Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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great tamarisk, our teacher the rabbi, R. Elijah Falcon, his memory for life everlasting.”38 Sambari’s text alone preserves all names found in Falcon’s manuscript, whereas Menasseh ben Israel’s Nishmat Ḥayyim and subsequent works dependent upon it simply read “so-and-so” wherever the identities of the spirit and the victim’s in-laws are mentioned.39 According to Sambari, the victim is the young daughter-in-law of “the venerable Joseph Ẓarfati.”40 We learn neither the name of the girl nor anything else about her. Might she have been from a converso family? A slender clue points in that direction: the usage of an expression from Esther, Chapter 4, verse 16 (“What can I do; if I perish, I perish”), which, if not a literary embellishment of Falcon’s, may disclose the special identification with Esther known to have existed among conversos.41 The only thing we learn about her husband, Joseph’s son, is that at the time of the episode, he was away from Safed, in Salonika. The spirit, for his part, declares himself to be Samuel Ẓarfati and explains that he died in Tripoli (Lebanon), leaving one son and three daughters.42 The third daughter was now married to a certain Tuvia Deleiria.43 Samuel seems to have been well known in the community, as Falcon mentions a number of times that the spirit’s words accorded with what people remembered about the deceased. Despite the fact that they were known to many in the crowd in attendance, Falcon asserts that these details were considered validating marks of the authenticity of the possession. “Then we recognized, all of us present, that the spirit was the speaker,” he writes after hearing the spirit recount his family tree. In addition to this description of his family, other convincing details were the spirit’s identification of his profession—money changer—and his synagogue, the local prayer hall of the Castilian exiles, Beit Ya‘akov.44 Many in attendance also confirmed that the spirit’s admission of his most egregious sin was familiar to them: the assertion that “all religions are the same.”45 “Regarding this, many testified before us that he had spoken in such a way during his lifetime,” notes Falcon.
The spirit’s statement that “all religions are the same” bespeaks a type of popular skepticism that has not been studied sufficiently. Treatments of skepticism in this period have been primarily devoted to the elite, neo-Pyrrhonist skepticism of figures such as Ẓarfati’s contemporary, Michel de Montaigne.46 In his monumental treatment of sixteenth-century skepticism, Lucien Febvre dismissed the historical significance of popular skepticism and viewed it as a response to tragedy, rather than as a reasoned philosophical position. Disbelief had formulated as “a veritable cluster of coherent reasons lending each other support …. If this cluster could not be formed … the denial was without significance. It was inconsequential. It hardly deserves to be discussed.”47 Febvre’s insistence notwithstanding, there has been no little dissent in more recent historiography from his blanket dismissal. In the present case, given our suspicion that key players in the account had converso pasts, it would be shameful to deafen our ears to the spirit’s heresy. Indeed, the words attributed to the spirit of Samuel Ẓarfati cannot but bring to mind similar statements of well-known seventeenth-century conversos. Samuel’s claim that all religions were equal would be uttered by Dr. Juan de Prado in 1643, according to inquisitorial testimony.48
Samuel was familiar for other improprieties as well. Somewhat more prosaically, though no less indicative of his impiety, Samuel was known for taking oaths and breaking them. If the elder Ẓarfati was impious, his son seems to have followed in his footsteps. When asked by the exorcists if the latter should recite the mourner’s prayer kaddish or learn Torah on behalf of his soul, Samuel replies that such a plan was untenable, given that his son was wholly unsuited to learn Torah. Although the dialogue with the spirit revealed a personality familiar to the onlookers, doubts as to the authenticity of the possession seem to have lingered. The ultimate litmus test was to be administered: the exorcists would assess the spirit’s ability to speak the languages Ẓarfati was known to have spoken when alive. In the event, the spirit’s successful display of his linguistic prowess in Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish—coupled with his inability to understand Yiddish—proved to be especially convincing, because “the woman did not know any of these languages.”49
Did Samuel Ẓarfati have a relationship with Joseph Ẓarfati’s daughter-in-law, within whom he had lodged himself? A recent cultural history of ghosts found that in more than three-quarters of the cases studied, percipients of early modern apparitions knew the identity of the spirit before them; possession cases in which the spirit was perceived as a disembodied soul seem to have worked similarly.50 The fact that the possessed woman was married into the Ẓarfati family would suggest the possibility of familiarity. Many of those present knew Samuel, who would have been an older contemporary of hers (his widow having only recently remarried) or perhaps even her brother-in-law.
Samuel seems to have been quite a cad—he was married three times according to Menasseh’s account and was an irreligious skeptic, his spirit relating to the adulterous intimations of his presence with urbane humor. In an exchange deleted from Menasseh ben Israel’s version, the exorcists ask the spirit pointedly, “And if she is a married woman, have you no reservations about copulating with her?” The spirit responded, “And what of it? Her husband isn’t here, but in Salonika!”51 Shortly after this remark, the exorcists worked diligently to expel Samuel from her tortured body, and she began to writhe and kick violently. In the process, she exposed herself immodestly, underwear not yet having been invented.52
[Samuel] raised her legs and lowered them one after the other, with great speed, time and again. And with those movements, which he made with great strength, the cover that was upon her fell off her feet and thighs, and she revealed and humiliated herself for all to see. They came close to her to cover her thighs, and she was not self-conscious throughout the episode. Those who were acquainted with her knew of her great modesty, but now her modesty was lost.
This image seems to amplify the exorcists’ concern and the spirit’s admission, that some sort of intercourse was taking place between Samuel and the woman. The possibility that women could have intercourse with spirits was discussed in the rabbinic literature of the period, and rabbis were called upon to determine whether women who had engaged in such forms of deviant sexual behavior were classifiable as adulteresses, prohibited to their husbands—precisely the concern voiced by the exorcists in this case.53 The final detail suggesting the sexual nature of the relationship between the woman and Samuel—at least in this young woman’s mind—was the spirit’s chosen point of departure from her body, her vagina. The account is discreet about this point, but the woman seems to have maintained that blood flow from her vagina was due to his departure, and sufficed to demonstrate that he had left.54 Unfortunately for her, however, he soon returned, and only eight days later, she died. Given the amount of smoke to which she was subjected in the course of the exorcism, it seems likely that irresponsibility on the exorcists’ part may have brought about her death—attributed in the account to “choking” at the hands of the spirit.
Whatever the etiology of the affliction that brought so much suffering upon this young woman, the disclosure of a network of associations between the possessed and her possessor certainly suggests that the episode was a meaningful struggle between familiar parties. A psychodynamic reading would highlight the sexual anxiety felt by this woman, left behind by her husband—perhaps away on business—and some lurking feelings of guilt over improper feelings for Samuel. The “other” that has displaced her “self” confesses his lust for her, as well as his utter disregard for her husband. He has also given voice to sentiments at odds with the pietistic standards that climaxed in the years around the possession. Perhaps struggling with a converso legacy, her “other” spoke the voice of Esther, the hidden one, risking transgression in the hope of eliciting the King’s compassion.55 And only a degenerate the likes of Samuel could utter the guilelessly heretical words of a popular philosophia perennis: all religions are equal.
Reading the text closely, we have exposed the meaning that this event may have had for the young woman, her family, and others who gathered around her during those difficult days, whether out of concern or curiosity. Yet another distinct meaning may be discerned in Falcon’s use of the event in his constructed narrative, printed as a broadsheet for circulation throughout the Jewish