LOST PURIM JOYS
It is scarcely accurate to assert, as is sometimes done, that the most characteristic of the Purim pranks of the past were children of the Ghetto, and came to a natural end when the Ghetto walls fell. In point of fact, most of these joys originated before the era of the Ghetto, and others were introduced for the first time when Ghetto life was about to fade away into history.
Probably the oldest of Purim pranks was the bonfire and the burning of an effigy. Now, so far from being a Ghetto custom, it did not even emanate from Europe, the continent of Ghettos; it belongs to Babylonia and Persia. This is what was done, according to an old Geonic account recovered by Professor L. Ginzberg:
"It is customary in Babylonia and Elam for boys to make an effigy resembling Haman; this they suspend on their roofs, four or five days before Purim. On Purim day they erect a bonfire, and cast the effigy into its midst, while the boys stand round about it, jesting and singing. And they have a ring suspended in the midst of the fire, which (ring) they hold and wave from one side of the fire to the other."
Bonfires, it may be thought, need no recondite explanation; light goes with a light heart, and boys always love a blaze. Dr. J.G. Frazer, in his "Golden Bough," has endeavored, nevertheless, to bring the Purim bonfire into relation with primitive spring-tide and midsummer conflagrations, which survived into modern carnivals, but did not originate with them. Such bonfires belonged to what has been called sympathetic or homeopathic magic; by raising an artificial heat, you ensured a plentiful dose of the natural heat of the sun. So, too, the burning of an effigy was not, in the first instance, a malicious or unfriendly act. A tree-spirit, or a figure representing the spirit of vegetation, was consumed in fire, but the spirit was regarded as beneficent, not hostile, and by burning a friendly deity the succor of the sun was gained. Dr. Frazer cites some evidence for the early prevalence of the Purim bonfire; he argues strongly and persuasively in favor of the identification of Purim with the Babylonian feast of the Sacaea, a wild, extravagant bacchanalian revel, which, in the old Asiatic world, much resembled the Saturnalia of a later Italy. The theory is plausible, though it is not quite proven by Dr. Frazer, but it seems to me that whatever be the case with Purim generally, there is one hitherto overlooked feature of the Purim bonfire that does clearly connect it with the other primitive conflagrations of which mention was made above.
This overlooked feature is the "ring." No explanation is given by the Gaon as to its purpose in the tenth century, and it can hardly have been used to hold the effigy. Now, in many of the primitive bonfires, the fire was produced by aid of a revolving wheel. This wheel typifies the sun. Waving the "ring" in the Purim bonfires has obviously the same significance, and this apparently inexplicable feature does, I think, serve to link the ancient Purim prank with a long series of old-world customs, which, it need hardly be said, have nothing whatever to do with the Ghetto.
Then, again, the most famous of Purim parodies preceded the Ghetto period. The official Ghetto begins with the opening of the sixteenth century, whereas the best parodies belong to a much earlier date, the fourteenth century. Such parodies, in which sacred things are the subject of harmless jest, are purely medieval in spirit, as well as in date. Exaggerated praises of wine were a foil to the sobriety of the Jew, the fun consisting in this conscious exaggeration. The medieval Jew, be it remembered, drew no severe line between sacred and profane. All life was to him equally holy, equally secular. So it is not strange that we find included in sacred Hebrew hymnologies wine-songs for Purim and Chanukah and other Synagogue feasts, and these songs are at least as old as the early part of the twelfth century. For Purim, many Synagogue liturgies contain serious additions for each of the eighteen benedictions of the Amidah prayer, and equally serious paraphrases of Esther, some of them in Aramaic, abound among the Genizah fragments in Cambridge. Besides these, however, are many harmlessly humorous jingles and rhymes which were sung in the synagogue, admittedly for the amusement of the children, and for the child-hearts of adult growth. For them, too, the Midrash had played round Haman, reviling him, poking fun at him, covering him with ridicule rather than execration. It is true that the earliest ritual reference to the wearing of masks on Purim dates from the year 1508, just within the Ghetto period. But this omission of earlier reference is surely an accident, In the Babylonian Sacaea, cited above, a feature of the revel was that men and women disguised themselves, a slave dressed up as king, while servants personated masters, and vice versa. All these elements of carnival exhilaration are much earlier than the Middle Ages. Ghetto days, however, originated, perhaps, the stamping of feet, clapping of hands, clashing of mallets, and smashing of earthenware pots, to punctuate certain passages of the Esther story and of the subsequent benediction.
My strongest point concerns what, beyond all other delights, has been regarded as the characteristic amusement of the festival, viz. the Purim play. We not only possess absolutely no evidence that Purim plays were performed in the Ghettos till the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the end of the Ghettos was almost within sight, but the extant references imply that they were then a novelty. Plays on the subject of Esther were very common in medieval Europe during earlier centuries, but these plays were written by Christians, not by Jews, and were performed by monks, not by Rabbis. Strange as it may seem, it is none the less the fact that the Purim play belongs to the most recent of the Purim amusements, and that its life has been short and, on the whole, inglorious.
Thus, without pressing the contention too closely, Purim festivities do not deserve to be tarred with the Ghetto brush. Is it, then, denied that Purim was more mirthfully observed in Ghetto days than it is at the present day? By no means. It is unquestionable that Purim used to be a merrier anniversary than it is now. The explanation is simple. In part, the change has arisen through a laudable disinclination from pranks that may be misconstrued as tokens of vindictiveness against an ancient foe or his modern reincarnations. As a second cause may be assigned the growing and regrettable propensity of Jews to draw a rigid line of separation between life and religion, and wherever this occurs, religious feasts tend towards a solemnity that cannot, and dare not, relax into amusement. This tendency is eating at the very heart of Jewish life, and ought to be resisted by all who truly understand the genius of Judaism.
But the psychology of the change goes even deeper. The Jew is emotional, but he detests making a display of his feelings to mere onlookers. The Wailing Wall scenes at Jerusalem are not a real exception—the facts are "Cooked," to meet the demands of clamant tourists. The Jew's sensitiveness is the correlative of his emotionalism. While all present are joining in the game, each Jew will play with full abandonment to the humor of the moment. But as soon as some play the part of spectators, the Jew feels his limbs growing too stiff for dancing, his voice too hushed for song. All must participate, or all must leave off. Thus, a crowd of Italians or Southern French may play at carnival to-day to amuse sight-seers in the Riviera, but Jews have never consented, have never been able, to sport that others might stand by and laugh at, and not with, the sportsmen. In short, Purim has lost its character, because Jews have lost their character, their disposition for innocent, unanimous joyousness. We are no longer so closely united in interests or in local abodes that we could, on the one hand, enjoy ourselves as one man, and, on the other, play merry pranks, without incurring the criticism of indifferent, cold-eyed observers. Criticism has attacked the authenticity of the Esther story, and proposed Marduk for Mordecai, and Istar for Esther. But criticism of another kind has worked far more havoc, for its "superior" airs have killed the Purim joy. Perhaps it is not quite dead after all.