Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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the maggid made its presence known through speech. The literature on ‘ibbur, however, indicates that the visiting soul generally remained silent in its temporary abode, discernible only by the clairvoyant (like Luria) and through what presented itself as a visceral influence, the embodiment of the qualities of the departed rather than his (speaking) personality.
Karo would seem to have wedded the two paradigms in an unprecedented manner. The famous recipient of the most famous maggid in Jewish history, Karo was also shown by Idel to have been the exorcist in the first known possession narrative in early modern Jewish sources.93 Karo was not the only recipient of maggidic revelations to have been associated with exorcism; Zacuto was also reported to have had a maggid.94 This should not be terribly surprising, given that rabbinic exorcists were as a rule kabbalists—precisely those who would pursue the attainment of a maggidic revelation. And a maggid could be pursued, unlike Elijah the Prophet, whose revelations were always desired but whose presence was considered impossible to compel. A seventeenth-century purveyor of hagiographic literature, Shlomo ibn Gabbai, discussed the relation between revelations of a maggid and those of Elijah in his introduction to his book on the wonders of R. Isaac Luria.
The level of a maggid is not like the level of Elijah, may his memory be a blessing, not even one one-thousandth part. Perhaps he will apprehend something, for a maggid is a spark of one’s soul that was already in the world, and one can adjure it, and it will appear in one’s own form and image, until one becomes bored with the apparition, since it is a shame that it is unable to reveal more, but only that which is within the power of the spark of one’s soul and not more. But Elijah, may his memory be a blessing, reveals himself with the Shekhina95 and they do not separate from each other. And the wise will intuitively understand that there is nothing higher than this level.96
Karo’s own status as a clairvoyant mystic suffered by the comparison. Unlike Luria, Karo’s positive possession state, his maggid, was not sufficiently rarefied to provide him with the most sublime revelations. His achievement thus paled when measured against that of Luria, as ibn Gabbai was quick to point out: “And you, who are interested, look at the book Maggid Mesharim of R. Joseph Karo, of blessed memory, to whom the maggid revealed himself regularly and revealed some [mystical] rationales of the Torah [ta‘amei Torah]. Yet nevertheless, these were as naught before the secrets of the AR”I [Luria], may his memory be for life everlasting.”97 Of course, because Elijah’s presence could not be forced, few enjoyed his revelations; maggidic revelations were far more common among the mystical rabbinic elite, for whom the maggid was a regularized, positive form of spirit possession with clear Iberian roots.
A good deal of the theoretical and practical groundwork for the reconstruction of spirit possession in sixteenth-century Jewish culture can therefore be found in literature written in and recalling preexpulsion Spain. The interest in cultivating positively valued possession states, whether ‘ibburic or maggidic, is recalled by sixteenth-century kabbalists as having been part of the Spanish milieu of their fathers. How do such recollections of Spanish antecedents accord with the views of spirit possession prevalent in late medieval Christian Spain? Was the Jewish willingness to accept a disembodied soul as a possessor entirely foreign to Christian contemporaries? Although the Church held that possession by the deceased was impossible—and indeed heretical—sixteenth-century Spanish writers acknowledged that popular notions of possession often presumed precisely that. Souls of the dead appeared frequently in fifteenth-century Spain in the forms of apparitions to the living. These souls, or ghosts, were thought to be in purgatory, in need of assistance from the living to ascend to heaven. Given that requirement, they make their appearance to ask that responses or anniversary masses be said on their behalf. They may also express anger at the dispersal of a patrimony.98 According to William A. Christian, “medieval theologians accepted that souls could visit the earth in visible form, and these souls seem to have been regarded as good, rather than bad, spirits.”99 Nevertheless, clerical authorities did not consider such ghosts to be capable of possessing the body of a living person—a belief that seems to have been prevalent, despite clerical opposition. Learned demonological works from early sixteenth-century Spain criticize this belief. Two authors of such works, Martin de Castañega and Pedro Ciruelo, sharing common sources and authorities, provided similar descriptions of the possessed.100 Both Castañega and Ciruelo wrote that souls of the dead professed to occupy demoniacs, compelling them to act as their possessing spirits had acted. If the soul was in purgatory, the possessed would prescribe masses, charity, and fasts. Castañega nevertheless criticizes exorcists for finding the souls of the dead in demoniacs, a phenomenon foreign to the documented experiences of Jesus and the apostles.101
Regarding possession phenomena more broadly as forms of prophecy, we may also see Iberian parallels without difficulty. Popular prophecy was a widespread phenomenon in fifteenth-century Spain. Jews who witnessed “plaza prophets” firsthand often suffered as a result of their diatribes.102 Their experience of prophecy was not merely one of passivity and suffering, however; New Christians were among the active participants in the prophetic revival during this period.103
The efflorescence of spirit possession in sixteenth-century Jewish culture resists simple explanation. Although the preoccupation with gilgul and tikkun in Jewish thought reflected in the idiom of dybbuk possession might, like nearly everything else in the period, be seen as a response to the expulsion from Spain, a richer appreciation of the idiom and its emergence requires a more complex historical context. Such a context frames the phenomenon in the broader, shared cultural constructions that characterized the early modern period.104 Even as they responded to their own crises, Jews nevertheless participated in broad idioms shared by other subcultures. An explanation of the emergence of dybbuk possession must therefore take several factors into consideration: shifts in kabbalistic anthropology and demonology, magical practices that closed the gap between the living and the dead, popular conceptions of “ghost” possession, and an appreciation of the indebtedness of sixteenth-century Safedian developments to the cultural climate of fifteenth-century Spain. A mixture of social factors, theory, and practices combined to facilitate the emergence of the classic construct of dybbuk possession and render it intelligible in sixteenth-century Safed.
Chapter 2
The Dead and the Possessed
Several times I was with my teacher, may his memory be a blessing, walking in the field, and he would say to me: “Here is a man by the name of so-and-so, and he is righteous and a scholar, and due to such-and-such a sin that he committed in his life, he has now transmigrated into this stone, or this plant…. My teacher, may his memory be a blessing, never knew this person; though when we inquired after the deceased, we found his words to be accurate and true. There is no point in going on at length about these matters, since no book could contain them. Sometimes he would gaze from a distance of 500 handbreadths at a particular grave, one among twenty thousand others, and would see the soul [nefesh] of the dead there interred, standing upon the grave. He would then say to us, “in that grave is buried such-and-such a man by the name of so-and-so; they are punishing him with such-and-such a punishment for such-and-such a crime.” We would inquire after that man, and found his words to be true. [There are] so many and great examples of this that one cannot imagine.
—R. Ḥayyim Vital1
R. Isaac Luria constantly beheld the dead in his midst. So recalled R. Ḥayyim Vital in the preceding passage, among many others. Luria gazed upon the dead, seeing souls suspended over their graves. Vital emphasizes that Luria did not merely feel the presence of the dead, nor did he conjure them up with his “sacred imagination”; he saw the souls of the dead “with his eyes.”2 For Luria, the dead mingled with the living. They appeared with transparent immediacy in the rocks and trees of Safed and, of course, in and about its graves, marked and unmarked.
City of the Dead
Safed, then as now, is a city that lives with its dead, its stone domiciles and synagogues poised