The Purim Play

[Back on 31 December, I published “Sight & Sound” by my friend Kirk Woodward.  For those who don’t know the post, it’s about the productions of religious spectacles by the titular theater troupe, a Christian company.   When I read the article about a month earlier, one of my responses was:

I had a recurring thought while reading [“Sight & Sound”].  I was wondering, as I read this, what the relation of what you describe here as “religious drama” and the Purim play in a Jewish congregation is.  They don’t seem to be the same, and not only because Purim plays are traditionally performed by children.  (I’ve never seen, nor even heard of, a Purim play given by adults, or even teens.)  The answer, I think, is the evangelism—altho’ I don’t know that all religious theater is intentionally evangelistic.  The Purim play isn’t an inculcation of a religious principle but a (fun) way to teach children the story of Esther and Haman, considered part of Jewish history (even tho’ it may be mythical or legendary in reality).

[I began to think about the Purim play, and even did a little research on it.  A little less than a week later, I wrote Kirk again, telling him:

I’ve just learned that, at least in Eastern Europe, there are Purim plays given by adult “actors,” but they’re usually satirical and comedic (the kids’ plays are usually serious—at least ours were—as far as little kids can be “serious”).  I’ve even read that there are puppet Purim plays by both adults and kids for an audience of children.  I never knew that.  That may also be a European practice.  (Given the breadth of American Jewish culture, it wouldn’t surprise me that there are some of all these variations—and others, like musical performances and performances in Yiddish or even Hebrew—somewhere here.)

[I was intrigued and decided I’d look into the subject more thoroughly.  Below is the result of that self-edification.  I learned a lot I didn’t know—and maybe you will, too. 

[This year, Purim started at sundown yesterday, Wednesday, 20 March, and runs till sundown today, Thursday.  ~Rick]

Purim, also known as the Feast of Lots, is a holiday that commemorates the Jewish peoples’ deliverance from their enemy Haman, royal vizier, a high-ranking political advisor or minister, to the Persian King Ahasuerus in the 5th century B.C.E.  According to the Old Testament Book of Esther, Haman had planned to kill all of the Jews in Persia because Mordechai, a prominent member of the Jewish community, had refused to bow to Haman.  (The alternative name for the holiday, Feast of Lots, comes from the notion that Haman drew lots to determine the date on which he’d carry out his extermination.)  When Queen Esther, who was Jewish and Mordechai’s cousin, told Ahasuerus (probably Xerxes I, aka Xerxes the Great, 519-465 B.C.E.) of Haman’s plot, the king  instead ordered Haman’s execution on the very gallows on which Mordechai was to have been executed.   

The historical truth of the story of Esther is disputed, and many scholars believe that Purim is a palimpsest on a pagan holiday marking the Babylonian New Year.  The holiday was celebrated with “masks, dances, and Mardi Gras shenanigans,” observes humorist and Yiddish lexicologist Leo Rosten.  Both Jews and Babylonians enjoyed this festival of abandon and license when conventional restraints and common pieties were set aside (this would be during the Babylonian Captivity of 597-539 B.C.E.).  Later, when the Jews of the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean) wouldn’t give up this “unseemly deportment,” the rabbis took the colorful story of Esther and Haman and slapped it onto the festival to which they couldn’t put a stop and the celebration of Purim took on the frivolous and profane aspects of the Babylonian festival.  

Rosten contends that “Purim is the closest thing to the carnival in Jewish life.”  As a result, Purim isn’t like the solemn observations Jews conduct at Pesach and Chanukkah; it’s observed with a general eat-drink-and-be-merry approach and even drunkenness.  (The Talmud even admonishes: “One must drink on Purim until that person cannot distinguish between cursing Haman and blessing Mordechai.”)  In Israel today, Purim is one of the most widely celebrated festivals, with costume parties, mummery, masquerading, busking, street fairs, and, in many towns and cities, parades with floats—and drinking.  Think Mardi Gras/Carnival/Fasching or St. Patrick’s Day.

Traditionally, in Jewish congregations around the world, one of the ways in which Purim is marked is the annual recitation in the synagogue of the story of Esther, called the Megillah.  In the Mishniac Era (10-220 C.E.), from which the first mentions of a Purim observance date, the reading of the scroll was formal and solemn.  Later, parody and satire was added to the reading and, as they do today, both children and adults booed and jeered loudly and shook groggers (ratchety noisemakers) whenever Haman’s name was mentioned, and, of course, today everyone munches on hamantaschen, the traditional triangular pastry usually filled with poppy seeds that resembles the distinctive three-cornered hat that Haman is supposed to have worn.  (The hat may, in fact, be apocryphal, but the belief and tradition persists nevertheless.) 

Another tradition at Purim is the Purim play, which grew out of the reading of the Megillah.  Also called a Purimspiel or Purimshpil (from the German Spiel and Yiddish shpil for ‘play,’ as in both an amusement activity or a theatrical presentation), the Purim play is usually a comic dramatization of the story of Haman and Esther, the narrative that describes what transpired on Purim and why it is celebrated as an important Jewish holiday.  Because it’s a comic, often satirical and farcical rendition of the story, with great liberties taken with the plot and characters, it’s not usually performed inside the synagogue, where such levity and low humor is considered vulgar and frivolous, but outdoors in a courtyard or lawn. 

The satiric Purim play is drawn from the so-called Purim Torah, a parody of Talmudic learning and logic that depends a great deal on a travesty of pilpul, the intense disputation used to analyze and interpret the Torah among Talmudic scholars and yeshiva students.  The marshelik, a kind of MC or interlocutor/narrator, specializes in this kind of verbal comedy.  Aside from that, different parts of the Jewish diaspora have different ways of presenting the Purim play.

In the United States, the Purim play is mostly performed by children for one another or for their parents.  When I was a boy, we did our Purim play in our Sabbath school classroom—ostensibly not part of the synagogue itself even though it was the same building—but, of course, ours was a reformed congregation.  (The children’s version, of course, was also less irreverent and not at all profane.  It was a more-or-less straight telling of the story of Esther and Haman, not unlike the children’s nativity plays put on in Christian churches.  It was seen as a lesson about Jews and other persecuted peoples triumphing over their oppressors.)  In other countries, the performers are adults, leading to a more profane and less faithful rendering of the story. 

Another tradition in some European communities is for the play to be performed by puppets, most likely in the style of 19th-century Punch-and-Judy shows.  It appears that the Purim play tradition, in whatever form it takes, is mostly observed today in Ashkenazi (that is, Central and Eastern European) Jewish communities.  (The Sephardim, the Jews of southern Europe and Holland, apparently also stage Purim plays, but from what I’ve gleaned, the impulse seems to have derived from the Ashkenazi tradition.  One oddity: at least some of the performances were in Hebrew rather than Ladino, the language of Sephardi Jewry; that would have been anathema to Ashkenazi Jews who’d never use the liturgical language for a secular purpose.)  Hasidic communities, both in the U.S. and abroad, continue to present elaborate Purim plays (though the vulgarity is severely suppressed).

Historically, the Purim play is considered the “only genuine folk theater that has survived a thousand years in European culture.”  (The European Passion Play dates from around the mid-14th century at its earliest.  Some Asian folk performances that are still enacted are older.)  It bears striking resemblance in many of its iterations to the medieval mystery or morality plays of Europe.  Integrating texts, theater, music, dance, songs, mime, and costumes, the Purim play is considered to be the origin of Yiddish theater.  Avrom (or Abraham) Goldfadn (1840-1908), the “father” of Yiddish theater, acted in Purim plays at his rabbinical seminary in the Ukraine from 1857 to 1866.  (For more about the Yiddish theater, readers are directed to my two-part post, “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” 23 and 26 August 2012.)  The term Purimspiel became common among Ashkenazi Jews as early as the mid-16th century.  (The German word is frequently used even in English because, apparently, it was German Jews who first developed what we recognize as the modern Purim play.) 

There are really two strains of the Purim play: one a religious rendering of the Biblical story (the Akhashveyresh-shpil, or Ahasuerus Play), the other a far more profane version, deviating widely from the Megillah.  From its very beginnings, the performative presentation of the Esther story included a farcical, irreverent, and melodramatic telling of a tale of escape from an existential threat, told with masks and disguises, costumes, songs and dances, pageantry, and mime.  It was and is a story of rejoicing over the defeat of an enemy—and has often, in its adult incarnation, even been accompanied, as I’ve noted, by drunkenness.  As Leo Rosten puts it, “[I]t tells [Jews] that tyrants and fanatics can be defeated.  In a larger sense, it signifies that evil cannot prevail forever.” 

The origins of the play go back to the Levantine Jews of the early centuries of the Christian Era when the east end of the Mediterranean Sea was under first Roman and then Muslim rule.  Jews commemorated the defeat of Haman and their escape from his plot to exterminate them by beating, hanging, and burning him in effigy.  It’s reasonable to assume that this event was accompanied by rejoicing and raucous singing and dancing and probably some spontaneous acting out of episodes from the Megillah.  (In an ironic twist, the Catholic Church of the day reported these celebrations as actual hangings and even crucifixions, thus provoking anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and synagogues.)

The true Purim play, however, didn’t take shape until the Middle Ages in Europe, when the cultural phenomenon of folk theater spread around the continent.  The term Purimspiel or Purimshpil appeared about 1500, according to historians.  This often referred first to dramatic monologues or poetic recitations, which then grew into narrative presentations performed by several actors.  These might be performances of not only the Esther story but other tales from the Hebrew Bible as well as, such as the selling of Joseph and David and Goliath.   

The performers might also add episodes from the Torah and stories inspired by Talmudic commentary.  Like the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the Purim play might also satirize the local figures of authority like the rabbi, cantor, leaders and well-known members of the community.  (During World War II, Purim plays in the Jewish ghettoes of Germany and Nazi-occupied countries frequently portrayed Haman as Hitler.)  In keeping with the rise of minstrelsy in Jewish communities, Purim players borrowed from liturgy, folk traditions, secular Jewish songs, or non-Jewish musical sources.  The plays increasingly presented satirical commentary on economic, political, and social issues and topics of faith and contemporary life. 

The reference to Commedia isn’t entirely accidental.  The Purim players told secular stories as well, borrowing some of them from the Italian folk theater that was popular all over Western Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries.  Often, the stock Commedia characters were blended into the characters of the  Megillah and composites developed: King Ahasuerus might become Pantalone, the foolish old man; Esther, his young queen, might be portrayed as La Signora, the old man’s wife who habitually cuckolded him; and Mordechai might morph into a clownish character like a Zanni, perhaps Brighella.  Jewish folk caricatures like the clown (lets), the fool (nar), and the jester (badkhen) were often added; a master of ceremonies (payats or marshelik) also appeared. 

Commedia, which was improvised and performed in the streets, was topical and often extremely vulgar, and the Purim plays influenced by this form could be sexually suggestive and loaded with double-entendre—so much so that at times, rabbis banned the performance of Purim plays altogether.  The bans never stuck, of course, because Purim had become the one time in the Jewish calendar when irreverence and even vulgarity were tolerated—possibly thanks, first, to the Babylonians and later, to the Renaissance Italians.

Unlike the improvised Commedia performances, Medieval and Renaissance Purim plays were carefully rehearsed.  Performances, often by students or craftsmen, and also by local musicians, dancers, and acrobats, were staged at yeshivas (religious schools) or in the homes of wealthy citizens.  The rehearsals were conducted in secret and the performers, called shpilers (‘players’), wore heavy make-up and costumes (and sometimes masks) to keep their identities hidden.  The troupes, which were restricted to men and boys (again, unlike the Commedia, which included female actors), went from home to home, often trailed by crowds of onlookers, especially children who would climb up to the windows of the houses to see the performances.  The performers were paid after the play in cash or food and would go off somewhere to pool their take and eat while regaling each other by parodying their wealthy patrons.

Of course, the common language of the Purim performances was Yiddish, until modern times when local vernaculars (including Hebrew in Israel, something that would never have been tolerated in earlier eras because Hebrew was the language of faith alone, not daily commerce of any kind) came into common use.  It is partly for this reason that the Purim play is seen as the source of the Yiddish theater that blossomed in the 19th and early 20th century.  It’s not a direct line of descent, but the popularity and increasing secularity of the Purim play led the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to adopt and adapt the form to more expansive themes and purposes.  

The Purim plays, though not improvised like the Commedia dell’Arte scenarios, were not written down but passed on in an oral tradition from generation to generation and from troupe to troupe.  There are no existing texts or scripts of Medieval or Renaissance Purim plays—prepared scripts are available today, however, including on line—but the Yiddish theater has a pantheon of playwrights and dramatists whose works are still performed today and are available in translation.  (Some may remember the 2017 Broadway production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent which was about the 1922-23 Broadway staging of The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, 1880-1957.  God of Vengeance was a play from New York’s Yiddish theater in 1907.)

As Europe modernized and Jews mixed with the dominant culture (despite expulsions, ghettoes, and pogroms), the Purim play took on the characteristics of the local secular theatrical entertainments.  In the mid-17th century in Italy and southern France, for instance, where Commedia dell’Arte was very popular, the Purim play adopted the parodistic grotesqueness of the improvised comedies.  In Germany, by the 18th century, the Purim play became heavily influenced by opera.  In the 20th and 21st centuries, Purim plays have taken on the contemporary culture, adapting pop and rock music and even hip-hop to satirize the current political and social scene, especially within the Jewish community. 

The Purim play grew larger and more elaborate over the decades.  From a brief, small-cast performance in people’s houses, by the 17th century, it became a large production with many performers, music and songs, several acts, and scenery,  The performances were staged in public places, including theaters, and the shpilers charged admission.  The vulgarity and satire remained and even increased and in the 18th century, the civic authorities in some cities banned all Purim plays from being performed on the charge that they violated obscenity laws.  (In some cases, there were also objections that the plays contained anti-Christian content, which was sometimes true, and that they insulted government officials and local royalty.)

There are dozens of contemporary versions and adaptations of the story of Esther, inspired, obviously, by the traditional Purim play.  One, for example, is The Megile of Itsik Manger, a Yiddish musical which débuted in Israel in 1972 and was presented in 2014 by New York City’s Folksbiene (music by Dov Seltzer; book by Shmuel Bunim, Hayim Hefer, Itzik Manger, and Dov Seltzer; lyrics by Shmuel Bunim, Hayim Hefer, Itzik Manger, and Dov Seltzer).  Another popular version is The Megillah According to the Beatles (1999) with book and lyrics by Norman Roth.

[When I was in middle school, we had to write periodic book reports.  The assignments were each for a different type of book: a book on sports (I remember reading about football—the first time I encountered the word gridiron, which I had no idea how to pronounce!—one on history, and so on.  The one assignment I remember specifically was biography.  We had to read and report on a book about a real person.  My first choice was Esther.  I had learned about her in Sabbath school and thought she was an amazing person.  My teacher nixed the idea, though, because there was no proof Esther ever really existed—she wasn’t a historical figure, but a mythical one like Paul Bunyan or King Arthur.  I was very disappointed—and I don’t even remember whom I read about instead.]