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Between Worlds
JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania
David B. Ruderman, Series Editor
Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert David Stern
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Between Worlds
Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism
J. H. Chajes
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Koret Jewish Studies Publication Program.
Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chajes, J.H.
Between worlds : dybbuks, exorcists, and early modern Judaism / J.H. Chajes.
p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8122-2170-1
1. Dybbuk. 2. Spirit possession. 3. Exorcism. 4. Mysticism—Judaism. 5. Spiritual life—Judaism. 6. Future life—Judaism. I. Title. II. Series.
BM729.D92C53 2003
296.3'16—dc21
2003044763
To my mother and mother-in-law, Annette Chajes and Karin Fenz, and in memory of my father and father-in-law, Julius Chajes z”l and Professor Emanuel Fenz
Reb Nachman laughed and said, “If scholars let one dead man step foot into their studies, all their work would be null and void!”
—Siḥot ha-Ran, §226
Introduction
What therefore is the locus that authorizes me, today, to suppose that I can speak the other better than all of them? Lodged like them in knowledge that attempts to understand, with respect to the possessed I am reiterating the position—now with a few variants which must be evaluated—that formerly belonged to the demonologist or the doctor.
—Michel de Certeau 1
In the early 1540s, a Jewish boy in the Galilean—and, for nearly a generation, Ottoman—village of Safed, was possessed by the soul of a sinner, a dybbuk.2 Furious that the boy’s father had killed the dog in which he had formerly been lodged, the soul sought vengeance by killing the man’s son. The eminent sage who was called upon to exorcise the spirit, having forced it to speak with threats of excommunication, discovered that there was little he could do but rescue the boy by removing the intruder and banishing him to the wilderness. This he accomplished by intoning a classic Hebrew liturgical formula, though with a magical twist: the rabbi recited the words both forward and backward. More cases were to follow. Safed would again be the locus of possession episodes in the early 1570s, as would, to a less dramatic extent, cities in both Christian and Muslim worlds: Ferrara, Ancona, Pesaro, Venice, Damascus, Prague, Cairo, Tituán, and Turin.
The possessed Jews of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not alone. Convulsing, tearing off their veils, bleating like sheep, and climbing trees like cats, the nuns of Wertet, in the country of Hoorn, Brabant, were
