Khshayarsha Who?

My renewed blog on the TAI site (which I will be duplicating here to keep the record whole) is entitled “The Middle East and Beyond” for a fairly obvious practical reason: It enables me to discuss subjects far and wide, since the word “beyond” can mean practically anything I want it to. I intend to limit myself geographically, however, to the Middle East, North Africa and the geopolitical peripheries of both. Beyond geography, I will include thematic material related to what I call Jewcentricity—the consistent if diversely expressed tendency to exaggerate the influence of Jews, Judaism and, by extension, Israel. I will do this in part because Israel is part of the Middle East and Jewcentricity affects the dynamics of the region, and also because The American Interest concerns itself with all things American—and Jews in America constitute, if no longer the largest Jewish community in the world, a large and influential community all the same.

As the two or three dozen people on the planet who are familiar with my book Jewcentricity (John Wiley, 2009) know, I conceive the phenomenon by way of a 2 x 2 matrix. On one axis are Jews and non-Jews, and on the other are positively and negatively disposed exaggerations. That makes for four quadrants, which correspond respectively to mostly Christian evangelical religious exaggerations of the role of Jews and Israel in cosmic history, anti-Semitism, Jewish chauvinism, and Jewish self-hatred. (Just draw the matrix you will easily be able to work these quadrant labels out for yourself.)  My argument is that in various ways each of these types of exaggeration tends to goad the others. For example, Jewish chauvinism can breed both Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism. In turn, anti-Semitism can breed Jewish chauvinism, as can gentile adulation of Jews, and so on. My counsel to everyone tempted to engage in any of these four forms of exaggeration is to just cut it out, and think of something better to do with your time and energy.

Although the book was finished and published more than two years ago, I have continued to collect examples of Jewcentricity.  The most recent addition to my collection, I must say, was most unexpected. It is an example of Jewish chauvinism on the general order of two thousand years old.

For reasons I need not detail, I became interested in parallels between the story of Joseph in Egypt as related in the book of Genesis and the narrative presented in the scroll of Esther.  One of these parallels has to do with the fact that neither Joseph nor the Jews of Esther’s time availed themselves of the opportunity to return from exile to the land of Israel.  To make the case that the Jews of Shushan could have returned had they wished to, it is necessary to show that the opportunity was real. That in turn requires figuring out roughly when the story happened. (Never mind the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the story told in the Book of Esther was from the beginning meant to be, and was understood to be at the time, a novella based only loosely on historical events.) If it happened after the building of the Second Temple was completed, then Jerusalem would have been a far more “permissive environment”, as the modern term would have it, than if it had happened before that.

Figuring out this time period is not as simple as it seems, and the source of the ambiguity lies in this case in a single sentence in the second chapter of the scroll. Verse five of that chapter reads, in translation obviously, as follows: “There was a certain Jew in Shushan the castle, whose name was Mordecai the son of Yair the son of Shimei the son of Kish, a Benjamite who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captives that had been carried away with Yechoniya king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away.”

Aside from the fact that this is a really terrible run-on sentence that desperately needed an ancient editor and never found one, it is not clear who was carried away, Mordecai or Kish. The most plausible reading is that Kish was carried away, and that four generations later Mordechai arrived on the scene. Hebrew in those days was written without punctuation, and Hebrew still today lacks capital letters, making it more difficult than usual to figure out the precise meaning of certain complicated sentences.  If we put a comma after the word “Benjamite”, one could make a better case that it was Mordecai who was carried away into exile with King Yechoniya. If we leave the comma out, as I have done above, then it’s Kish who is the more likely deportee. But since, as I say, the language was written without commas, how are we supposed to know which is which?  The answer is that other contextual clues have to be brought to bear.

In this case the most important contextual clue resides in the name of the Persian king in the story. In Hebrew his transliterated name is Ahashverosh, which in English is usually rendered Ahasuerus. To which Achaemenid king does this name correspond? Without getting into a lot of detail, it corresponds to the Persian name Khshayarsha, from which was derived the Greek name Xerxes, who ruled from 485-464 BCE. If so, then the story of Megillat Esther would begin in 483 or 482 BCE, the third year of the king’s reign. That determination fits well with the assumption that Mordecai is four generations removed from the initial deportation, which occurred in 597 BCE.  Do the math, and you will see.

But this was not good enough for some observers many centuries ago. A chauvinistic tradition emerged insisting that Queen Esther was the mother of one of the great gentile heroes of the Jewish people: Darius I. Why was Darius a hero?  Because under his auspices the second Temple, whose construction was enabled by King Cyrus, was completed in 516/515 BCE.  If Queen Esther was Darius’s mother, then according to later Jewish law, that would have made Darius technically Jewish.

The problem with this idea is that for Queen Esther to have been Darius’ mother, Cyrus’ son, Cambyses II (ruled 530-522 BCE), would have had to be the king of the story. But there is no formulation of that name, or any way to manipulate it, to come up with Ahashverosh. Nevertheless, some commentators a very long time ago insisted upon it, which meant placing a notional comma after “Benjamite” in chapter 2, verse 5, to push Mordecai back in time a century or so. It was very important to them, it seems, that Esther be Darius’s mother.

If we take the more plausible date, then yes, Jerusalem was a relatively permissive environment for Jews to return to their homeland—though not as permissive as it became after Nehemiah finished building the city’s walls in around 433 BCE. Yet there is not so much as a proto-Zionist hint in the Scroll of Esther; no one so much as mentions the possibility. As to why that is, you’ll have to wait for my essay to appear on parallels between Esther and Joseph in Egypt.

This episode, which has bedeviled the understanding of the Scroll of Esther for centuries, corresponds, very roughly perhaps, to the claims of Jewish American chauvinists today that Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and, especially, Abraham Lincoln were really Jews all along. What? You don’t believe that anyone could possibly have the audacity (that would be chutzpah) to make such ludicrous claims? You’d be wrong. Hey, you can look it up, in Jewcentricity, pages 149-152!