Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes

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       Between Worlds

      JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

      Published in association with the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

      David B. Ruderman, Series Editor

      Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert David Stern

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       Between Worlds

      Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism

      J. H. Chajes

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia

      Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Koret Jewish Studies Publication Program.

       Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press

       All rights reserved

       Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

       10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       Published by

       University of Pennsylvania Press

       Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Chajes, J.H.

      Between worlds : dybbuks, exorcists, and early modern Judaism / J.H. Chajes.

       p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN: 978-0-8122-2170-1

      1. Dybbuk. 2. Spirit possession. 3. Exorcism. 4. Mysticism—Judaism. 5. Spiritual life—Judaism. 6. Future life—Judaism. I. Title. II. Series.

       BM729.D92C53 2003

       296.3'16—dc21

       2003044763

      To my mother and mother-in-law, Annette Chajes and Karin Fenz, and in memory of my father and father-in-law, Julius Chajes z”l and Professor Emanuel Fenz

Contents
Introduction
1 The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession
2 The Dead and the Possessed
3 The Task of the Exorcist
4 Dybbuk Possession and Women’s Religiosity
5 Skeptics and Storytellers
Arrival
Appendix: Spirit Possession Narratives from Early Modern Jewish Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

       Reb Nachman laughed and said, “If scholars let one dead man step foot into their studies, all their work would be null and void!”

       —Siḥot ha-Ran, §226

       Introduction

      What therefore is the locus that authorizes me, today, to suppose that I can speak the other better than all of them? Lodged like them in knowledge that attempts to understand, with respect to the possessed I am reiterating the position—now with a few variants which must be evaluated—that formerly belonged to the demonologist or the doctor.

       —Michel de Certeau 1

      In the early 1540s, a Jewish boy in the Galilean—and, for nearly a generation, Ottoman—village of Safed, was possessed by the soul of a sinner, a dybbuk.2 Furious that the boy’s father had killed the dog in which he had formerly been lodged, the soul sought vengeance by killing the man’s son. The eminent sage who was called upon to exorcise the spirit, having forced it to speak with threats of excommunication, discovered that there was little he could do but rescue the boy by removing the intruder and banishing him to the wilderness. This he accomplished by intoning a classic Hebrew liturgical formula, though with a magical twist: the rabbi recited the words both forward and backward. More cases were to follow. Safed would again be the locus of possession episodes in the early 1570s, as would, to a less dramatic extent, cities in both Christian and Muslim worlds: Ferrara, Ancona, Pesaro, Venice, Damascus, Prague, Cairo, Tituán, and Turin.

      The possessed Jews of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not alone. Convulsing, tearing off their veils, bleating like sheep, and climbing trees like cats, the nuns of Wertet, in the country of Hoorn, Brabant, were possessed in large numbers in 1550. So too the nuns of Xante, Spain, in 1560. Communities of nuns were overwhelmed by devils in Milan in 1590, in Aixen-Provence in 1611, in Lille in 1613, in Madrid in 1628, and, famously, in Loudun in 1634. Hundreds of accounts report the possession of individuals beyond these monastic communities as well.

      The dramas of spirit possession episodes, macabre and in many cases sexually charged, have long been of interest to historians and lay readers. The fascination of the latter hardly requires explanation; by the sixteenth century, authors of the surviving accounts had realized that their tales would tantalize the reading public. Sharing this affection for colorful narratives, historians have made frequent use of possession accounts, recognizing the extent to which they communicate significant features of early modern culture.


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