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mission. Jews of Estella engaged in tax farming throughout
the 15th century. The city opened its doors to the exiles from
Aragon and Castile but the Jews in Estella suffered the same
fate, with the rest of those of Navarre, in 1498.
Bibliography: M. Kayserling, Geschichte Portugal, 1 (1861),
index; Baer, Spain, index; Baer, Urkunden, index; Cantera-Millás,
Inscripciones, 291–2. Add. Bibliography: J. Carrasco Pérez, in:
MEAH, 30:2 (1981), 109–20; idem, in: En la España medieval, 2–3; Estudios
en memoria del Profesor D. Salvador de Moxó, vol. I (1982),
275–95; B. Leroy, in: Archives Juives, 17:1 (1981), 1–6.
[Haim Beinart / Yom Tov Assis (2nd ed.)]
ESTERKE, Jewish woman from the village of Opoczno, Poland,
said to have been a mistress of the Polish King *Casimir
the Great (1310–1370). Reports claim that her outstanding
beauty caught the king’s eye while he was passing through
her town. Her two sons, Pelka and Niemera, were given grants
of land from their father and were raised as Christians. The
names of her daughter (or daughters) were never recorded,
but with the king’s approval, they supposedly remained Jewish.
Alternate endings to Esterke’s story include the king’s severing
his relationship with her; Esterke’s death while they are
still together; and Esterke’s suicide either immediately after
the king’s death or several years later. Although a house in
Opoczno was designated as her family home, and her grave
was believed to be in Lobzow Park, near Cracow, there is no
historical basis for any of the Esterke legends, and there is no
mention of her either in court documents or in Jewish sources.
Written mention of Esterke appears in the late 15th century in
a history by Polish cleric Jan Dlugosz (1415–1480). The first
Jewish source to mention Esterke is Ẓemaḥ David by David
Gans, written in 1595. Gans believed in the historicity of the
report and gave a Christian source for it. The relationship of
Esterke and Casimir, with its obvious parallel to the Book of
Esther, was appealing; the theme was used by Jewish writers
as late as the 19th century. Versions of Esterke’s story in Polish
antisemitic literature attempted to undermine customary Jewish
privileges granted to Jews by King *Boleslav V (1221–1279)
and continued by King Casimir, suggesting that they were
promulgated to please a lover rather than for the good of the
nation. A 16th-century priest alluded to Esterke in his book
Jewish Cruelties, claiming that her “gentle words induced him
[Casimir] to devise by scheme this loathsome law under the
name of the Prince Boleslav.…” Such negative allusions to Esterke
continued in Christian writings until the 19th century;
the belief that this Jewish woman actively interceded for her
people gave Casimir the nickname “the Polish Ahasuarus.”
Despite confirmations by modern historians that Esterke is
best regarded as an example of a literary trope of the seductive
Jewish woman, popular from the early Middle Ages, and
despite the fact that her name was used to further antisemitic
claims, her sentimental appeal persists among Jews.
Bibliography: E. Aizenberg, “Una Judia Muy Fermosa: The
Jewess as Sex Object in Medieval Spanish Literature and Lore,” in: La
Corónica, 12 (Spring 1984), 187–94; Ch. Shmeruk, The Esterke Story
esther
in Yiddish and Polish Literature (1985); E. Taitz, S. Henry, and C.I.
Tallan (eds.), The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E.–1900 C.E.
(2003), 84.
[Emily Taitz (2nd ed.)]
ESTERMANN, IMMANUEL (1900–1973), U.S. physicist. Estermann,
born in Berlin, was educated and worked at Hamburg
University until 1933 when he immigrated to the U.S.A.
For the next 20 years he was professor at the Carnegie Institute
of Technology, and a consultant on the Manhattan
(atomic bomb) Project. From 1951 he was with the Office of
Naval Research, and in 1959 became its scientific director in
London. From 1964 onward he had a visiting professorship at
the Technion in Haifa. Estermann’s main fields of work were
on molecular beams, low temperatures, solid state physics,
and semiconductors. Among his books was Recent Research
in Molecular Beams (1959). He edited Methods of Experimental
Physics (vol. 1, 1959) and coedited Advances in Atomic and
Molecular Physics (3 vols., 1965–68).
[Samuel Aaron Miller]
ESTEVENS, DAVID (born before 1670–died after 1715), Jewish
artist of Spanish (Marrano) origin. He lived in Denmark,
studying in Copenhagen under the French artist Jacques
d’Agar; he also spent some time in England. His best-known
work is a portrait executed in London of Rabbi David *Nieto
which was afterward engraved by James McArdell (1727). He
may also have been the artist of the well-known portrait of
Ẓevi Hirsch *Ashkenazi (the Ḥakham Ẓevi).
Bibliography: F. Landsberger, in: HUCA, 16 (1941), 387–8.
[Cecil Roth]
ESTHER (Heb. רתְ ֵּסֶ
א), daughter of Abihail, an exile at *Susa,
and heroine of the Book of Esther. The name Esther is probably
from Old Persian star (well attested in the later Persian
dialects), with the same meaning as English “star.” She is once
called Hadassah (Esth. 2:7), a testimony to the practice of Jews
having double names, as do the heroes in *Daniel. She was
orphaned as a child, and her cousin *Mordecai adopted her
and brought her up.
When Queen *Vashti fell into disgrace because of her disobedience
to King *Ahasuerus, Esther was among the beautiful
virgins chosen to be presented to the king (1:19–2:8). Ahasuerus
was struck by her beauty, and made her queen instead
of Vashti (2:17). Esther, however, did not reveal the fact that
she was a Jew.
Later, when *Haman, the prime minister, persuaded the
king to issue an edict of extermination of all the Jews of the
empire, Esther, on Mordecai’s advice, endangered her own
life by appearing before the king without being invited, in order
to intercede for her people (4:16–17). Seeing that the king
was well disposed toward her, she invited him and Haman to
a private banquet, during which she did not reveal her desire,
however, but invited them to another banquet, thus misleading
Haman by making him think that he was in the queen’s
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