Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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To summarize, cases mentioned in contemporary sources include the Karo exorcism in Ḥallewa’s work, the famous Falcon case of 1571, copied from Falcon’s manuscript by Sambari, and the major accounts of spirit possession involving R. Ḥayyim Vital. Though mentioned in Vital’s own manuscripts, these accounts found their way into printed sources only with the efflorescence of hagiographic literature in the mid-seventeenth century; they reflect sixteenth-century Safed as a multicultural, pietistic nexus of the living and the dead.26
More than a generation before Luria’s arrival in Safed, a case of spirit possession occurred that has been preserved in the unique manuscript of Judah Ḥallewa’s Zafnat Pa‘aneah. “I saw with my own eyes,” testified Ḥallewa, that in 1545 a young boy began collapsing and uttering strange prophecies, “grand things.” Many rabbis were called to examine the youth, among them the author of the account and the eminent sage R. Joseph Karo. At the threat of excommunication, Karo was able to find out about the nature of the possessing spirit. Answering a series of Karo’s questions, the spirit goes through its previous incarnations: just before he entered the boy, he had been a dog; before that, an African; before that, a Christian; and before that, a Jew. A frightening plummet indeed! “Did you put on tefillin?” Karo asks him. “Never,” answers the spirit. Karo’s response: “There is no fixing you, then.”27 The report reveals that Karo accepted the spirit’s identity as a disembodied soul and that, in theory, he accepted the notion that the exorcist should assist, not only in the expulsion of the disembodied soul but also in its tikkun (rectification). Such a concern for the amelioration of the plight of the spirit is conspicuously absent from ancient narratives of spirit possession. Conceptually this concern flows from the reinscription of spirit possession within the conceptual ground of transmigration. The narrative form highlights this new, pathetic dimension by focusing upon the confession of the spirit, no longer a demonic shed but a disembodied soul embroiled in a torturous afterlife.
Falcon’s “A Great Event in Safed”
Elijah Falcon, in the aftermath of a dramatic possession case that began on 16 February 1571, penned what was to become one of the best-known accounts of spirit possession in Jewish history: “The Great Event in Safed.”28 Falcon’s account, signed by three other prominent rabbis of Safed who, like himself, were eyewitnesses and participants in the affair, was circulated in the Diaspora as a broadsheet by the late 1570s.29 R. Eliezer Ashkenazi, writing in Poland after having departed from Italy, wrote that he had heard “in this, our own time” of cases of spirit possession and that only “this year, in 5340 (1579–80)” had he become familiar with the phenomenon upon receiving a broadsheet from Safed that described such a case. In his Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah, Gedalia ibn Yaḥia mentions having seen this signed broadsheet as well.30 Falcon, it would seem, was an early publicist in Safed’s bid for acknowledged centrality and preeminence in the Jewish world.31 Less hagiographic in orientation than we might have expected, Falcon’s didactic and dramatic broadsheet asserts Safed’s aspirations for leadership on the basis that it was the center of Jewish values and their instruction, as well as a locus of ongoing divine incursion into the historical process. In this case, the divine incursion was seen most vividly in the form of the return of the dead to the society of the living. Constituting a dramatic reification of traditional Jewish values in a period of transition and crisis, spirit possession enhanced the spiritual resources of a community facing conditions of unremitting insecurity as well as swift and disorienting social change.32
Falcon opens his account with an exhortative prologue in which he laments human nature for leading people to indulge in the sensory pleasures of the body. Such an indulgence leads to the impoverishment of the soul and to the abandonment of the Torah and its directives. Falcon bemoans that even “believers and the punctiliously observant” generally fail to overcome this vulgar human inclination. Their inability to live up to demands of the holy Torah or to tend to their spiritual edification, writes Falcon, is chiefly due to the profound mismatch in the contest between spirit and flesh. The most sublime elements of the gossamer soul make but faint traces alongside the powerful, coarse desires of the body. Few come to recognize the folly of their material pursuits, the claims of the spirit being uttered in a small voice easily overpowered by the din of the flesh. In Falcon’s view, only one conceivable way exists for people to hear the message of the spirit. To overcome the hedonism and epicureanism that naturally vanquish the gentle voice of the spirit in the contest for the shaping of human will, a disembodied spirit must speak from within a living body. Nothing in the Torah, he writes, can possibly make a strong enough impression upon a person to enable him “to remove from himself all traces of evil and wrongdoing: whether in speech, thought, or action.” To accept that the soul lives on after the body dies and that reward and—especially—punishment await the sinning soul upon its departure from its short stay in the corrupting body, one must meet a soul that has crossed over into the realm of the dead and returned to tell the tale. “And this is known to him from one who came from that World, and told to him by one who has crossed over. For perhaps the Holy One, Blessed be He, sent him so that they might fear Him, as the Sages of blessed memory said, ‘“And God does it, so that men should fear him” (Ecclesiastes 3, 14)—this is a bad dream.’ (BT Berakhot 55a) And this is not in a dream, but while wide awake, before the eyes of all.” Although a nightmare might have sufficed in former good days to inculcate fear of the Lord, such phantasms pale before the persuasiveness of a face-to-face meeting with a denizen of the world of the dead. Here, and throughout his account, Falcon emphasizes the embodied presence of the dead before the living, who, in large numbers, gathered to see the evil dead with their own eyes. He is only one eyewitness among many, and his broadsheet begins and ends with this refrain. “I was there, and my eyes saw and my ears heard all this and more—he who sees shall testify,” signed Shlomo Alkabetz. “I too was summoned to see this matter, and my eyes have seen, and my ears have heard,” added Abraham Arueti.33 Lest the reader have any doubts, we are told that some 100 people attended the exorcism, including many sages and dignitaries.34
Before this “great assembly,” the dead soul appears through the lifeless body of the possessed woman. Responding to the adjurations of the exorcists, a voice erupts from the woman’s throat, unformed by any movement of her tongue or lips. This inchoate growl is inhuman, a lion’s rumbling. Gradually, the exorcists impose upon it the standards of human language and the voice in the body of the woman becomes “like the voice of men.” The exorcist has reinstated within established language that which “manifests itself as speech, but as an uncertain speech inseparable from fits, gestures, and cries.”35 Was the human speech as we have it in the account merely a projection of the anonymous exorcists? A literary invention of Falcon? A faithful record of the words spoken by the possessed woman or by the dissociated personality speaking from within her body? There are no simple answers to these questions. Possession accounts of the early modern period, among Jews and Christians alike, were written up by learned members of the clergy. Nevertheless, many include accounts of possession-speech that give the impression of transcription rather than of literary artifice. In his analysis of the possession of a Silesian girl in 1605, H. C. E. Midelfort notes the theologically learned arguments that the Devil pursued with exorcist Tobias Seiler. These arguments were so complex that “any reader is bound to conclude that Seiler was composing not only his own lines, but the Devil’s, too.” On the other hand, threats by the spirit to defecate in the pastor’s throat “have the ring of spontaneous reporting.” Midelfort thus argues that it is possible to “take the shape and color of the lens into account” in order “to say something of what demon possession was like to the demon-possessed, and, more generally, what ordinary people in the German-speaking lands thought of the Devil.”36 Listening for the voice of the possessed in these accounts restores to them a degree of agency denied to them originally on theological grounds, and more recently by historiographical trends that emphasize political and ecclesiastical factors, psychoanalytic subtexts, or, as in Certeau’s work, the semantic aggression of the exorcists.37
And what does the woman in the Falcon case actually say? What can we find out about her and about her relationship to the soul possessing her? For answers, we must turn to the version of the account preserved in Sefer Divrei Yosef by the seventeenth-century