Rabin’s son’s pronunciation of the Kaddish he said on behalf of his father. See “On Language,” “Yuval Rabin’s Kaddish,” Forward, November 17, 1995. Perhaps if Amir had butchered a blessing rather than Rabin, Halkin would have found occasion to criticize.

Commentary, however, wasn’t done with Horowitz. In 2010, Commentary published Abby Wisse Schachter’s essay, “The Problem with Purim,” which is generally about feminist views of Purim characters. As an aside, she claims that Horowitz’s book contains “the questionable claim” and the “bizarre thesis” that “Purim has long been the occasion for outbreaks of Jewish animosity and even violence toward Christians.” She asserts that Horowitz’s thesis is based solely on the example of Baruch Goldstein. This is incorrect. As Horowitz demonstrates in his letter to the editor, it is evident that she could not have spent more than ten minutes with the book to arrive at her conclusion. Horowitz shows that Schechter’s article contains other mistakes beyond her discussion of his book.

In the end, there is little doubt that he wrote a well-researched and thorough book that inevitably engenders discussion, whether or not readers agree with Horowitz, is less the point. (See, for example, Eliezer Brodt’s post, “The Origins of Hamenstashen in Jewish Literature (Revisited),” on this site. Brodt references Horowitz’s discussion regarding a Saudi scholar who alleges Jews use blood to make hamenstashen.) Instead, as with all groundbreaking scholarship, a Talmudic approach, one that values discussion over conclusion is the best one can hope for.

For a collection of posts on Purim see here.  These deal with topics as diverse as Jewish humor and parodies, a series on the the origins of hamantaschen (and here and here), banging at the mention of Haman’s name, piyutim for Purim, mishcholot manot, identifying the personalities of Megliat Ester in secular sources, how to approach the story of Ester with children by the late Elliot Horowitz, as well as a couple posts regarding his book on Jewish violence and Purim, and mixed dancing on Purim.

Purim in Tehran: The Symbolic Devaluation of the Ahrimanic Republic

By Dan D.Y. Shapira

Dan (or, Dan D.Y.) Shapira is an Orientalist and grows more than fifty trees on the edge of the Judaean Desert. He’s a Full Professor at Bar-Ilan University.

Some fifty years ago, my father brought home a small glass bottle of Iranian Coca Cola, no idea where from. I sat hypnotized looking at the bottle, with its Persian (well Arabic) letters, so beautiful.

It was easy to understand that two letters stand for k, one for l, one for o and one for a. The letters for o, l, and for k had some remote similarities to the corresponding Hebrew letters, if you rotate them a bit in your head. How I know that the letter for a, ا, is also like the Hebrew א, you should just squeeze the Aleph on both sides. And a couple of year later there was the Islamic revolution in Iran, at the end of the same year there was the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, and new tasty, delicious words began to pour – baseej, inqhilab, Haqiqat-e Inquilab-e Saur, mujahedeen-e khalq, sipaas, Kermanshah, pasdaran, and somehow I began learning Persian.

The language struck me with its grammatical similarities to German and its lexical parallels to Yiddish. Just as Yiddish incorporates Hebrew and Aramaic, Persian is saturated with Arabic. In Yiddish, one can play with registers, tilting the language toward its Germanic core or thinning out its Hebraic elements. Persian offers the same flexibility, allowing a speaker to choose more, fewer, or even no Arabic words. Years later, many Jewish-American Iranists from the WWII generation confirmed this early impression. Learning the language went smoothly, as if I had already known it in a former gilgul.

When I was an Iranian studies student in the late 1980s at Hebrew University, one of my teachers told us that Persians are simply prone to short periods of mass hysteria before returning to “normal” and going back to counting money and carpets within a few years. Time has since proven that my former teacher understood Iranians quite poorly, as they have shown no symptoms of recovering to that supposed normalcy. I eventually realized that my chances of visiting Tehran or Shiraz are slim, perhaps reserved for a future gilgul. Being an Israeli Iranist without the possibility of visiting Iran is much like being Jewish without the possibility of joining a Gentile club.

I am writing this on Sunday, March 1. Today is my secular birthday, and tomorrow, Ta’anith Esther, is my Jewish one. Last night, Bibi and Trump sent me a wonderful gift. I shouted into the sky as drones sent from Iran turned into smoke: Khamenei kotlet shod (“Khamenei went kebab”) as millions of Iranians around the world shouted along with me.

My son just called. He is married to a girl whose parents were both born in Iran. “What do you say about your birthday present?” he asked. “I just realized that your entire life is connected to the fact that you were born on Ta’anith Esther.”

“Yes,” I replied, “and I am just now writing about that. I’ll send it to you.”

It was published today that the joint American-Israeli training for the very operation we witnessed yesterday began as early as January 2023. In January! This timing is critical; it means that even as the domestic anti-Bibi demonstrations began to surge and well before the horrors of October 7, the strategic “pedestal” for the current reversal was already being constructed.

In my view, the son of the last Shah has been designated by Bibi and President Trump to lead the transitional period in a post-Khomeinist Iran. Whether he will be able to restore the historical monarchy remains an open question.

As I discussed in my co-authored article with Reuven Kiperwasser, “Encounters between Iranian Myth and Rabbinic Mythmakers in the Babylonian Talmud,” published a dozen years ago in Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon Scholarly: Conversations Between Jews, Iranians and Babylonians in Antiquity (2014) and available here, the Babylonian sages often engaged in a process of symbolic devaluation. They created their own imagined worlds by taking elements of Iranian mythology and recasting them to define the borderlines of their own culture. After the certain dismiss of what many Iranians call “the Ahrimanic Republic” (instead of “the Islamic Republic,” with Ahriman being the wicked opposite, sitra oḥora, of the benevolent Ahurmazd, or Ahura Mazda), we are seeing this ancient devaluation play out as a modern geopolitical reality. In our analysis of Sanhedrin 39a, we examine a dialogue where a Magus claims the human body is divided, with the upper part belonging to Hwrmyz (Ohrmazd) and the lower, excretory part belonging to ‘hrmyn (Ahriman). The Talmudic sage Amemar sarcastically challenged this dualism by asking why Ahriman would permit Ohrmazd to send life-giving water through his “territory.” Today, this sarcasm has turned into a tangible reality as the “Ahrimanic” regime governed through the “lower” impulses of mass hysteria and regional chaos has been devalued by a population that has largely secularized and rejected the official ideology. With the collapse of this demonic mask, many Iranian exiles will return home (four to five millions Iranians live outside of the present borders of Iran). They return to a land ready to restore its “upper” civilizational identity, finally mirroring the way the rabbis once harmonized their world with the benevolent elements of the Iranian heritage.

In Iran, while 99% of the population is officially classified as Muslim (including a 5% to 15% Sunnite minority composed of Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, and Turkmens living along the borders), the internal reality is starkly different. In truth, only about 30% to 40% of the population considers themselves Muslim at all. The actual majority has shifted toward being non-religious or atheist, with many becoming fiercely anti-Islamic or “spiritual” in various ways. Others identify as self-proclaimed “Zoroastrians” or have become secret converts to American-style Evangelical Christianity.

Under the Khomeinist regime, Iran has become largely secularized and has partially moved in an anti-Islamic direction. Today, nobody believes in the official ideology, a situation very much like the lack of belief in the official ideology during the late Brezhnev USSR. The “Ahrimanic republic” now sends Shi’ite clerics who oppose its ideology to prison or places them under home arrest, just as the late Brezhnev USSR did to the few who identified as “the real Marxists.”

The Iran of tomorrow will certainly be anti-Islamist, with the potential for the oppression of Islam itself. While the Iran of yesterday was a global leader in antisemitism, the Iran of tomorrow will be a global leader in the state-supported fight against the “Free Palestine” movement. The “Palestinian discourse” was central to the old Iran and will remain so in the New Iran, though with its emphasis entirely reversed.

The raison d’être of the Iran of tomorrow will be a staunch alliance with the USA and Israel. The principle of nahapokh hu from the Purim story reveals the sarcastic hypostasis of the Jewish God’s sense of humor. As the scripture asks, “See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.” One need only consider the metamorphosis of pogromist Czarist Russia into what some, astonished by the transformation, termed “the Jewish Commune.”

Some predict that Iran will fall apart due to the separatism of ethnic minorities, but to me, this is absolute nonsense. Iran has only insignificant real minority groups; although some Iranians speak languages other than Persian, they are Iranians first and foremost. Fantasies about Azeri separatism in Iran are especially hilarious. It is as if Nazi Germany tried to lure Israel’s Hasidic Jews into a “Great Germany” separatism simply because those Jews speak Yiddish. Iranians of Azeri background are, more or less, the Iranian equivalent of Israel’s Ashkenazim.

But the borders of Iran might change. It is a significant topic, and once stabilization is achieved, one can envisage the enlargement, rather than the shrinking, of Iranian territory eastwards within a predictable span of time.

The position of the Iran of tomorrow as an ally of Israel will fundamentally change Israel’s strategy toward its Arab allies and partners. MBS understood this some time ago and, consequently, dragged his feet regarding a rapprochement with Israel.

Another significant point is Türkiye, which has emerged as a primary adversary of Israel since October 7, though I hope the motivations behind this shift were largely opportunistic and fundamentally misguided. However, if the IDF map is accurate, the fact that Israeli jets overflew Turkish territory on their way to Iran suggests a significant development. This possibility hints that Mr. Erdoğan is beginning to view the regional landscape through a more pragmatic lens, perhaps recognizing the inevitable devaluation of the “Ahrimanic” status quo in favor of a more stable, “upper” civilizational order.