Purim Torah is humorous and

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or ...

comments in the learned style of talmudic or halakhic comments customarily read, recited from memory or authored on or for the

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

holiday of

Purim Purim (; , ; see Name below) is a Jewish holiday which commemorates the saving of the Jewish people from Haman, an official of the Achaemenid Empire who was planning to have all of Persia's Jewish subjects killed, as recounted in the Book ...

. Purim Torah can be simple or elaborate.

History

Parodies of Jewish life and the world have been found as early as the twelfth century. In some examples, the boundary between humor and irreverence is very thin. An example of such is the fourteenth century '' Masekhet Purim'' by

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus Kalonymus ben Kalonymus ben Meir (Hebrew: קלונימוס בן קלונימוס), also romanized as Qalonymos ben Qalonymos or Calonym ben Calonym, also known as Maestro Calo (Arles, 1286 – died after 1328) was a Jewish philosopher and transl ...

, condemned by many scholars. Purim Torah authors, often displaying an amazing grasp of Jewish knowledge, playfully use some of the far-fetched methods of Talmudic logic and Biblical exegesis in order to reach absurd conclusions.Websters Online - Purim Torah
/ref> Another popular method is "play on words" where a reasonable word or phrase is purposefully misinterpreted as something absurd that sounds similar. For example the verse in the Megilla that states "Vashti made a feast for the women" sounds similar (in Hebrew) to "Vashti was born of two women".

Ashkenazi Ashkenazi Jews ( ; he, יְהוּדֵי אַשְׁכְּנַז, translit=Yehudei Ashkenaz, ; yi, אַשכּנזישע ייִדן, Ashkenazishe Yidn), also known as Ashkenazic Jews or ''Ashkenazim'',, Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation: , singu ...

culture has a variation of the Purim Torah that is acted out, often with elaborate costumes and is referred to as a Purim Shpiel, from the

Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...

for play.

Talmudic sources

Eliezer Segal points to a passage in the

Talmud The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law ('' halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the ce ...

as the first suggestion of a Purim Torah. In a passage on

Hulin Hulin () is a county-level city on the Muling River in southeastern Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China. With a population of around 200,000, it is under the administration of Jixi. Nearby are Lake Xingkai, to the southwest, the ...

139b, a sage offers up a series of interesting puns in order to find allusions to characters from the Purim story in the

Torah The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the ...

. Others such as Israel Davidson state that while there is humor present in the Talmud, calling any part of it a parody is simply untrue.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Purim Torah Purim Jewish comedy and humor Torah Hebrew words and phrases

History

Talmudic sources

See also

References