Purim’s Rattle: A Shared and Divisive Symbol in Catholic and Jewish Traditions

In Christian tradition, wooden rattles emerged by the ninth century during the three days preceding Easter, known as the Triduum, replacing the traditional church bells that were silenced out of respect for the mournful period between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. On village streets, rattles featured loudly in a popular Catholic spring custom where an effigy of Judas is hanged, beaten, burned, and drowned while children twirled their rattles in celebration of the flaming puppet.

In Poland, the period around major Christian Holidays like Easter and Christmas was a dangerous one not only for Judas, but for Jews, who suffered everything from insults and mockery to vandalism and physical attacks at the hands of their Catholic neighbors. Jews appropriated the violence and anti-Semitism contained in the rattle and flipped it around: rather than castigating Judas (and Jews), the Jewish grogger (from the Polish word grzechotać, to rattle) was used to vilify the evil figure of Haman in the book of Esther read on Purim, a holiday occurring near Eastertime, which embodies both Jewish persecution and Jewish fantasies of revenge.

The cases in the spring gallery display at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum (MEK) contain examples of Polish Catholic terkotkas (see photo). The sketch below shows a Jewish grogger/grzechotka drawn for renowned collector Regina Lilientalowa’s 1927 book on Jewish children’s culture, The Jewish Child, held in MEK’s archive.

Looking at the example in the top window, the Christian and Jewish “toys” are almost identical in material, size, and mode of operation. Jewish and Catholic Polish culture are adjoining pieces of a very old puzzle, which bear each other’s contours – sometimes violent ones. Many objects in the museum have their Jewish stories, which are also Polish stories. To know them, we need to learn to ask: more, different, sometimes difficult, questions.

Erica Lehrer
Professor, Concordia University, Montreal
2025
(Based on research by Dr. Alina Cała, Dr. David Zvi Kalman, Dr. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir)

Z języka angielskiego przełożyła dr Aleksandra Kumala.