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 half of the seventeenth century and beyond containing possession accounts, these early narratives would be reprinted time and again.25
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
