Guest Post: They Tried to Kill Us

Five ways the Jews have survived, and which are still open to us

Oct 7, 2026

Every year at Purim we read the Book of Esther aloud, and every year we boo Haman until our throats are raw. It can be read as a children's story with a happy ending, and we often tell it as comedy with everyone dressed up. But strip away the costumes and the noisemakers and you are left with something colder: a people marked for annihilation, saved only because one of their own happened to sleep beside the king.

Esther defeated Haman and saved the Jews of Persia with access, courage, and influence. It is worth asking, as antisemitism climbs again in the diaspora countries we have come to call home, whether we have an Esther anywhere near a palace today and, if not, where that leaves us.

We have a joke to describe just about all our festivals: “they tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat”. It’s funny because it’s true, and it is dangerous if we focus too much on the eating part and don’t stop to examine how survival actually manifests.

If we read our calendar not as liturgy but as a field manual, a pattern emerges. Across three thousand years of attempted annihilation, Jews have survived in roughly five ways: through the courtier, the insider who bends the ear of power; the fighter, who refuses to yield; by fortune, the improbable turn that saves a people who could not save themselves and who some attribute to God; by keeping our heads down, practising in secret; and we have survived by leaving.

Each of these has a festival, or a fast attached to it and each is part of our shared memory from modern times as well as ancient. Each worked, sometimes. Each failed, sometimes. The question for Jews in the 2020s is not which of these we admire. It is which of them are still available to us and which we should choose.

The courtier, and the arithmetic

The courtier is the oldest Jewish survival strategy, and the one we romanticise most. Joseph rose to run Pharaoh's granaries. Nehemiah poured wine for the Persian king and walked away with permission to rebuild Jerusalem. Mordechai sat at the king's gate and overheard the plot that would later save him. In early modern Europe, the court Jews financed princes' wars and, in exchange, bought their communities some breathing room.

Notice what these stories have in common. The protection was never collective. It ran through one person, and it lasted exactly as long as that person kept their place. Joseph died, and a new Pharaoh arose who knew him not. Joseph Süss Oppenheimer ran the finances of Württemberg until his duke died suddenly; within a year he was hanged in a cage. The courtier's power is borrowed, and the lender can call in the loan.

There is a reason Jewish influence has always run through individuals rather than through votes, and we should say it plainly. There are not many of us. World Jewry numbers roughly fifteen million, about one in every five hundred people on earth. In Britain we are well under one percent of the population; in France, under one percent; in the United States, perhaps two. In New Zealand you could seat the community in a mid-sized stadium. No democratic politician needs our votes to win. Some will calculate, correctly, that they can win without them, and some that they can win by standing against us, for our enemies are much more numerous.

That is not a complaint. It is realpolitik, and the worst thing a small people can do is fool itself about its own size. A minority that cannot swing elections survives in a democracy on the goodwill of the majority, or through individuals placed close enough to power to remind that majority of its own principles.

So: where are the courtiers now? There are Jews in Western parliaments and cabinets, and in newsrooms and university councils. But proximity is not the same thing as Esther's role. Esther hid who she was, and then, at the moment it mattered, risked everything by revealing it. Esther was also a woman of strong principle and put community ahead of herself. The question is not whether there are Jews near power. It is whether there is anyone near power, Jewish or not, who will walk into the king's chamber uninvited when the decree comes down and stand up for our tiny tribe. If the honest answer is no, then this option, the one we have leaned on most, is off the table.

The fighter

The Maccabees had no friend in Antiochus's court and did not want one. They took to the hills, fought a guerrilla war against an empire, and kept fighting long after any sensible person would have negotiated. On Hanukkah we light candles and eat donuts for the oil, but the story underneath is about a small, stubborn force that would not stop.

The fighter's record is mixed, and we should not pretend otherwise. Bar Kokhba fought Rome with the same conviction and brought down a catastrophe that emptied Judea. Masada is a story of defiance, but it ends with everyone dead. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising saved almost no one and redeemed something that cannot be measured. Fighting is not a guarantee. It is a refusal.

And yet the twentieth century gave the fighter something it had not had for two thousand years: a state. Israel is the Maccabean option made permanent. It has been at war, in one form or another, for its entire existence, and its posture has been consistently unyielding. That posture has produced results. The Abraham Accords did not come about because Israel made itself smaller or softer. They came about, in large part, because Gulf states concluded that Israel was strong, durable, and worth aligning with. In the Middle East, strength is a language everyone speaks.

Fortune

Go back to Esther, because there is a second story hiding inside the first. God is never mentioned in the Book of Esther, not once. What drives the plot instead is happenstance. The king cannot sleep, so he has the court chronicles read to him, and they happen to fall open at the page where Mordechai foiled an assassination. Haman happens to arrive at that moment to ask for Mordechai's execution. The festival itself is named for the purim, the lots Haman cast to pick the date of the slaughter. The whole book is about the dice.

The book itself calls this venahafoch hu, the great reversal, and we celebrate it by getting so drunk we cannot tell Haman from Mordechai. That is not an accident either. Fortune is indifferent. It does not distinguish the deserving from the undeserving, and it cannot be planned for.

Jewish history is full of luck: the storm, the border guard who looked away, the visa that came through a week before the borders closed. But every survivor's story of luck sits on top of a far larger silence of people whose luck ran out. Fortune is real, and it has saved us more than once, but it’s not a strategy.

Heads down

There is no festival for the fourth way, which is fitting, because its whole point is not to be noticed. But it has a liturgy. Tradition links the solemn annulment of vows in Kol Nidre to the conversos of Spain and Portugal: Jews forced to the baptismal font who went on lighting candles behind closed shutters on Friday nights. Whether or not the link is historical, the instinct behind it is real. The Jews of Mashhad, forcibly converted in 1839, lived publicly as Muslims and privately as Jews for a century. Soviet Jews kept a kind of Judaism alive in kitchens for seventy years.

This strategy is quieter than fighting and less glamorous than the courtiers, and it has kept more Jews alive over the centuries than either. It asks for no army and no access. It asks only for patience, and for the willingness to be invisible.

Its costs are the slowest. The secret Jew pays in a currency of erosion. After a few generations the candles are still lit but few may remember why. Many converso families simply dissolved into the majority. And invisibility does not guarantee safety: the Inquisition went looking for the hidden ones precisely because they were hidden, and Spain's purity-of-blood statutes followed converts' grandchildren for generations.

It is worth noticing that many Western Jews are already choosing this option without naming it. The mezuzah moves inside the doorframe. The kippah goes under a baseball cap. Children are told not to mention where they go on Saturday mornings. Nobody announces the decision. It simply happens, one small concealment at a time.

Flight

Passover is the great festival of leaving. We do not defeat Pharaoh, and we do not win him over. We go. We eat the bread before it rises because there is no time to wait, and every year we end the Seder with the promise of next year in Jerusalem, a promise to leave wherever we ended up and return to indigenous lands.

Flight is the strategy Jews have used most and talk about least, perhaps because it looks too much like defeat. But the record is clear. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who made it to the Ottoman Empire built communities that lasted four centuries. The German Jews who left in 1933 and 1934, often mocked by their neighbours for overreacting, mostly lived. Many of those who waited for things to settle down did not.

The lesson of the 1930s is not only that leaving early is better than leaving late. It is that flight requires a destination. In 1938, at Évian, thirty-two nations met to discuss the Jewish refugees of Germany and Austria, and almost all of them found reasons to take none. That door, shut then, is now open. For the first time since the Exodus, Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland provides a home.

Which is why the movement of Western Jews to Israel, from France especially in recent years, should be read as flight. It is also something more. A Jew who leaves Marseille for Netanya is fleeing one place and joining the fighter in another. Aliyah is where the fifth strategy and the second meet. That is its strength. Its cost is everything left behind: the communities, the cemeteries, the centuries of Jewish life in places we had every right to call home, and the Jews who cannot or will not leave.

Reading the hour

Lay the five side by side and the menu facing Western Jews looks shorter than we might like.

Way	Where we tell it	What it asks	What it costs	Open to us now?
The courtier	Purim; Joseph; the court Jews	Someone inside the palace	Protection ends when the patron does	Only if we can name the Esthers
The fighter	Hanukkah; the Maccabees	A refusal to yield, and an army	Bar Kokhba; Masada	Yes, in Israel
Fortune	Purim’s lots; the great reversal	Nothing	Everyone whose luck ran out	Never a plan
Heads down	Kol Nidre; the conversos	Patience and invisibility	Slow erosion, then disappearance	Already happening, unannounced
Flight	Passover; 1492; the 1930s	A destination, and the will to go	Everything left behind	Yes, and for the first time with somewhere to go

The courtier option depends on people we may not have. Fortune is not a plan. Keeping our heads down is a strategy whose success looks, after a few generations, exactly like failure. That leaves the fighter and flight, and in the twenty-first century they share an address.

This is not an argument that every Jew in London or Sydney or Auckland should pack tonight. It is an argument against drifting. The Jews who fared worst in our history were rarely the ones who chose the wrong strategy. They were the ones who never chose at all, who assumed the old arrangements would hold because they always had. The courtier option, if it is gone, can be rebuilt, but only by people who first admit that it is gone and then by those willing to get involved.

Mordechai's message to Esther, when she hesitated, was not a promise but a question: who knows whether you have come to this position for just such a time as this? Each generation of Jews has had to answer some version of it, and to read its own hour clearly enough to know which of the old ways that hour demands.

They tried to kill us. We survived. Before we eat, we should remember how.