Poor Pharaoh, Wicked Moses: The “Letter of Haman”—A Rabbinic Parody of Anti-Jewish Counter-History

This chapter is mainly about the “Letter of Haman”, a late antique parody decrying what Moses did to poor Pharaoh. It is an early rabbinic parody of attacks on Jewish sacred history, and especially on Moses and Joshua. A discussion is provided of that parodic text the way it appears in Midrash Esther Rabbah. This is the main thrust of this chapter, and is the subject of its first four sections. The chapter also contrasts this to a modern parallel: Solzhenitsin’s complaint about what the so good, so lovely Tsar (Czar) did to Russia and to the Jews in particular, and what they supposedly did to him out of ingratitude, in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s corrosive reception in a review article he published. The chapter also discusses Gerson Rosenzweig’s parroting in 1892, on the first page of his pseudo-Talmudic satire Tractate America, the topos of the “sewers of Europe” from anti-immigrant rhetoric in the New York press. Then the chapter turns to how the Book of Esther and its Jewish dramatis personae, Mordecai and Esther, were besmirched by a liberal author from Genoa, Cesare Cabella, in 1869, in a critical review of a work by a clergyman whose own view of Esther and the Book of Esther was favourable. To Cabella, putting the Book of Esther or a sympathetic work based upon it in the hands of teenage girls at school is an attempt on their virtue, offering to them as a model despicable behaviour by Cabella read into the actions of those two heroes of the story. In this chapter, after a general preamble, Midrash Esther Rabbah is considered among other midrashic works on Esther. Then the medieval versions of the “Letter of Haman” are considered, projecting back onto biblical times the Jewish medieval experience of being demonised. A subsection shows Haman arguing for the extermination of the Jews, the way he is imagined in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Megillah 13a. Two sections deal, in turn, with Moses and with Joshua in the “Letter of Haman”. A subsection is devoted to a perceived need for early rabbinic authors to respond to hostile, delegitimising Hellenistic claims about “Joshua the Robber”, the way in early Byzantine times Procopius of Caesarea claimed he had seen an ancient inscription in North Africa describe Joshua.