Jeremy Rosen
Purim: Fact and Fiction
Summary
Rabbi Jermey Rosen explores the many different layers of Purim and attempts to separate what we do and do not know for certain about this holiday, its origins, and its meaning.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Well, a lot of people say yes because this time of the year is the the Persian New Year. And there is a connection between that, as I suggest before, between Carnival and the period of Lent. So all these things seem to be interconnected and go back a long time indeed. Probably have pagan origins to begin with. But the art of a religion when it comes forward is that it tries to improve on the pagan tradition, but never succeeds actually in eradicating it. And in fact, in let’s say Jewish custom, many of the customs that we have today in the orthodox world are derived from mediaeval, non-Jewish and superstitious sources. So all cultures absorb from other cultures, whether it’s in music or language or pronunciation.