of spirit possession in sixteenth-century Safed, these efforts to forge a pietistic community cannot be forgotten. In addition to the Iberian cultural influences that we have stressed, Safed was a “pressure cooker,” uniquely capable of stimulating apparitional contact with its dead through the idiom of possession. We recall that in northern Germany, Midelfort discovered twice as many cases of possession in this period as in southern Germany, with the greatest frequency “among nunneries and among the most gnesio-Lutheran areas.” In his estimation, this concentration was due to the fact that “in both situations the attempt to live an ever more perfect life may have led to stronger temptations [manifested as demonic possession] than those felt in other parts of Germany.”101 How apt is this observation to the religious environment of sixteenth-century Safed, the epicenter of the possession phenomenon in Jewish culture.102 As Gershom Scholem described it, “Ascetic piety reigned supreme in Safed. At first the religious ideal of a mystical elite only, asceticism now allied itself to an individual and public morality based on the new kabbalism; it struck deep roots in the collective consciousness.”103 The “megalomaniacal” posture that reigned in Safed in this period has been well depicted by Joseph Dan:
The very pretension of Safed to be a spiritual center and the epicenter of ordination in the Jewish world after the destruction of the center in Spain has within it something of megalomania: a remote village, which even in its apex of development had a population smaller than scores of Jewish communities in Europe—and which lacked the vitality of a large and crowded assembly of Jews, with a high level of culture and organization—dared to aspire to serve as a replacement for the tremendous center that was destroyed in Spain, and to carry the miracle of redemption to the whole community of Israel.104
In short, every element was present in the culture of mid-sixteenth-century Safed to make it the epicenter of a resurgence of spirit possession in Jewish society. A substantial number of Iberian refugees, conversos among them, had made Safed their new home. With them, they brought stories and memories, theory and praxis, inner conflicts and turmoil, elation and despair, faith and skepticism. Now in the Ottoman Empire alongside Arabic-speaking coreligionists, they were also in close proximity to Islamic traditions, popular and orthodox alike, sharing similar demonological views and familiar with forms of spirit possession and their magico-therapeutic treatment. For its part, the rabbinic leadership of Safed was leading a campaign to make of this fledgling community a new spiritual center for world Jewry, and producing didactic texts designed to inculcate its values and to discipline its people. Finally, embracing the cemetery at its heart, the people of Safe were living with their dead in exceedingly close proximity. With visionary mystics beholding apparitions at every turn, with farm animals being revealed as deceased relatives, and, no less, with the quotidian brushes with death faced by a society beleaguered by plagues and the tragic mortality of the young, possession by the dead was only natural. Its etiology was certainly familiar to all; if each possession case required careful diagnosis and inquiry to be established as authentic, no doubts were voiced as to its fundamental plausibility. The men and women who were thus possessed were full somatic participants in the ferment that characterized their cultural environment. Their experience and its diffusion through the accounts carefully drafted by leading Safedian rabbis was to resonate for centuries in Jewish communities around the world for whom Safed, itself long since in decline, had come to represent pietistic aspiration and achievement.
Chapter 3
The Task of the Exorcist
The material aspects of spells has frequently been described. A list of them will wear down any scholar who takes on the unenviable task of studying them.
—Julio Caro Baroja 1
Exorcism techniques, as eclectic as they were extensive, were found among the Jews for centuries, a diverse repository deployed by magical experts in their midst. This legacy was inherited by generation after generation of magical practitioners, many of whom were also leading rabbinic figures. In scanning the history of this magico-liturgical material, only one chapter seems to evince signs of internal opposition: the “reform” in technique demanded by R. Isaac Luria. With the reconstruction of the possession idiom, and its reinscription in the field of transmigration, came the need to develop new strategies for exorcising the spirits. Moreover, Luria’s new approach reflected his idiosyncratic and ambivalent attitude toward Judaism’s magical tradition. Notwithstanding Luria’s towering reputation, however, subsequent Jewish exorcists seem to have simply added his reformed technique to their arsenals, rather than rely on it to the exclusion of the others.
The Church also initiated exorcism reform in the late Middle Ages. Europeans saw the transformation of exorcism from a spectacle, performed by saints and wonder-workers, into a fixed ritual, performed by priests. This process, an expression of the Church’s quest for centralization of authority, and amid a growing suspicion of female spirituality, culminated in the early seventeenth century with the codification of the Rituale Romanum (1614), which treated the priestly rite of exorcism in the tenth title.2 Thus, although there was a concurrent rise in the prominence of spirit possession among early modern Jews and Christians, the Jewish rituals of exorcism did not undergo the kind of revision and standardization that Catholic authorities applied to the exorcisms in their own traditional arsenals. Whereas the Church may have sought to centralize its authority by controlling exorcism, a decentralized rabbinic leadership seems to have favored bolstering its own authority by retaining a broad spectrum of impressive magical techniques to vanquish the spirits.
Despite the warnings of Baroja that open this chapter, in what follows I present the adumbrated results of “the unenviable task” of studying the formulas of Jewish exorcism since antiquity. Such a survey will better enable us to appreciate the context and significance of Luria’s reform of exorcism technique in the late sixteenth century, as well as its subsequent absorption in the ever-syncretistic Jewish magical repository.
Exorcism in the Ancient World: Jewish Dimensions
King David is the first recorded exorcist in Jewish—or at least Judean—history, and King Saul the first demoniac. When King Saul was tormented by an evil spirit, the young David was called upon to heal him with the sweet strains of his lyre.
The spirit of YHVH departed from Saul and an evil spirit from YHVH tormented him. And Saul’s servants said to him, “Behold now, an evil ELOHIM spirit [ruaḥ elohim ra‘ah] is tormenting thee. Let our lord now command thy servants, who are before thee, to seek out a man, who knows how to play on the lyre, and it shall come to pass when the evil ELOHIM spirit is upon thee, that he will play with his hand and thou shalt be well. [1 Sam. 16:14–16]
David is successful: “And it came to pass, when the ELOHIM spirit was upon Saul, that David took the harp, and played with his hand; so Saul found relief [ve-ravah le-Shaul], and it was well with him, and the evil spirit departed from him” (ibid., 23). After waves of spiritual elation (“the spirit of YHVH”) and affliction (“the evil ELOHIM spirit”), only the strains of David’s harp return the king to a state of well-being. Yet diagnosing Saul as a manicdepressive would be anachronistic and insensitive to the biblical valence of the key terms in the account: ruaḥ ra‘ah and elohim. Elohistic spirits are not metaphors, and this passage constitutes an account of an attack of one such evil elohistic spirit upon Saul. Josephus was unequivocal about the nature of the disturbance, and described it as an attack of demons (daimonia).
But the Divine Power departed from Saul, and removed to David; who, upon this removal of the Divine Spirit to him, began to prophesy. But as for Saul, some strange and demoniacal disorders came upon him, and brought upon him such suffocations as were ready to choke him; for which the physicians could find no other remedy but this, That if any person could charm those passions by singing, and playing upon the harp, they advised them to inquire for such a one, and to observe when these demons came
