Professor Albert S. Lindemann writes in his book Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust:
Haman offers a more engaging model from a modern standpoint, in part because the Book of Esther leaves God or divine purposes out of the picture. In that book we encounter tribalism, inherited hatred requiring no immediate or palpable cause, as the reason Haman plotted to murder Jews. Still, there is also the fact that Mordecai insulted Haman in a flagrant and apparently unprovoked way — starting things, as it were — and making Haman’s anger understandable. Mordecai’s motives for the insult remain obscure but ostensibly also reflected tribalistic attitudes. Further complicating matters, the Jewish people in the Book of Esther lead a shadowy existence, lacking any notable moral dimensions, any clearly asserted association with the one true god and his superior morality. Haman denounces the difference, and it is not immediately obvious from the bare text why Mordecai and his tribe should be ranked morally above Haman and his or any others in the kingdom. A reader who is innocent of the symbolic significance of the links of Mordecai to Saul and Haman to Amalek might well see the tale as an all too familiar one of two tribes seething with inherited hatred and ready to murder one another on the slightest pretext. Such a reader might even conclude that the Jews, by ostensibly refusing to respect the laws of the state (we are not told which laws are at issue or how they were being disobeyed), were the kind of disloyal or subversive element that any ruler must view with suspicion.
