[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 world. What was Jewry at large to infer from the suffering and death of this innocent woman?
For those who witnessed this incursion of the dead into the land of the living, several points emerged with palpable clarity:56
• Life persists after death. No one could scarcely have imagined otherwise then, but the appearance of the dead made the conclusion inescapable. In a later period, when this tenet became contentious, Falcon’s account, along with others, was called upon to prove decisively what had once been obvious.
• The wicked are punished after death. Judging from Falcon’s introduction alone, this tenet was all too imaginable. During the case itself, the exorcists did not miss the opportunity to ask the spirit to describe the punishments he suffered after death.
• The dead are at close proximity, still embedded in networks of association with the living. Not only in the graveyard a few paces away, they are in and about the synagogue, blocking Samuel’s path as he sought respite within its walls. New associations with the living may also be formed, as with the exorcists who were called in to rectify the spirit’s soul even as they ejected it from the victim’s body. A certain dependence of the dead upon the living is thus apparent.
• The dead cast social and ethical ideals into relief by articulating their transgression. These transgressions emerge in the course of the revelations that the spirit made, including the sins that brought him to his insufferable limbo state and, in other cases, the sins of many in attendance. The spirit’s flagrancy encouraged sexual propriety, yet for Falcon at least, there is no more serious violation of communal codes than the subverting of Judaism’s exclusive authority. The spirit, in denying this exclusivity and the traditional claim of Judaism’s singular truth, and in disregarding the most solemn oaths of the Torah, had placed himself beyond redemption. His inability to enter Gehinnom signifies this unredeemability—rectifiable only through the intercession of the living saints, the kabbalists.
The kabbalists do not, however, always succeed. “One can search in vain,” wrote Midelfort, “for Catholic accounts of unsuccessful exorcisms.”57 Not so in the Jewish literature of the period, which begins with failures and is thereafter regularly punctuated with them. The didactic punch of these early accounts might even have been weakened by success, for in becoming a hagiographic genre, the fear of heaven inculcated by the spirit’s travails could be supplanted by the hope for miraculous, salvific intercession, regardless of one’s sins. For writers like Falcon, religious authority could be strengthened no less by the didactic inculcating of its values (through fear) than by the hagiographic amplification of its leading personalities.
The Young Man in Safed
Sambari’s text appends another possession episode to the Falcon account.58 This second case does not seem to have been part of the original broadsheet, because the signatories on the latter appear immediately after the recounting of the woman’s death. The case, as we have noted, is said to have taken place contemporaneously in Safed by Sambari; other versions omit its location. It certainly pairs well with the Falcon account, in any case, with which it has much in common. This time, the victim is a young man, into whom the spirit of another dead young man entered. The spirit’s greatest lament is not his own cruel fate, but that of his young widow. Having died at sea, the young bride is trapped in ‘agunah status. Such a status applies to the wife of a man who has disappeared without granting her a divorce; it is forbidden for her to remarry unless reliable news of his death arrives.59 Although we are given no details, the account relates that the spirit argued assiduously with the assembled rabbis to permit her to remarry, even invoking rabbinic literature in defense of his position.
Then come the disclosures and revelations: the woman, unable to remarry, is engaged in illicit sexual relationships; the spirit’s bitter fate is also a punishment for his having had intercourse with a married woman in Constantinople, a transgression punishable by death in classical Jewish sources beginning in the Bible (Lev. 20:10). His death by drowning thus fulfilled the requirement that one guilty of adultery die by choking, a neat fact that may bespeak the learned construction of the whole account.60 When a group of young men comes in to examine the possessed, the spirit is quick to reveal clairvoyantly that they too were guilty of adulterous activities, which they immediately confess. Like the Falcon case, then, the case of the possession of the young man in Safed suggests a network of sexual intrigue on the part of the victim, his spirit, and his family—here his wife. If the account is at all factual, it is hard to allay the suspicion that the possessed man was sexually involved with the widow. From a psychodynamic perspective, the appearance of the dead husband made it possible to demand the woman’s release from the accursed ‘agunah status, while allowing for the transference of the possessed’s feelings of guilt at his involvement with a married woman upon her husband and all the young men who come to see their peer. The ability of the possessed to argue with the rabbis bespeaks a degree of engagement in Jewish sources that would likely have prompted guilt over adultery, if not its avoidance.61 We ought to note as well the gender of the possessor and the possessed. In this case, we find an example of the somewhat less common scenario, in which male
