Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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living.3 Safed embraces its graveyard, which, like the stage of an amphitheater, is always within view, commanding one’s attention. Not far in the distance, every denizen of Safed can see hills filled with the graves of rabbinic-era sages, culminating with Mount Meron, graced with remains of the second-century R. Shimon bar Yohai, Moses of the mystics, and, in their eyes, author of their bible, the Zohar.4
Sixteenth-century Safed was a city shared by the living and the dead, a sacred space that might be compared to sixteenth-century Spanish churches, “where the dead were relentlessly buried under the worshipers’ feet.”5 Many who made their way to Safed did so to partake in this sacred space and the special benefits it afforded their souls. R. Moshe Alsheikh, Vital’s teacher in rabbinics,6 described Safed in his Ḥazut Kasha (Terrible Vision) of 1591 as a city
which has forever been a city of interred dead, to which people from throughout the lands of exile came to die. A holy place, a city of our God from the day of its founding, they come to die there and be buried. Within it are many more than 600000 men, not to mention the bones of men continuously brought to the righteous [dead] in its midst, beyond measure, for “there is no end to its corpses.” (Nahum 3, 3) Who from all the cities of the exile, near and far, does not have in her a father or brother, son or daughter, mother or sister, or some other kin, them or their bones?7
This depiction of Safed by an elder contemporary of Vital could hardly emphasize more vividly the exceptional nature of the place of the dead in the economy of the city, broadly construed. If historians have sensitized us to the regularity of medieval and early modern trafficking with the deceased, few contexts could claim the amplification of this relationship suggested by Alsheikh.8 According to other authorities of the period, living in Safed was conducive to penetrating the secrets of the Torah. The insights one could expect along scholarly lines were not unrelated to the qualities of the city that promised one a good death as well. R. Abraham Azulai wrote the following about Safed around 1619, some twenty years after his arrival in the Land of Israel:
Safed also adds up [numerically] to 21, and with the word [Safed] itself 22;9 this corresponds to the 22 letters of the Torah, and alludes to the readiness and receptivity of one in Safed to plumb the depths of the Torah and its secrets. For there is no purer air in the whole of the Land of Israel than the air in Safed …. And Safed also adds up to 570 [TK‘A],10 to allude that all who dwell in Safed have an advantage over all other cities in the Land of Israel. Since it is a high place with air purer and cleaner than any city in the Land of Israel, the soul of one who dies and is buried there speedily sails and takes wing to the Cave of Makhpelah,11 in order to pass from there to the lower Garden of Eden.12
Mystical hermeneutics and auspicious death, according to Azulai, are Safed’s specialties.13 Its special atmosphere, here associated with the especially refined mountain air, is regarded as conducive to the spiritual study of Torah. This remarkable air also functions as something of a conduit, carrying the dead soul aloft in its breezes along occult passageways, linking Safed to the patriarchal tomb in Hebron, the gateway to Eden. The promise of safe passage, of a good death, may have encouraged the longing for death expressed by so many of its leading lights. This longing could find expression explicitly and literally in R. Joseph Karo’s wishes to be burnt at the stake, or esoterically and figuratively in the frequent meditations on death and martyrdom in the prayer meditations (kavvanot) of Luria.14
With so many interred in her midst, Safed was a natural locus for visionary contact with the dead. Quotidian encounters with apparitions pervade the literature produced in this hothouse of morbid ecstasy. Towering above all stood Luria: his clairvoyance and the visionary powers that enabled him to behold the dead before him (no less than the secrets of the living people and texts that came under his scrutiny) quickly became the stuff of legend. Vital’s accounts of his master’s abilities repeatedly underscore their exceptionality.15
Though few could see the dead quite as Luria seemed to, death was underfoot in Safed and its environs, its proximity never in doubt. The regional relics, the graves of myriad talumudic-era sages, did much to attract the leading lights of the Jewish world in the course of the sixteenth century. By virtue of its unique appeal, as well as its economic health, Safed soon out-stripped every other center in the Land of Israel both in the quantity and “quality” of its population.16 According to the Mufaṣṣal Defterler, detailed registers of the cadastral surveys undertaken by the Ottomans in Palestine, Safed’s Jewish population tripled between 1525 and 1555, from 232 to 716 households.17 During that time, the composition of the population changed markedly as well. By mid-century, Mustarib (native Arabic-speaking) Jews were no longer the large majority of the Jewish population. Their absolute number declined, as Jews from Portugal, Cordova, Aragon, Seville, Calabria, and other lands added hundreds of new households to the community. Conversos also chose to settle in Safed in substantial numbers.18 Safed thus took on a cosmopolitan character, with a strong European—and particularly Iberian—component. This Sephardic cultural prominence was not inconsequential in fashioning the particularly intense engagement with the dead we have noted. First there was the orientation to the grave and to death. Among Spanish Jews a positive, sacral orientation is evident, as the zoharic literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries exemplifies. Ashkenazic contemporaries, by contrast, regarded the world of the dead as “an abode of dread and danger.”19 It would be the zoharic image of Galilee and its holy relics that attracted many to Safed in the sixteenth century.
Although most did not see the dead hovering over graves or suffering in their transmigrations into the minerals, plants, and animals around them, the residents of Safed did have one way of encountering the dead face to face, “not in a dream, but while wide awake.”20 The dead appeared to the living of Safed through a process of displacement. By commandeering the bodies of the living and making them their own, the dead could become visible to all. The dead appeared to the living Jews of Safed in the living Jews of Safed. The episodes of spirit possession recorded by Safedian rabbis of the period—the first such narrative accounts in Jewish literature in more than 1,000 years—are the subject of our analysis in this chapter.
Before we may begin our reading of these narratives, however, we must explore their provenance. The earliest extant manuscripts that include accounts of spirit possession were written in the seventeenth century. These include copies of earlier, no longer extant manuscripts and new works composed in the seventeenth century that include possession accounts. Examples of the former include the 1545 work Ẓafnat Pa‘aneah (Decipherer of Mysteries) of Judah Ḥallewa and Vital’s autobiographical Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot, which refers to Safedian cases from the 1570s, as well as to a major 1609 Damascus case.21 Manuscripts of Jacob Ẓemaḥ’s Ronu le-Ya‘akov (Rejoice for Jacob) and Meshivat Nafesh (Restoration of the Soul), and Joseph Sambari’s Divrei Yosef (Words of Joseph) are among the seventeenth-century works that include versions of possession accounts relating to sixteenth-century Safed.22 Ẓemah included two Safedian cases in which Vital was the exorcist, and Sambari included four Safedian cases in his chronicle of its “golden age.”
Only one work printed in the sixteenth century includes a Safedian case: Ma‘asei ha-Shem (Acts of the Lord) of R. Eliezer Ashkenazi, published in Venice in 1583. Gedalia ibn Yaḥia’s Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah (Chain of Tradition), published in Venice in 1586, recounts ibn Yaḥia’s own experience with a possessed woman in Ferrara, and mentions a multiple possession case in Ancona, but includes no Safedian cases.23 At the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Ma‘aseh Buch (Story Book) appeared in Basel, which featured a possession narrative that, in Sambari’s version, was reported as having taken place in Safed.24 It was only in the seventeenth century that the classic Safedian accounts began to be published widely: from Joseph Delmedigo’s 1628 Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah (Mysteries of Wisdom), to Naftali Bacharach’s 1648 ‘Emek ha-Melekh (Valley of the King), and culminating in Menasseh ben Israel’s 1651 Nishmat Ḥayyim (Soul of Life). This last work contained a half-dozen accounts of demonic possession among Jews, half of which were said to have taken place in Safed. In the many works published in the latter