Royal Flush

by Eliezer Segal

The following scene appears in a crude illustration in a manuscript Hebrew prayer book from early fourteenth-century Germany:

A Jew attired in a crown and regal robes is riding atop a noble steed and carrying the recognizable cone-shaped hat worn by medieval European Jews. Walking before him and holding the horse’s reins is a very unhappy moustached man. 

Of course, these figures are Mordecai and Haman, and the image represents the episode in the Megillah where the villain was commanded to bestow royal honours on his Jewish arch-enemy.

Behind the procession we see a tower, from the top of which emerges the upper body of a lady. In her hands is a vessel, and from that vessel flows a dirty brown liquid that spills onto Haman’s head.

Readers who are familiar with the Talmud’s retelling of the Esther story will recognize the incident that is being portrayed in this illustration. The Talmud says,

As Haman was leading Mordecai along the street of Haman’s residence, he spotted his daughter standing on the roof. She assumed that the one riding must be her father and the one walking before him must be Mordecai. So she picked up a chamber pot and cast it onto her father’s head. But then he gazed upward, and she realized it was her father. She fell from the roof to the ground and died.

Some of the traditional commentators found this scenario very implausible. Thus, the Maharal of Prague objected that even if her intention had been to target Mordecai, the daughter must have realized how difficult it is to aim with precision, and that Haman was almost certain to suffer from collateral splashing of the human waste. We must therefore imagine that the villain was situated at an improbably great distance in front of Mordecai’s steed.  

Similar questions bothered the Ben Ish Hai of Baghdad: Is it really conceivable that a daughter would not recognize her own father’s voice when he was marching through the streets proclaiming loudly, “Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour”? The rabbi was therefore forced to introduce some additional details into the story: as Haman’s route took him through several winding streets to make his announcement, his throat became parched and his voice was altered beyond recognition, even by his daughter. It was also necessary to take additional liberties with the plot in order to explain why she did not identify her father’s face. In his embarrassment at his predicament, Haman deliberately bent his head downwards to avoid visual recognition, so that his daughter did not actually see his face. 

Nor, adds the Ben Ish Hai, could she recognize Mordecai as the figure mounted on the horse. After all, Mordecai had become weakened from three days of continual fasting, rendering him unable to hold his head straight or stand with erect posture. He was bent over and clung with both his arms to the horse’s flanks. It was for these reasons that Haman’s daughter was unable to observe his face clearly from the roof.

Ultimately, Maharal resigned himself to the premise that this kind of incident cannot be subjected to normal standards of rational analysis. It was all part of a divine strategy to bring about Haman’s miserable and humiliating downfall; and the Almighty was perfectly capable of making his daughter disregard the risks attached to her action.  

Rabbi Enoch Zundel Ben Joseph, a prominent nineteenth-century commentator on rabbinic homiletical works, linked this story to a detail found in the Targum (Aramaic translation) of Esther: Haman had entered his daughter in the competition for the new queen of Persia, but she had to withdraw from the pageant when she was supernaturally afflicted with halitosis and repulsive bowel and bladder ailments. Therefore, at the decisive moment when she emptied the chamber pot onto her father’s head, it was filled with particularly disgusting contents. 

The Talmud found an allusion to this incident in the Bible’s precise wording when narrating Haman’s actions following his honouring of Mordecai: “Haman hastened to his house mourning, and having his head covered.” 

This was not the only instance where this motif occurred. The Talmud contains anecdotes about rabbis whose heads were assailed by the discards of careless sweepers and moppers, and they interpreted the mishaps as designed to ensure their humility, citing the words of the Psalmist, “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill.” 

The insulting implications of such acts were similar for the Greek and Roman contemporaries of the talmudic sages.  It was common for crowds to demonstrate their disdain for political opponents by hurling garbage at them in a manner analogous to the modern use of rotten tomatoes. The Athenian orator Demosthenes once prosecuted a drunken soldier who would, among other abuses, empty chamber pots onto his victims. 

Though gags about chamber pots might be expected in bawdy comedies, they even show up in works by serious tragedians. In a lost play by Aeschylus, Odysseus justifies his killing of one of Penelope’s unwelcome suitors by declaring that he “once threw in my direction an object designed to make me a laughing-stock, the evil-smelling chamber pot… wafting over me an odour very unlike that of perfume-jars.” Identical expressions appear in the surviving fragments of a drama by Sophocles when describing a rowdy gathering of brawling Achaean soldiers en route to the Trojan war. 

Vulgar scatological mockery of tyrannical villains like Haman can be an effective means of spiritual resistance. As Mel Brooks said about his crude mockery of the twentieth century’s incarnation of Haman in his movies “To Be or Not to Be” and “The Producers”:

There’s only one way to get even—you have to bring him down with ridicule if you can make people laugh at him, you’re one up on him.

In a similar spirit, this year several Israeli bakeries have been advertising “Sinwar ears” as a replacement for the traditional “Haman’s ears” [hamentaschen].

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