Haman and the Antisemitic Fantasy

Zach Truboff

There is a well-known Jewish joke, set in Berlin in 1935. A rabbi is sitting in his office reading Der Stürmer, the Nazi propaganda sheet. His secretary is appalled. “Rabbi, how can you read that filth? Are you a masochist? A self-hating Jew?” The rabbi puts down the paper and smiles. “On the contrary. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know, it makes me feel a whole lot better.”

Since October 7, one has had a similar experience when scrolling through social media, where one now finds no end to antisemitic rhetoric and memes. Jews are accused of controlling politicians, silencing critics, determining what gets covered by the media, running the economy, and, of course, even the weather. The German rabbi in 1935 would recognize the structure instantly. The content has changed as “Zionist” has replaced “Jew” and “the lobby” has replaced “the banks.” But the underlying fantasy is identical. And if we want to understand its enduring power, why it returns again and again with such irrational intensity, we would do well to return to Megillat Esther, a text that depicts the psychic architecture of antisemitism with an almost clinical precision.

This is perhaps unsurprising, as the Megillah is arguably the most familiar book of the Tanakh for contemporary diaspora Jews. It takes place outside the Land of Israel, in exile. God’s name does not appear. Its Jews bear Persian names, attend Persian feasts, and are largely indistinguishable from their neighbors. It depicts a world American Jews easily recognize: a multiethnic empire, assimilation, and a genocidal hatred that emerges not from theological conviction but from something far more elemental. When Haman makes his case for the annihilation of the Jews, his arguments are devastatingly familiar: Jews are everywhere, they are different, they are disloyal, and they have no regard for the king’s law. Therefore, the king has nothing to gain by keeping them around (Esther 3:8). These are the arguments of every moment in modern history when Jewish belonging was called into question. But what makes the Megillah remarkable is not the depiction of antisemitic propaganda but its unflinching portrayal of the fantasy that drives it.

Haman’s Rage

Haman’s hatred begins simply enough. Ahashveirosh elevates Haman above all his ministers and commands that everyone at the king’s gate bow before him. As the story of the Megillah unfolds, it becomes clear that Haman is a man consumed by power, and the act of prostration is what he requires of others to confirm his own greatness. This is not a polite bow of acknowledgment. It is total self-abasement.

Mordechai, of course, refuses, and the reason he gives, when pressed by the other servants at the gate, is simply: because he is a Jew (Yehudi) (Ibid. 3:4). We are not told precisely why being a Jew prevents him from bowing. The Megillah leaves this deliberately opaque. What matters is that Mordechai’s refusal to bow is intolerable to Haman. Although initially unaware, upon seeing it for himself, Haman is filled not only with anger but also with a burning, all-consuming rage (heimah) that overtakes his entire body (Ibid. 3:5). It is out of this fury that the irrational leap occurs. Killing Mordechai alone is not enough for him. Instead, he seeks to destroy all the Jews throughout the kingdom. One man’s refusal to bow becomes a warrant for genocide.

Why, though? What could produce a rage so disproportionate that a single slight transforms into a desire for total annihilation? The Megillah answers this question with extraordinary psychological insight in the fifth chapter. Esther invites both Ahashveirosh and Haman to a private banquet, an invitation that fills Haman with elation, since being close to the king is the ultimate confirmation of his power. Haman leaves the palace in a state of euphoria: happy and good of heart (sameiah ve-tov lev) (Ibid. 5:9). And then, at the king’s gate, he sees Mordechai, who refuses to bow once more. Instantly, Haman’s euphoria collapses, and in its place, returns the same burning rage (heimah) at precisely the moment that should have been his greatest happiness.

What follows is one of the most psychologically revealing passages in all of Tanakh. Haman goes home and gathers his family and friends. He recounts all his achievements, his wealth, his many sons, his elevation above every minister, and above all, his exclusive invitation to dine privately with the king and queen. In many ways, this is the fulfillment of every narcissist’s fantasy. To have one’s greatness recognized while achieving proximity to power. And then comes his devastating admission: “All of this is worth nothing to me every time I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate” (Ibid. 5:13).

Rid, a medieval commentator, makes a crucial observation about this verse. When Haman says, “All of this is worth nothing to me,” what he really means is that he cannot enjoy all the good things in his life. Haman possesses everything a person in his position could desire, and yet he cannot experience pleasure in any of it, because Mordechai exists. Mordechai’s mere presence makes enjoyment impossible for Haman, as though his very capacity for enjoyment has been stolen. And yet, in the very next moment, the Megillah reveals what Haman can enjoy.

When Haman’s wife Zeresh and his friends propose building a gallows for Mordechai, the text says, “the thing was good in Haman’s eyes” (Ibid. 5:14). Haman could take no pleasure in his wealth, his sons, or his invitation to the queen’s banquet, but is now suddenly happy. Not because he has suddenly fulfilled his deepest desire, but because his hatred has become his primary source of enjoyment, more reliable than anything his power and status could provide.

Lack and Fantasy

To understand how a single man’s refusal to bow becomes a warrant for genocide, we need to understand a structure that psychoanalysis, particularly the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his interpreters, has mapped with considerable precision. The structure is built on two interlocking concepts: lack and fantasy.^[1]

Lack comes first. For Lacan, human beings are creatures of desire. We are finite creatures, perpetually reaching for something that would make us whole, whether it be more power, more recognition, or more love, and the reaching never ends, because the lack it aims to fill is not something that can ever be resolved. It is constitutive. It belongs to the structure of being human. No achievement, no accumulation of wealth or status, ever delivers the total satisfaction we imagine it should. This is the universal condition, and it is unbearable. Not because we suffer from some unusual affliction, but because human beings are built to want more than existence can provide.

And so we fantasize. Not in the colloquial sense of idle daydreaming, but in a precise psychoanalytic sense. We unconsciously construct a scenario that explains how our lack could be filled. And what fantasy promises is never modest. It does not just offer a slightly better life or a marginal improvement. Fantasy promises complete satisfaction, absolute wholeness. This is what makes fantasy so powerful and so dangerous: it’s always excessive. We become libidinally invested in our fantasies precisely because they offer the impossible, and the impossible is intoxicating.

But if fantasy is impossible and can’t actually deliver on its promises, where does that leave the one who holds fast to it? The answer is that there must be an obstacle, a scapegoat, that prevents its fulfillment. What this means is that we, as individuals and collectives, continuously identify obstacles to our deepest fantasies and blame them for preventing us from achieving the enjoyment we so righteously deserve. We blame the teacher who told us we weren’t good enough, and whose voice we still hear every time we fail, the ex-spouse whose betrayal is the reason we can’t love again, or the parent whose insensitivity is the reason we can’t trust anyone. Nations do the same: if only the immigrants weren’t here, if only the elites hadn’t sold us out, if only the other party hadn’t ruined everything, we would finally have what is rightfully ours and the country we deserve. And here is what makes the structure so intractable: the resentment itself becomes a source of enjoyment, which organizes our world, gives it meaning, and provides a dark but reliable pleasure that the fantasy never could. We may tell ourselves we want the obstacle removed, but what we really want is nothing more than to enjoy our hatred for the one who embodies it.

This is the logic of Haman. He is the second most powerful man in the Persian Empire. He has wealth, sons, proximity to the king, and public recognition. And yet he cannot enjoy any of it. Not because there is something wrong with these things, but because enjoyment, in its fullness, was never available to him or to anyone. What Haman does instead is locate the source of his dissatisfaction in a single figure, Mordechai, and then, by extension, in all the Jews. They are the ones who have stolen his enjoyment. If he can eliminate them, he will finally be able to fulfill his fantasy and feel whole. And as the Megillah has already shown us, the project of elimination is itself deeply satisfying, more satisfying, in fact, than anything Haman’s power ever provided. His hatred of Mordechai has become the most dependable enjoyment he has.

The Jew Who Stole Germany

Whereas premodern antisemitism, typically fueled by Christian theology, was often about keeping the Jews in a subordinate position within European society, modern antisemitism is different. Rather than seeing the Jews as lesser than Christians for having refused conversion, modern antisemitism tends to envision the Jews as superior and far more powerful than their Gentile neighbors, and, crucially, as whatever form of power most threatens the antisemite. For the worker, the Jew is the capitalist who profits from his labor. For the nationalist, the Jew is the cosmopolitan who dissolves his people’s bonds. The Jew can be accused of being both at once, because the accusation was never about what the Jew actually is. It is about what the fantasy requires him to be.

Nazism took this fantasy to its furthest extreme. In a speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, years before his rise to absolute power, Hitler laid out the structure of the Nazi antisemitic fantasy that would eventually capture Germany. Germany had entered World War I with imperial ambitions and exited it humiliated, buried in debt, forced to pay reparations. The nation’s fantasy, its sense of greatness and world-historical destiny, had been shattered. Hitler’s explanation for why this had happened was simple: the Jews had stolen it. He pointed to the banks, the stock exchanges, the international finance system, and declared that Jewish capital had profited from Germany’s collapse. “If we ask who is responsible for our misfortune,” he said, “then we must inquire who profited by our collapse.”^[2]

But the financial accusation was only the beginning. In the same speech, Hitler argued that the Jew had deliberately corrupted Germany’s political life by imposing democracy, a system he called “fundamentally not German” but “Jewish,” through which Jewish manipulation of public opinion prevented authentic German leadership from ever emerging. And more fundamentally still, Hitler accused the Jews of fracturing the unity of the German nation itself, of “divorcing the social idea from the national,” so that the organic wholeness of the German people, the workers and intellectuals, could never coalesce. The Jew, in this fantasy, was not merely a thief. He dissolved the very bonds through which a people could experience collective satisfaction.

The structure is unmistakable, and it maps precisely onto Haman’s logic: the Jew does not merely possess what Germany lacks. The Jew prevents Germany from becoming what it should be. He blocks national unity and corrupts political life. As long as the Jew exists, the fantasy insists, Germany can never achieve the wholeness it was destined for. This is Haman at the king’s gate: Mordechai’s existence makes everything I have worthless.

And like Haman recounting his grievances to a rapt audience of family and friends, the Nazi rally was above all an exercise in the collective enjoyment of hatred. One need only watch footage of Hitler’s speeches to see it: the flushed faces, the thunderous applause, the almost ecstatic release that swept through the crowd as the Jew was named to be the enemy and condemned. This was not about a group reluctantly accepting a grim political analysis about the difficulties faced by Germany. It was about a group experiencing the deep pleasure of shared hatred — the satisfaction of finally knowing who was to blame. The rally, like Haman’s gathering at home, was where the antisemitic fantasy was performed, refined, and enjoyed together.

The Jew Who Stole America

What is striking about the present moment is that the antisemitic fantasy has returned simultaneously on both the political right and left, each arriving at the same destination: the Jew is the obstacle that prevents people from enjoying America. The antisemitic fantasy was not born on October 7. It was already brewing underneath the surface after pressure from decades of compounding dissatisfaction. What the war did was provide the object.

The right’s fantasy is that America would be great again if the Jew hadn’t stolen it. Jewish donors and lobbyists capture American politicians, ensuring that American wealth and military power serve Israel rather than Americans. Jews in media and finance shape narrative and policy from within. The dual loyalty accusation means the nation can never belong to its people so long as Jews are among them. And at its deepest level, the fantasy reaches for the great replacement: Jews as architects of demographic transformation, engineering the dissolution of the very people to whom the country belongs. The Jew does not merely corrupt the real America. The Jew is replacing it.

The left’s fantasy is an America that finally serves as a vehicle for justice, and it is Israel that stands in the way. Zionist donors silence politicians who might otherwise speak freely. Zionist influence in media and academia polices what can be said, who can teach, and which narratives are legitimate. The Zionist lobby makes sure American bombs continue to be dropped on Palestinian civilians. Chants such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are not merely slogans. They express a deeper conviction that the elimination of Israel would unblock the moral universe, for Israel is the keystone holding the entire corrupt structure in place — settler colonialism distilled to its purest form, where imperialism, white supremacy, and militarized violence converge. Understand Zionism, and you understand why America is broken. Dismantle it, and you strike at the root. A just world is possible. Israel prevents it.

In both cases, the structure is Haman’s. If the Jew or the Jewish State is removed, everything falls into place. And as anyone who has spent time on social media can attest, what animates this resurgence is not sober political analysis but the unmistakable enjoyment of shared hatred, as can be seen in the countless memes, the conspiracy theories, and the gleeful connecting of the dots. The antisemite today enjoys his antisemitism, just as Hitler and Haman did before him.

What Jews Know

If the analysis of antisemitic fantasy offered here is correct, then one of the most common Jewish responses to antisemitism — education and explanation, what in Israeli parlance is called “hasbara” — misses the problem entirely. The impulse is understandable: if people hate Jews because they believe false things about them, then correcting the falsehoods should dissolve the hatred. But as Freud observed, knowledge about the unconscious has as much influence “as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger.”^[3] The antisemite is not suffering from a lack of information. He is suffering from a lack he cannot name, and the fantasy that the Jew is its cause provides him with an enemy whose elimination promises wholeness. In the meantime, the antisemite can enjoy their antisemitism, which offers the dark but unmistakable enjoyment of knowing exactly who to blame. The sad truth is that no adjustment in Jewish behavior, whether it means becoming less or more visible or powerful, will eliminate a hatred whose source lies in the unconscious of the one who hates.

None of this, of course, denies the reality or severity of antisemitism. But psychoanalysis also seeks to turn the question inward as well.  Jews often have their own fantasy of wholeness that is structurally similar, in which it is not the Jews but antisemitism that is the obstacle. The modern Jewish world was built on two promises. Liberal democracy promised that Jews could be safe as equal citizens in a pluralistic society. Jewish sovereignty promised that Jews could be safe by having a state of their own. Between the two, the Jewish problem, the perennial vulnerability of Jewish existence, was supposed to be solved. And yet neither has delivered quite as expected. American Jews watch antisemitism surge on campuses, in politics, and in the streets. Israeli Jews experienced the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Antisemitism is real, and it is not the invention of Jewish paranoia. But the fantasy is that antisemitism explains everything, that it is the sole reason liberal democracy has not kept its promise to Jews, and the sole reason Jewish sovereignty has not delivered the security it was meant to provide. If only the campuses weren’t hostile, if only the media weren’t biased, if only the UN weren’t captured, if only the Arabs weren’t fueled only by hate, Israel would be recognized and accepted. If only the right didn’t elect demagogues and embrace racist ideas, then Jews would have a place in America and Israel and enjoy the security they were promised. What the fantasy screens out is that both liberal democracy and Jewish sovereignty have generated problems of their own, that liberal democracy is failing not only Jews but many of its citizens, and that Jewish sovereignty has produced moral and political dilemmas that no defeat of antisemitism will resolve.

Jews have long known that no state or political arrangement, nor defeat of any enemy, will deliver our most deeply held desires to be safe and secure. The Megillah itself makes that clear. After the greatest victory the Jewish people have ever known, when genocide had been averted and their enemies totally defeated, the rabbis still did not institute the practice of reciting Hallel on Purim. This seems particularly strange, given that we recite it on Pesach for having been liberated from slavery. All the more so, we should then say it when saved from certain death. The Gemara explains that the reason is simple. The Jews of the Megillah begin as subjects of Ahashveirosh and end as subjects of Ahashveirosh (Megillah 14a). The enemy is defeated, but exile remains. And yet, Purim is still celebrated, not with Hallel, the song of a fully redeemed people, but with gratitude nonetheless. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the hero of the Megillah is known as Mordechai ha-Yehudi — the Jew, for the name Yehudi itself contains the answer to how a people can celebrate even when their deepest desire remains unfulfilled.

The Gemara teaches that until Leah named her son Yehudah (an expression of gratitude to God), no one in human history had ever expressed true gratitude (Berakhot 7b). Before then, the names she had given her older sons all reflected the hope that Jacob would finally love her, but by the fourth, something had changed. Leah still does not have her husband’s love, but her gratitude to God is real. Knowing our lack can’t be filled need not prevent us from enjoying what we have, and to be a Jew means orienting toward the world in a similar fashion, antisemitism and all.

On most days, we hold fast to our fantasies, because we need them to help make sense of a scary world. But once a year on Purim, when we have had a few drinks and can embrace the absurdity of our existence, perhaps we can look at things a bit differently, as the German rabbi once did when he was reading Der Stürmer. We can open up Twitter or TikTok and have a good laugh.

[1] See Slavoj Žižek, “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!,” in Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Duke University Press, 1993).

[2] Adolf Hitler, “Speech of April 12, 1922, Munich,” in The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, ed. and trans. Norman H. Baynes, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1942), vol. 1, 6.

[3] Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis” (1910), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. XI, 225.