Belated, but: I’ve been catching references to the “Chapter 9 Project,” which seems to have become linked by some pundits to a modern blood libel, accusations of genocide committed by Jewish Israelis against Palestinians in Gaza.
I respect many aspects of the more progressive denominations of Ashkenazi Judaism, but this project and the association that has developed between it and the recent war in Gaza seems extraordinarily vapid. (And no, Prof. Leibowitz doesn’t get a pass on promoting the basis for this weird reading, back in his day.)
The Persian Empire, under the reign of Xerxes, contained some 49 million people. Chapter 9 of the book of Esther records that the Jewish people killed some 75,000 people across 127 countries, people who themselves were not targeted for elimination but killed (in self-defense) by the actual targets for elimination by an actual governmental edict. For those who are as bad at math as I am, 75,000 is far less than 1% of an imperial population of 49 million. That is not genocide.
On a completely unrelated note – and it should be stressed how unrelated this point is, and how laborious and contrived its linkage is to the above – while no confirmed number exists, higher estimates suggest that some 48,000 Gazans have died over the past 1.5+ years of this misbegotten war, out of a population of just over 2 million. That’s roughly 2.5% of the population – a much greater percentage than that of the Persian Empire above, but still not nearly a genocide.
For a frame of reference, 60% of Europe’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust and 77% of the Tutsi population was killed in the Rwandan genocide.
Just Say No To Propaganda, People