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.

Ba-Yamim ha-Hem Ba-Zeman ha-Zeh: Were Jews Involved in Iran’s First Political Upheaval?

Aton M. Holzer

The Persian Empire was founded via the conquests of Cyrus II following his rise to the Anshan throne in 559 BCE. Cyrus, celebrated in the Hebrew Bible as the liberator whose decree permitted the Return to Zion, was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who is not mentioned in the Bible. Cambyses was followed for a brief period by his brother [or someone claiming to be] Bardiya (known in Greek sources as Smerdis or Tanyoxarces), until Darius I overthrew him.

The Behistun inscription of Darius I, an ancient trilingual text carved into a rock face at Mount Bīsotūn, which overlooks the main road from Babylon to Media, presents the case for Darius’s royal legitimacy. It begins by tracing Darius’s lineage back to the mythical royal ancestor Achaemenes and his son Teispes, great-grandfather of Cyrus, and then recounts his struggle against Gaumâta, a Median magus (priest) who, in Darius’s telling, impersonated royal heir Bardiya.

Gaumâta declared his rebellion on 14 Viyakhna (the eleventh month) from atop Mount Arakadris and was crowned on 9 Garmapada (the fourth month).^[1] He was ultimately defeated by a coalition of seven nobles, including Utana, son of Thukhra, and was executed by Darius on 10 Bagayad (the seventh month). Traditionally, modern scholarship has viewed Darius’s claims of royal ancestry and Smerdis’s imposture as fabrications to justify a coup d’état, but this assumption has recently been called into question.^[2]

²⁶ …Darius the King ²⁷ declares: This is what was done by me when the king ²⁸ I did become. The son of Cyrus, of our family, Cambyses by name — ²⁹ he was the king here. Of that Cambyses [there] was a brother, ³⁰ Smerdis by name, having the same mother and father as Cambyses. And then Cambyses ³¹ struck down that Smerdis. When Cambyses struck down Smerdis, ³² it did not become known among the people that [he] had struck down Smerdis. And then Cambyses ³³ went to Egypt. And when Cambyses went to Egypt, the people grew treacherous, ³⁴ and thus deceit rose rampantly in both Persia and Media and ³⁵ in the [Empire’s] other lands. Darius the King declares: Later, ³⁶ there was one man, a Magian, Gaumâta by name, and he rose up from Paishiyauvada. ³⁷ [There is] a mountain in Persia named Arakadri. From there, when fourteen days of the month of Viyakhna ³⁸ were completed, he rose up, [and] he deceived the people [saying] thus: ³⁹ “I am Smerdis, the son of Cyrus who [is] brother of Cambyses.” ⁴⁰ Thereupon, all the people became rebellious against Cambyses and went over to him, [Smerdis], ⁴¹ Persia and Media and the other lands, [and] he seized the kingdom. ⁴² Nine days were completed in the month of Garmapada [when] he seized the kingdom thus. ⁴³ And then Cambyses died by his own hand …

⁴⁸ … Darius the king declares: There was no man, ⁴⁹ neither Persian nor Median nor any among our family who could render that Gaumâta ⁵⁰ kingdom-deprived. The people feared him greatly, ⁵¹ lest he would strike down the numerous people who knew him previously as Smerdis; ⁵² lest he would strike down the people on account of this: “Lest he who would know me [would know that] I am not Smerdis, ⁵³ the son of Cyrus.” No one dared to say anything ⁵⁴ against Gaumâta the Magian until I came. After that, ⁵⁵ I asked Ahura Mazda for help, [and] Ahura Mazda bore me aid. ⁵⁶ Ten days of the month of Bagayad were completed when, with a small number of men, ⁵⁷ I struck down that Gaumâta the Magian and those men who ⁵⁸ were his foremost allies. [There was] a fortress called Sikayauvati, a land called Nisaya, ⁵⁹ in Media, [and] there I struck him down. I seized the kingdom [from] him, [and] by the will ⁶⁰ of Ahura Mazda, I became king. Ahura Mazda bestowed the kingdom to me…^[3]

…Says Darius the king: These (are) the men who were there then when I slew Gaumâta the Magian, who called himself Bardiya; then these men cooperated as my allies; Intaphernes (Vidafarnah) by name, the son of Vayaspara, a Persian; Otanes (Utāna) by name, the son of Thukhra, a Persian; Gobryas (Gaubaruva) by name, the son of Mardonius, a Persian; Hydarnes (Vidarna) by name, the son of Bagabigna, a Persian; Megabyzus (Bagabuxša) by name, the son of Daduhya, a Persian; Ardumaniš by name, the son of Vahauka, a Persian.^[4]

The information from the Behistun inscription is enriched by Herodotus and fragments from Ctesias’ now-lost Persica, which are preserved in the writings of the Byzantine scholar Photius. In Herodotus’ Histories (3.68-3.87), a Persian noble named Otanes is depicted as the chief conspirator against the impostor Smerdis/Gaumâta-Bardiya, rather than Darius, who is actually the last to join the conspiracy. It was Otanes’ daughter, Phaedyme, one of Smerdis’ wives, who discovered the imposture because Smerdis lacked ears, which had been removed by Cyrus as punishment for earlier misdeeds (in Ctesias’ account, it is not a queen, but a eunuch, who informs the entire army of the deception). Otanes invited Aspathines and Gobryas for a discussion, and each subsequently recruited another conspirator. Darius joined them last, but quickly became the most vocal. They entered Smerdis’ palace without difficulty, and carried out the assassination.

The subsequent events in Herodotus also differ from Darius’ account. According to Herodotus, The Seven convened shortly after Smerdis’ death to discuss the future form of government. Otanes proposed a democracy, Megabyzus suggested an oligarchy (or aristocracy), and Darius advocated for a monarchy. After four members sided with Darius in favor of monarchy, they then needed to determine who would become King. They agreed on a competition: the one whose horse neighed first at dawn would become King. Otanes declined, leaving six conspirators to meet the next day. Darius prevailed by means of a ruse, and thus became the King of the Achaemenid Empire.

While the Behistun inscription portrays Darius as an unquestionable leader and future King, Herodotus downplays his significance and adds numerous details to the events, though the eventual outcome and main points of the revolt, including the names, remain unchanged. The seven conspirators became the most important officers of the empire, and the families of each of these seven continued to play key roles in Achaemenid governance until Alexander’s conquest.^[5]

But one conspirator played an outsized role in the Empire’s affairs. Herodotus describes:

These were the three opinions presented at the meeting, and after the other four of the seven men decided in favor of the last one, Otanes, despite his eagerness to establish isonomy, recognized that he had lost the argument, and he now addressed them all: “My comrades, it is clear that one of us must become King, and whether he who will be entrusted with the administration of the kingdom is chosen by lot, by the majority of the Persians, or by some other method, I shall not compete with you, for I wish neither to rule nor to be ruled. So I now withdraw from this contest on the following condition: that neither I nor my descendants will be subject to you.” When he had stated this requirement, the other six agreed to it, and so he took no part in the competition among them but stood aside with an attitude of neutrality. And even now, Otanes’ family is the only free one among the Persians; it submits to rule only as much as it wants to, although it does not transgress Persian laws. The remaining six then deliberated about how they could most fairly establish one of themselves in the position of King. First they all agreed that if the kingship did go to one of them, Otanes and his descendants would be granted yearly allotments of Median clothing and every other gift thought to be most honorable in Persia. They decided to grant him these gifts because he had been the first to plan the conspiracy and bring them all together. And in addition to these perquisites for Otanes, they resolved to establish other privileges that they would share in common: they agreed that anyone of the seven would be allowed to go into the palace without an official to announce him, unless the King happened to be sleeping with a woman at the time, and that the King would not be permitted to marry a woman from any families other than their own… (Histories 3.83-3.84)^[6]

In Herodotus’ account, Otanes advocates for Persia to transition to a democracy. Scholars^[7] often view this debate as an apocryphal reflection of Herodotus’ own thoughts on governance, influenced by the democracy-oligarchy conflicts at the onset of the Peloponnesian War. Nonetheless, Herodotus himself notes contemporaneous skepticism, and asserts that Otanes nonetheless championed democracy (6.43). When outvoted in favor of maintaining the monarchy, Otanes relinquishes any claim to kingship, requesting only that he and his descendants be granted independence from royal rule (3.83). Ultimately, Darius triumphs among the six remaining contenders by resorting to deceit in a contest. Otanes, identified as “one of the seven,” reappears in Herodotus (Histories 3.141.1) as a commander of the Persian army. He is further noted as the father of Amestris, Xerxes I’s wife, and as the general during the campaign against the Greeks in 480 (7.61.2). This is forty-two years after the conspiracy – at which time Otanes already had a grown daughter in Bardiya’s harem – which would make Otanes, if living, quite old for such a task.

Pierre Briant^[8] argued that the Otanes who led the campaign in 480, whom Herodotus identifies as the father of Amestris, was a different individual altogether. Rüdiger Schmitt posits that Herodotus may have been mistaken about the general in 480, who probably was one of Otanes’ sons, but maintains that Amestris was indeed Otanes’ daughter – such a royal marriage would have made good sense, in order to further cement the Darius-Otanes lineal alliance.^[9]

In the Biblical Book of Esther, Xerxes’ wife is Esther. The historicity of Esther, once roundly rejected in scholarly circles, has recently gained some support. A recent article by faculty at the University of Tehran (!)^[10] highlights numerous details within the Masoretic text of Esther that could only have arisen from direct familiarity with “the details of the administrative system, rules, and customs of the Achaemenian Empire and court,” without mediation by Greek sources. Coupled with the fact that Esther contains many Persian loanwords but no Greek ones, this evidence supports dating Esther, at the latest, to the end of the Achaemenid empire or the very beginning of the Hellenistic period—i.e., a time when the Achaemenid dynastic line was still a living memory. Scholars have suggested that the name Esther might be an apocopated form of Amestris, and the name given for her father, avi hayil, meaning ‘father of the soldiers,’ could be a title rather than a proper name, indicating a military commander.^[11]

Following out this line of thinking – granting historicity to both the book of Esther and Persian and Greek sources, to the maximum extent possible – leads to some interesting possibilities.

In the Biblical book, Esther’s apparent selection through a contest might have been a strategic charade by Xerxes, a king known for cosmopolitanism and promoting equality among his subjects,^[12] to give the impression of being open to marriage alliances with his diverse peoples, even as the contest for chief queen was really among a much smaller pool – since he preferred to marry a Persian from one of the seven families, in consonance with the agreement of the seven. (Otanes is explicitly identified as a Persian in the Behistun inscription.)

But how could Esther be both Persian and Judean?

One might suggest that Otanes’ Persian credentials were fabricated. The “Persians” were not averse to fabricating their own fictional ancestries; indeed, some skeptics suggest that even Darius I might have done so concerning his royal lineage as depicted in the Behistun Inscription.^[13] Or perhaps Amestris was a product of intermarriage, Persian by her father but of a Judean mother — the question of whether ethnicity is passed in a patrilineal or matrilineal manner was unresolved in the early years of empire, both are reflected in the evidence, and concerns with the details of adjudicating conflicts of ethnicities are actually hashed out in the “constitutional laws,” data of Darius, as preserved at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rostam.^[14]

But none of this is necessary. Recent studies argue that Persian ethnicity, in the early Achaemenid period, was actually a new construct:

“To be ‘Persian’ is unlikely to have denoted partaking in a cultural identity that was the direct heir and linear continuation of a migrant Indo-Iranian identity; instead, it meant to subscribe to a relatively new and inclusive identity, informed by both Elamite and Indo-Iranian traditions and developed and transformed pari passu with the incredible dynamism from which the Persian empire emerged… Of course, it may well be that in certain aspects of being ‘Persian’ the Indo-Iranian side was or became dominant, but that is not the essence: what matters is that both founding traditions were transformed and merged to the extent that one may speak of a new ethnicity or ethnic identity – the Persian ethnogenesis.”^[15]

Judean ancestry or worship of the God of Israel, even if professed, would not have posed a barrier, in Achaemenid eyes, to identification with the constructed Persian ethnicity; Mazdaism, in whatever form it may have taken, was not confirmed as the ruling class’ religion until or after Darius,^[16] and many cults continued to be worshipped in the Persian heartland.^[17] The possibility that Amestris’ late “Persian” father-Darius co-conspirator Otanes, the commander of Persian forces, was of Judean ancestry and even creed, is thus not at odds with any Achaemenid imperial marriage policy. Nonetheless, once Darius embraced Zoroastrianism as the official state religion, and “Judaism” emerged as a distinct ethnicity,^[18] the Persian nobleman’s family would have had reason to hide both.

If Otanes is indeed the character identified in the Megillah as avi hayil, a “crypto-Jew”, he might just have been the greatest shtadlan of all time. According to the Behistun inscription, Gaumâta had either destroyed or halted work on temples of which he disapproved — “the temples which Gaumâta, the Magian, had destroyed, I restored to the people.” Whether or not the disruption of Cyrus’s promise to rebuild the Jewish Temple was a motivating factor in Otanes’ conspiratorial intervention, Darius’s unusually fervent and forceful insistence on the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple (Ezra 6:11-12) makes good sense if a repayment of a debt to his good friend and benefactor.

This could potentially also resolve a longstanding crux interpretum in Esther (3:2-4): why did Mordechai refuse to bow to Haman? If we consider Herodotus’ account – which indicates that Otanes’ family remained free from subjugation to Darius’ descendants – it might explain why Mordechai^[19] chose to uphold the privilege their ancestor had secured and refrained from bowing before the king or his representatives.

In a highly original and ambitious article^[20] published some time ago, which rejects Herodotus in favor of the historicity of Esther (and Daniel), Chaim Heifetz posited that Gaumâta—as a magus-priest and religious absolutist linked to the ancient Median religion—was engaged in a religious conflict against the abstract (imperial form of) Zoroastrianism, which Jews and their religion found to be a more natural ally. He suggests that Haman “the Agagite” was a literary-theological construct derived from historical memory of Gaumâta. According to this reading, the very first Persian regime change—the overthrow of genocidal religious fanatics—bears a striking resemblance to the last, kein tihiyeh lanu.

1. Incidentally, the anniversary of the date recorded in II Melakhim 25:3 as that of the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. 14 Adar is of course Purim, and 10 Tishrei is Yom Kippur – fascinating but not more than that, given no evidence of Judean-Persian calendrical synchronization. ↑
2. Amir Ahmadi, “The Bīsotūn Inscription-A Jeopardy of Achaemenid History.” Journal of Archeology and Ancient History 27 (2020) 1-55; .‏Zarghamee, Reza. “A Contribution to the Discourse Regarding a Teispid-Achaemenid Dynastic Divide.” Ancient History Bulletin 39 (2025) 3-4, 86-124. ↑
3. Translation by Scott L. Harvey, Winfred P. Lehmann, and Jonathan Slocum, Old Iranian Online, Lesson 8: Old Persian, archived at https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/aveol/80 and accessed January 14, 2026.↑
4. Translation by Herbert Cushing Tolman, The Behistan Inscription of King Darius (Vanderbilt University, 1908),‏ 35. ↑
5. Libor Pruša, “Seven Against Mage: Darius and His Co-Conspirators,” Sapiens ubique civis 3 (2022), 27-56.‏ ↑
6. Translations of Herodotus are from Robert B., Strassler, ed., The Landmark Herodotus: the Histories (Vintage, 2009). ↑
7. Farane Zaidi, “The Controversies and Skepticisms of the Constitutional Debate in Herodotus 3.80-82.” Ipso Facto: The Carleton Journal of Interdisciplinary Humanities 3 (2024), 49-62; Breno Battistin Sebastiani, “Herodotus’ Allusions to Democracy in Books 7 and 8: Between Heuristic Device and Purposeful Action,” Greece & Rome 72:2 (2025), 203-223.‏ ↑
8. Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002), p. 135. ↑
9. Rüdiger Schmitt, Iranische Anthroponyme in den erhaltenen Resten von Ktesias’ Werk (Verlag der ÖAW, 2006), 174-176.‏ ↑
10. Morteza Arabzadeh Sarbanani, “Revisiting the Book of Esther: Assessing the Historical Significance of the Masoretic Version for the Achaemenian History.” Persica Antiqua 3:4 (2023), 19-32. ↑
11. Robert Gordis, “Religion, wisdom and history in the book of Esther: a new solution to an ancient crux.” Journal of Biblical Literature 100:3 (1981), 359-388; Mitchell First, “The Origin of Ta ‘anit Esther.” AJS Review 34:2 (2010), 309-351. ↑
12. Kristin Kleber, “Taxation in the Achaemenid Empire.” Oxford Handbooks Online. Classical Studies. Oxford University press, 2015. See also Aton Holzer, “Esther, Feminist Ethics, and the Creation of Jewish Community,” The Lehrhaus, March 13, 2022, archived at https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/esther-feminist-ethics-and-the-creation-of-jewish-community/ and accessed January 15, 2026. ↑
13. Pierre Briant, “Achaemenids.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics, 2015. ↑
14. Hilmar Klinkott, “How to Govern an Empire? The Inscriptions of Darius I As a Constitutional Program,” archived at https://pourdavoud.ucla.edu/video/how-to-govern-an-empire-the-inscriptions-of-darius-i-as-a-constitutional-program/ and accessed February 22, 2023. ↑
15. Wouter FM Henkelman, “Humban and Auramazda: Royal Gods in a Persian Landscape,” in Henkelman, Wouter FM, and Céline Redard, eds., Persian Religion in the Achaemenid Period-La religion perse à l’époque achéménide. (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 302. ↑
16. Philip G. Kreyenbroek, “Zoroastrianism under the Achaemenians: A non-essentialist approach.” In J. Curtis, St. J. Simpson. L., eds., The world of Achaemenid Persia: history, art and society in Iran and the ancient Near East (I.B. Tauris, 2010), 103-109. ↑
17. Wouter FM Henkelman, “Practice of worship in the Achaemenid heartland.” A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire 2 (Wiley, 2021), 1243-1270. ↑
18. Aton M. Holzer, “Esther, Empire, and the Emergence of Jewish Ethnicity,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 56:4-5 (2025), 371-395.‏ ↑
19. And possibly others from Otanes’ family, had they been stationed at the king’s gates rather than leading armies — see Herodotus Histories 7.62 and 7.82. ↑
20. Chaim S. Heifetz, “Malkhut Paras U-Madai be-Tekufat Bayit Sheini u-Lefaneha – Iyun Mehudash,” Megadim 14 (1991), 78-147. ↑

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.