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 historian of Ottoman Jewry, Joseph Sambari. Sambari prefaces his reproduction of this account with the phrase “as I found written in the autograph of the 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.
