How Queen Esther became American

In 10 fast-paced chapters, the Book of Esther recounts an attempted genocide of the Jews in ancient Persia. The Persian emperor Ahasuerus (known better to historians as Xerxes I ) allows himself to be persuaded by Haman, an influential royal adviser, that the Jews are a disloyal and disobedient minority who ought to be eradicated.

The emperor signs an edict authorizing Haman and his followers "to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all the Jews, both young and old, women and children, in one day."

But the plot is foiled thanks to court intrigues involving Mordechai, the leader of the Jewish community in the imperial city of Shushan, and the audacity of Esther, the young Jewish heroine who wins a beauty contest and becomes Ahasuerus's queen.

In the end, Haman and his followers are killed, and Mordechai is named to replace him as the king's chief adviser.

The Book of Esther is easy to read and understand; it has memorable characters and a plot line filled with high tension and comic relief. But beneath the surface are profound complexities and puzzles — it makes no mention of G od, for example — and over the millennia, Jewish sages and scholars have mined vital insights from its text. From the nature of antisemitism to the fate of Jews in exile to the dangers of bad political leadership, there are depths of meaning to be found in the Book of Esther.

But it isn't only Jews for whom this biblical tale has resonated over time. It has inspired countless Americans as well, and in far more ways than I had realized before reading Esther in America, an eclectic collection of short, informed, and compelling essays edited by Stuart Halpern, a scholar and administrator at Yeshiva University. From New England Puritans in the 17th century to Hollywood's moviemakers in the 20th, the Book of Esther has repeatedly turned up in American rhetoric, art, and politics.

( Buy "Esther in America" In hardcover at a discount! by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a (72% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)

The great American abolitionist and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth, who was born into slavery in 1797, never learned to read or write. But she knew the biblical story of Esther and invoked it in a powerful speech in September 1853, when she addressed the Women's Rights Convention in New York City.

The meeting had been invaded by male hecklers and protesters hostile to women's equality. They loudly booed and hissed when Truth took the floor. Undaunted, she faced down the rabble . She told them she would speak whether they wanted her to or not. After all, hadn't Queen Esther done just that in ancient Persia, when she summoned the courage to enter the royal court without permission — a breach of etiquette so severe that she could have been killed on the spot?

"I was a-thinking, when I see women contending for their rights, I was a-thinking what a difference there is now, and what there was in old times," said Truth.

There was a king in the Scriptures — and then it was the kings of the earth would kill a woman if she come into their presence — but Queen Esther come forth, for she was oppressed, and felt there was a great wrong, and she said I will die or I will bring my complaint before the king. Should the king of the United States be greater, or more crueler, or more harder?

But the king, he raised up his scepter and said: "Thy request shall be granted unto thee — to the half of my kingdom will I grant it to thee!" Then he said he would hang Haman on the gallows he had made up high. But that is not what women come forward to contend. The women want their rights as Esther [did]. She wanted only to explain their rights. And he was so liberal that he said, "the half of my kingdom shall be granted to thee," and did not wait for her to ask, he was so liberal with her.

Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don't get them. When she come to demand them, don't you hear how sons hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask for their rights? Can they ask for anything less? The king ordered Haman to be hung on the gallows which he prepared to hang others; but I do not want any man to be killed, but I am sorry to see them so short-minded. But we'll have our rights; see if we don't. And you can't stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.

Halpern writes that Truth's citation of the ancient Jewish heroine "as a prism through which to view her fight for equal rights was no anomaly. Throughout history, Americans have turned to the Scroll of Esther, the megilla, as they navigated their liberties, morals, passions, and politics." Time and again, Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have found way to reinterpret a narrative "whose themes — freedom, power, fraught sexual dynamics, ethnicity, and peoplehood — continue to define American identity to this day."

In the years preceding the Revolutionary War, as American colonists struggled to accommodate their loyalty to the British crown with the outrages being imposed upon them by His Majesty's Government, the Book of Esther provided a metaphorical opening to denounce the king's policies without speaking ill of George III himself. They did so, as historian Eran Shalev notes in an eye-opening essay ("Haman in the American Revolution"), by blaming those policies on royal advisers who in their wickedness had misled the king.