Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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This technique to bring about ‘ibburic possession—the conscious or unconscious imitation of the figure desired as a catalyst to spiritual elevation—is the very essence of mimesis, and reveals the AR”I as close kin of the Renaissance magi.77
The tales of the AR”I’s elder, R. Judah Ḥallewa, would seem to suggest that the atmosphere in Safed was charged with interest in reincarnation at least a generation before Luria’s arrival.78 Ḥallewa, a rabbi and kabbalist from Fez, Morocco, came to Safed in the early part of the sixteenth century. Upon his arrival, Ḥallewa was dismayed by the lack of disciplinary authority exercised by the rabbis of the Land of Israel. The rabbis of Safed had their hands tied: Turkish authorities granted them little power to punish, while forcing Jews who were turned over for punishment to convert to Islam. Ḥallewa conceived his treatise Ẓafnat Pa‘aneaḥ (Exposer of Mysteries) as a work to dissuade readers from sin by instilling fear in them.79 Adducing talmudic and zoharic passages dealing with the punishments awaiting the soul after death, Ḥallewa sought to save his people from the torments of Gehinnom—or worse. Moshe Idel, who brought this work to scholarly attention, wrote of the considerations that would seem to have led to the book’s composition: “In an atmosphere of the weakening of the Jewish tradition and an inability to force it upon sinners through the threat of violence, a unique way of acting arises: persuasion through fear.”80 Ḥallewa’s was among the first kabbalistic ethical (mussar) books of Safed, which emerged to strengthen religious mores at a time of their weakening.81 So as to discourage his contemporaries from pursuing their untamed appetites for sexual sins, theft, slander, and apostasy, Ḥallewa focused sharply upon reincarnation and its tribulations.82 By 1545, Ḥallewa had related a story about a cow escaping to Jews in the hopes of being slaughtered in accordance with Jewish dietary law for transmigratory reasons.83 In addition to this well-known tale, which Ḥallewa embeds in a discussion of the plausibility of reincarnation into animal bodies, Ḥallewa relates two accounts of spirit possession in which the possessor is a disembodied soul.
One of Ḥallewa’s tales of spirit possession features a spirit who declares himself to be the tortured soul of R. Joseph Della Reina. Della Reina, a mid-fifteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist, was the hero of a kabbalistic legend surrounding his failed attempt to hasten the redemption. Although various versions of this Faustian tale are found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, most scholars believe, with Joseph Dan, that “some factual basis for the story exists.”84 Ḥallewa reports that he was told of this case by two eye-witnesses, but no markers provide further clues as to the provenance of the account, nor confirmation that it took place in a Christian household, which seems to be implied. Although the possessed in Ḥallewa’s account is a young Christian servant girl, the exorcist is a Jewish expert.
Once in the west there was a healthy Gentile maidservant. She suddenly fell to the ground with the falling sickness and said wondrous things. They finally sought out a Jew, from among those who know how to adjure demons, spirits, devils, and destructive beings. He adjured the spirit who entered that Gentile to reveal his name and to depart. The spirit that was in the Gentile’s body responded that he should be left in peace in the body of the Gentile, having only now arrived, and that he was weary and exhausted from his journey when he entered the body of that Gentile. [The Jew] adjured him to say who he was, and he responded and said that he was the soul of Joseph Della Reina, who had been punished and driven away by the Supernal Court for having conjoined his soul with demons. For while in this world, he had used Holy Names for his own benefit and for the good of his body, rather than for the sake of the holiness of heaven.85
This striking account locates a case of possession by a disembodied soul in preexpulsion Spain. It also suggests, however cryptically, something of a religious syncretism surrounding the possession episode. Christians are said to turn to Jewish experts to treat the possession of one of their own, and the Jewish exorcist is shown revealing the possessing spirit to be none other than a Spanish rabbi of the not-so-distant past. The rabbi has sought refuge in the body of a Gentile girl, having been punished for his abuse of divine names before his death. Although the syncretistic dimension of the account is fascinating, as is its suggestion of a certain ecumenicism in the area of spirit possession in preexpulsion Spain, the account is fragmentary. It neither provides information as to the means of exorcism used nor comments as to the conclusion of the episode. Ḥallewa does not seem to have felt it important to establish that Della Reina was even exorcised successfully from the maid-servant’s body. For Ḥallewa, the significance of the account was didactic in that it forced his readers to confront the unimaginable suffering that sinners faced after death. Although reincarnation and the possibility of evil impregnation are significant elements in Ḥallewa’s thought—and were thus familiar to members of Safed’s population in the 1540s—Ḥallewa’s discussions and the illustrative and terrifying stories he recounts lack the emphasis upon the rehabilitation or reparation (tikkun) of the possessing soul that became central in the literature in the decades to come. In these later accounts, the exorcist often assumed a responsibility for the ultimate welfare of the possessing spirit no less than for the possessed.
Ḥallewa’s is not the earliest source that testifies to the association between gilgul and some form of spirit possession in the Iberian context. In his midrashic commentary, R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi recounts a firsthand experience with a woman who died, but whose spirit subsequently returned to her dead body.86 With the spirit within her, she attained clairvoyant powers associated with the possessed. “Sometimes a spirit will return after its death. I myself saw a woman who had died, and remained so from the beginning of the night until almost the middle of the night, and suddenly she arose and sat aright. She remained mute, however, without speech. Yet she heard, and revealed future events.”87 Ashkenazi’s account has much in common with the possession narratives of the subsequent century and constitutes yet another indication that Spanish Jews were not unfamiliar with the idea of a departed soul returning—here to a freshly dead body, emptied of its former soul inhabitant. (It is unclear whether the returning soul was the woman’s own.) Although this narrative differs from the standard evil ‘ibbur scenario insofar as the penetrated body is a corpse, the rest of the story is strikingly similar to later accounts. First, the corpse is a woman, and even though women were not the only victims of spirit possession, they were considered to be especially vulnerable to it.88 Second, the possessing or resurrecting soul is described as manifesting clairvoyant powers—the woman “revealed future events” (maggedet ‘atidot). Here, Ashkenazi attributes to the woman an ability that was considered by R. Moses Zacuto more than three centuries later to be a distinguishing characteristic of the possessed: “some of them also say something regarding the future.”89 Both Ashkenazi and Zacuto use forms of the Hebrew root MGD to describe the manner of speaking associated with clairvoyance in the case of the spirit possessed. Maggidism, another kabbalistic phenomenon with strong Iberian roots, was the most significant and recognized form of positively valued spirit possession in early modern Jewish culture.90
A maggid might be defined as a beneficial ‘ibbur, were it not for the fact that unlike an ‘ibbur, a maggid is construed not as a disembodied soul but as an angelic being. Spanish Kabbalists actively sought this form of possession through the deployment of a variety of magico-mystical techniques. An examination of Sefer ha-Meshiv (Book of the Responding Angel) reveals the extent to which practices for obtaining revelations through maggidic possession were of central importance in fifteenth-century Spanish kabbalistic circles. “This work,” wrote Moshe Idel, “represents the first precedent for the rise in the revelatory element in the later Kabbalah of the sixteenth century—as testified to by the work Maggid Mesharim [Angel of Righteousness, by R. Joseph Karo].”91 The aggressive pursuit of revelation through magical means, entailing the supplanting of one’s own personality with that of an “other,” is not far removed from the cultivation of beneficial ‘ibburim that was a staple of Luria’s prescriptions for his disciples. Dybbuk possession, which proliferated contemporaneously with maggidism, may thus be regarded as “an instance of ‘inverse maggidism.’”92 The inversive parallel between dybbukim and maggidim is most clearly manifest