On Texts, Contexts, and Countertexts

Accusations of Jewish misanthropy have a long history. Consider the following litany of charges from a Byzantine-era text, for example:

[The Jews] refuse to acknowledge that others do them kindness. Come see! What did they too do that poor man, Pharaoh? When they went down to Egypt, he welcomed them with a smiling face, and settled them in the best part of the land, sustained them during the years of famine, and fed them all the best food of his land. He had palaces to build, and they were building there. . . . When Pharaoh heard that they were fleeing, he went after them to get his money back. What did they do to him? There was one man with them, named Moses, son of Amram, and with his magic, he cast a spell over his staff and struck the sea, and it dried up. So they all went in, on the dry land, and passed through. I don't know how they passed through, or how they dried the water. When Pharaoh saw, he went after them to retrieve his money, and they pushed him into the sea! He and his entire army drowned. [The Jews] certainly did not recall the good he had done for them—so you see how ungrateful they are!

They arrived at Sihon and Og, the great warriors of our land, whom no creature could challenge, and I don't know how, but they killed them. They arrived at the kings of Midian, and I don't know how, but they killed them. What else did that disciple of that man Moses do? He brought the Israelites into the land of Canaan, and it's not enough that he took their land, but also killed thirty-one kings, carved up their territory, and had no mercy on them. Those whom he didn't try to kill, he enslaved! . . . After that, they had another king, David, son of Jesse, and he used to destroy and exterminate all the kingdoms, pitying no one, as it says, "David did not leave a man or a woman alive"

(1 Samuel 27:11).

This text, meant to denigrate and degrade Jews by retelling their history in a disparaging way, appears to be blatantly antisemitic. It draws on Jews' own texts and narratives, but perverts them, turns them on their head, and constructs a tale of immorality and ethical breaches that leaves the audience with the clear sense that the Jews have a long history of violence and treachery, and certainly cannot be trusted as friends or allies. One scholar commenting on this text wrote that it "may rightly be considered . . . one of the precursors of . . . the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."¹

But this passage is drawn from rabbinic literature:² it is a midrashic text purporting to report the contents of the letter sent out by Ahasuerus to the people of the Persian empire, justifying the genocidal decree that serves to kick off the tension of the book of Esther. These midrashim, which date from the Byzantine era in their current forms, put a counter-history in the mouth of Haman.³ As is plain, the rabbinic authors of this passage don't believe anything they wrote; in fact, they presumably composed these stories, these counter-histories, as a way of delegitimizing them. The authors are conceding that there may be alternative ways of thinking about the history of the Jewish people and of the biblical stories. But no reasonable person sees things that way; only Haman and other irrational antisemites would say things like this. The rabbis marginalize these stories through their act of telling them.⁴

Counter-histories are a phenomenon that has been studied, sporadically, over the past few decades. A working definition might be: "A history of an adversary written for polemical purposes, which takes as its sources the adversary's own primary historical sources, and draws on them to construct a narrative which undermines the story usually told by that...