This is a longer version of an essay published at tradition online yesterday.
[Looking for Talmudology on the Daf , Sanhedrin 87, to be learned on Purim? Click here.]
In 1703 in Livorno in central Italy. David Raphael ben Abraham Polido published Zikhron Purim, subtitled: The last will and testament of Haman ben Hamdata and his children, the enemies of the Jewish People.[1] In this inventive booklet, Polido imagined Haman imprisoned on death row, his execution only hours away. Of course, the Megillah contains no such scene, and instead describes the execution of Haman as an almost instantaneous event, occupying just three verses at the end of chapter seven:
Does [Haman] mean to ravish the Queen in my own palace? …Harvona said… “there is a gallows which Haman has prepared for Mordechai”… “hang him on it!” ordered the king. So they hanged Haman… and the king’s fury abated.
But what if it had not been so? What if Haman had been imprisoned? How might he have contemplated his fate? What might he have said? What might he have instructed his family?
Zikhron Purim, Livorno 1703. Held in the Etz Chaim Library Amsterdam, through The National Library of Israel. Ktiv Project, here.
Polido imagined a Haman who lay chained and dejected. And completely unrepentant. The book opens with an echo to the text of the ketuvah, the marriage agreement outlining the responsibilities of a husband for his new wife. “On the sixteenth of Nissan in the year 3,998 we, who signed below, testify that the chakan [sic]…was visited in prison and we found him sick, on the ground dejected (cf. Ps.41:4), crying and pleading for his life.” Despite this, the ‘witnesses’ reported that Haman was “in full control of his mental faculties,” which enjoins the reader to take Haman’s words with the utmost seriousness. “You are aware that the king has sentenced me to hang in a most ignoble manner; therefore, I call upon you to act as witnesses to my testament.” We never learn the names of these witnesses, but Haman’s will is signed in the spirit of Purim, with a litany of curses on the tzorer layehudim:
הרב המקולל, החזיר המטונף, גאה וגאון עוכר ישראל הצר הגדול מאור’ר המ’ן האגגי ימח שמ׳ו רוח ה׳ ימרוהו יתרדוהו מכל עדן. ממ’ה ברחמיו יראינו בעמו כמו שאראנו בשמו. וכן יהי רצון ונאמר אמן
The cursed leader [rav], the filthy pig, proud and a genius who is the deformed one among Israel, the great enemy our learned rabbi Haman ben Hamdata, may his name and memory be blotted out, may the Spirit of God remove him from all that is pleasant,…And may it be His will, and let us say Amen.
Haman begins with some general guidelines as to how his ten sons should live the remainder of their lives.
Lend your ears to my will, for it is the path of your lives. Love one another and live together in tranquility. “For how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live as one (Psalms 123:1).” Hate the Jews as your father has commanded you, for they are your enemies. Write hateful letters about them to King Ahasuerus… And so harden your heart against the poor, and copy the way your of your ancestors…if you ever lend money to others arm yourselves and demand repayment. And if they tell you “we will repay you, only let Heaven have mercy upon us,” then spill their blood like water. Kill them without mercy and make a name for yourselves. For how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to destroy others and be free of the worms.
Some of these fictitious words of Haman echo the Talmud, where, in an anonymous Baraita, Canaan, the cursed son of Noah, also left instructions for his descendants:
Canaan commanded his sons about five matters: Love one another, love robbery, love promiscuity, hate your masters, and do not speak the truth.[2]
This is, of course, an exercise of rabbinic fantasy, but just in case we were thinking that this Canaan literally said this, Samuel ben Meir of Troyes, (d. circa 1158), known as the Rashbam, notes the following in his commentary:
This means that [slaves descended from Canaan] act in this way – as if they had once been commanded by their ancestor to do so. And this has a practical ramification: that we are on alert when around them.
After these remarks, Haman addresses each son, in a parody of the blessings that Jacob gave to his sons and of the Ten Commandments themselves:
To Parshandata his firstborn. Do not pay any attention to the first of the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord your God” does not apply to you, because you were never in Egypt and the Torah was not given to us. Neither did we hear the voice of God on Sinai saying, “I am God.” Moreover, while in Egypt Moses said “this is what the God of the Hebrews has said.” Now had he said “the God of the Amalakites” we would certainly have been included “in the curse of those who do not uphold” (Deut. 27:26). I bequeath you a double portion as it is written “the first born of a wife whom you hate should receive a double inheritance” (cf. Deut. 21:15-17).
Each son is given instructions as to which one of the Ten Commandments to break. Wherever he can, Haman leaves precise instructions to rebel against the norms of society that the Torah has outlined.
[Haman] called to [his fifth son] Adaliah and he quoted [the fifth of the Ten Commandments:] “honor your father” – if you know who he is. And if you do not, then act like Rebbi Bena’ah [in the Talmud] and bury him, or hit him with your staff. For in the Gemara it was Rebbi Hunnah who declared “most Gentile women are whores.”[3]
The two versions of Zikhron Purim that I examined share much of the opening text and Haman’s specific guidance to each of his sons. But they also differ. In the handwritten version held in Amsterdam, there follows the prayer for the welfare of the government which rather remarkably includes Shabbatai Zevi (“may his name be forever” cf. Ps. 72:17). Both versions then have a parody of the Memorial Prayer for the Dead (“El Malei Rahamim”):
… May the spirit of Satan guide him through the fires of hell… may the Supreme King of the Demons in his mercy fly above him and spread the shadow of death over him…may Ashmadi be his inheritance, may thorns afflict him (cf. Ez. 28:24) and may anger come upon his resting place, as it is written “may fury come, may his grave be obliterated” (cf. Isaiah 57:2)…together with all those who hate Israel, with every kind of curse, and may it be His will, and let us say Amen.
For good measure, both copies also have seven “hakafot for Haman.” The opening rhyming stanza reads: “I invoke the living God to excommunicate him; May those who hate Him [God] be removed from the source of life, and forever banished from the land of the living, and may his soul mourn and be forgotten from the living.” And so on.
Why imagine this conversation at all? Haman is the most punished enemy of the Jews. His plans are foiled, his mortal enemy is elevated to King’s advisor, his sons are killed, and his property is seized. What is to be gained by an imagined last will, other than to demonstrate that Haman was unrepentant? This question is sharpened when we consider Livorno, in central Italy, the place where the book was published. If David Polido lived there (and this is not certain, and neither are his origins,) he was lucky enough to be living in a Jewish renaissance period of sorts. Some one hundred years earlier, King Ferdinand I had issued a blanket amnesty to all those living as Morranos, secret Jews in Spain and Portugal. Jews living in Livorno were among the safest in Europe and the Jewish community there had liberties “that most Jewish communities elsewhere could only envy in the course of the seventeenth century,”[4] But surely that safety was precisely what frightened David Polido. Safety comes. And safety ends.
Perhaps this is what makes Zikharon Purim resonate today, as those in the US recognize that our security and comfort may be real, but they cannot be guaranteed. However comfortable the material circumstances, the injunction to remember “what Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt” (Deut. 25:17) has never far from the Jewish mind. Perhaps, thought David Polido, without the memory of what had befallen us, what chance did we have to avoid the hatred that was certain, one day, to come?
In April 1982 I saw a performance of George Steiner’s novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. The story revolves about a group of Jews who capture Hitler, who had been hiding in the Amazon some thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Both the book and the play engendered controversy: John Leonard, in his review for The New York Times, thought that Hitler’s monologue at the end of the play, which went unanswered, was “obscene.” Dostoyevsky, he noted, “didn't end ''The Brothers Karamazov'' with the tale of the Grand Inquisitor.” Leonard’s overall reaction to the work and listening to the greatest murderer of the Jews offer a justification of his actions was visceral: “it makes me sick to my stomach.” And it is understandable. Here is part of Steiner’s A.H soliloquy:
“But did Herzl create Israel or did I? Examine the question fairly. Would Palestine have become Israel, would the Jews. have come to that barren patch of the Levant, would the United States and the Soviet Union, Stalin’s Soviet Union, have given you recognition and guaranteed your survival, had it not been for the Holocaust? It was the Holocaust that gave you the courage of injustice, that made you drive the Arab out of his home, out of his field, because he was lice-eaten and without resource, because he was in your divinely ordered way. That made you endure knowing that those whom you had driven out were rotting in refugee camps not ten miles away, buried alive in despair and lunatic dreams of vengeance. Perhaps I am the Messiah, the true Messiah, the new Sabbatai whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home. ““The Holocaust was the necessary mystery before Israel could come into its strength.[5]
It is a dangerous thing to imagine the machinations of our worst enemies, and usually it is not necessary. Their actual words are terrifying enough. But there is a long tradition of Jews doing exactly that, both as parody and as criticism. Surely it won’t be long until someone writes a novella about the last thoughts of Yahya Sinwar as he sat on an armchair, covered in dust, vainly throwing a piece of wood at that drone that was watching him. What were his final thoughts? Regret? Anger? Resignation? Would the author have Sinwar implore his followers to carry forward their hatred of the Jews, or perhaps have him offer an unanswered justification for his actions?
How are we to read David Polido’s work? Over a century ago, Israel Davidson read it as a parody, which he defined as “a composition in which the form and expression of grave or dignified writings are closely imitated, but are made ridiculous by the subject or method of treatment.”[6] And Davidson thoroughly disliked it, declaring it to be “hardly worth the name of literature. It consists of curses and maledictions hurled at the head of Haman, the symbolic enemy and oppressor of the Jewish people…Euphony is mistaken for thought, and paranomasia for humor…. We can see, as it were, the face of the poor, shabby scribbler brighten up as he labors over his puns, amused at his ingenuity in telling people what he needed without asking them for it.”[7] Davidson’s work is cited to this day as “seminal”[8] and it seems that it was his remark alone that led Marvin Heller to describe Polido’s Zikhron Purim as “not highly regarded.”[9] But reading it today, as we observe a second Purim while at war, with our family held hostage and our dead denied a Jewish burial, this assessment should be reevaluated. Jewish life in Livorno was, for the first time in a century, relatively safe. Many even prospered. But David Polido, like the Rashbam before him, reminded his contemporaries that even if an enemy is vanquished, hatred of the Jews endures. The lesson for moderns is clear.
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[1] For background see Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature. New York; Columbia University Press 1907.p48–49, 195–199. Roni Cohen, Parodic Purim Literature in the Early Modern Era and the Ban that Failed. Zion 5782 [2022] 103-128 {Hebrew].. See Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Liborium Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852–60), col. 855. Zikhron Purim was published in different versions (Steinschneider mentions two possible dates for publication, 1700 and 1703). In a manuscript copy held by the Ets Haim Bibliotheca Sefardica in Amsterdam (and available through the National Library of Israel) the entire text is handwritten, but at the end there is a ten-page printed Spanish poem that tells the Purim story. Another version contains fifteen pages of text, of which four (including the frontispiece and introduction) are handwritten. A definitive study of this work awaits.
[2] T.B Pesachim 113b.
[3] This is a fabrication. Or a parody. However, the phrase does appear in the commentary of Rabbi Eliyakim Gatinov (c.1725-1795) of Izmir, in his Yitzhak Yeranen, a commentary on Maimonides Mishnah Torah (Issurei Bi’ah 12:21).
[4] Bregoli, Francesca. “Economic Utility and Political Reforms: The ‘Jewish Question’ in Livorno.” Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014, p. 208–38. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqsdrk7.14. Accessed 7 Mar. 2025. Bregoli is however, careful to note where these liberties ended.
[5] George Steiner. The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. New York; Simon and Schuster 1979. p169
[6] Davidson, op cit. XIV. The definitions of parody are varied, and there is some overlap with irony and satire. Regardless, Polido’s work might be read as any of these literary archetypes. The literature on this topic is vast. See in general Holger Zellentin, Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature. Tübingen; Mohr Siebeck, 2011, but especially 5-21; Simon Dentith, Parody. London, Routledge 2000, and Dov Noy, Haparodia besifrut Ysrael hakeduma" Mahanayim 54 (1961–62), 92–99.
[7] Ibid, p49.
[8] See Zellentin p23.
[9] Heller, Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book, Leiden, Brill 2008. p179.
