The Rite to Be Reckless

On the Perpetration and Interpretation of Purim Violence

Bibliographic Data

ID4375238
AuthorsElliott Horowitz (corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume15
Issue1
Pages9
Publication date1994-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1773202
OpenAlexW2317701185
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited12

This essay deals both with Purim's character over several centuries as a holiday combining ritual reversal, joy, and hostility and with the attempts in nineteenthand twentieth-century scholarship to come to grips with Purim's complex character. The first section, showing how scholars have often been confounded by the tensions between the evidence of past Purim practices they encountered and their own preferences concerning what shape it should take in the present, focuses on historians of recent times and their various depictions of what one of them (Israel Abrahams) called lost Purimjoys. Discussion then shifts to the actual Purim practices that began to appear in early medieval times, focusing on the festival's more violent anti-Christian undertones, before moving on to address the continuation (and even resurgence) of various violent forms of Purim festivity in the early modern era, side by side with efforts to subdue and delegitimize them. The epilogue deals with Purim during the Hitler years and the Holocaust. The emphasis throughout is on the fact that the history of cultural practices cannot be sundered from the history of efforts to reconstruct and understand (or, alternately, to suppress the memory of) those practices

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics) · Hostility · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Political science · Rite · Scholarship · Sociology · The Holocaust · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Social Psychology

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