Counter-hagiography and counter-biography besmirch foundational figures held dear by different religious, political, or social groups. Such phenomena figure prominently in the history of religion or of conflicts. For example, what we know of the Mazdakite revolution in pre-Islamic Iran/Iraq comes from revilers. The anti-Judaic polemicist from ninth-century Afghanistan and Iraq, (“Snake”), was actually called (still a name among Iraqi Jews). The reputation of the great Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) thinker Moses Mendelssohn) was damaged among the Orthodox by how Haskalah (“Maskilic”) extremists portrayed him in their image. Maskilic Czarist censors disfavored Jewish mystical literature. The mystical diary of Haim Vital (1543–1620) imagined the afterlife of some founders of religions. In 1869, a Genoan politician, Cesare Cabella, fulminated against Esther and Mordecai. In the  in rabbinic homiletics, Jews parodized hostile representations of their sacred history. Gerson Rosenzweig parroted in his 1892 talmudic-style anti-immigrant rhetoric from New York newspapers. Roman-age rabbis responded to claims about the protagonist of the Book of Joshua, “Joshua the Robber” as per a North African inscription early Byzantine Procopius of Caesarea alleged to have seen.weiterlesen