differently from the way its successors would. Although our postmodern reality map is perhaps more forgiving and less triumphalist in its celebration of reason’s vanquishing of superstition, it remains difficult to assess phenomena long since classified as supernatural without projecting the anachronistic boundaries of modernity’s map upon our subjects.44 Moreover, modern professional history is predicated upon the removal of God—or any other supernatural force or forces—as a causal factor. What we are left with, then, is a situation in which phenomena regarded in their time as natural are recast as supernatural; the supernatural is then dismissed or displaced in favor of a “scientific” explanation acceptable in the modern context. Needless to say, analytic reductionism, anachronism, and distortion are almost inevitable. In our case, what sorts of scientific-historical explanations of spirit possession are possible? Diane Purkiss summed up the situation neatly in her recent The Witch in History, noting, “History can say nothing about angels or demons or witches until they are psychoanalytic symptoms, chemicals, illnesses, political tools, or social categories.”45 Here is her sobering challenge to one who would attempt to do professional history while avoiding reductionism:
The supernatural must be transformed into something else so that it can be discussed. For instance, the following ways to displace possession are on offer: the possessed are physically ill; they are mentally ill, in a thousand ways; they are poisoned; they are in an altered state induced by drugs; they are acting; they are taking a culturally sanctioned opportunity to express “bad” feelings about the family, the church and sex; they are reducible to a textual sign. All these possibilities, even the last, were available to an educated early modern observer of the contorted and wildly writhing body of a victim of possession. However, most early modern observers had one more possibility in mind: that the person in question was inhabited by a demon, a demon who had moved into the body as one might invade a country or occupy a house, a demon automatically hostile to his host because at war with his whole race, a demon who had usurped the place of the soul of his victim.46
Purkiss, while recognizing the inherent impossibility of producing an academically acceptable history of the supernatural that is not, to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase, “exiled from its subject matter,”47 can offer no compelling alternative to the historian who wishes to overcome this conundrum.48 From the standpoint of academia, no evidence of spirit possession could ever be adduced, because spirit possession could never have occurred.49 At the same time, historians and anthropologists know only too well how ubiquitous spirit possession has been in human culture from time immemorial. And although not without methodological crises of its own, anthropological theory holds the most promise for the historian seeking to avoid reductionist analysis. Through descriptive analysis of ideas and behaviors, we aim to understand the meaning of the possession idiom to the possessed and their exorcists within their broader cultural environment. By keeping our conceptual conversions to a minimum, our goal is to avoid reductionist and anachronistic readings of unfamiliar worlds.50
The chapters that follow thus constitute something of a historical anthropology of spirit possession cases from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than be doctrinaire, however, my approach has been shaped by the literature at my disposal: mystical, magical, ethical, and legal. I have attempted to avail myself of a wide variety of sources and approaches, and have striven to provide thick description as well as sustained comparative-historical analysis. To assess the meaning of spirit possession in early modern Jewish culture, it was necessary to understand its relation to a constellation of related issues: mystical theory, magical practice, and afterlife beliefs, as well as notions of gender, illness, and the body. These are a few of the subjects that come in and out of focus throughout the following chapters.
In Chapter 1, I provide a genealogy of spirit possession, tracing the mystical theories and magical practices that provided the phenomenon with coherence in traditional Jewish society. A close reading of the Lurianic-era narratives of spirit possession follows in Chapter 2, in which I focus upon the role of the phenomenon in the peculiar spiritual economy of sixteenth-century Safed. Chapter 3 surveys the rituals employed by Jews to treat the possessed, from the classical techniques of antiquity preserved in medieval magical manuscripts, to the novel technique advocated by the preeminent Jewish mystic of the sixteenth century, R. Isaac Luria (1534–72).51 I then examine the afterlife of Luria’s exorcistic innovations and show how ancient magical procedures proved to be too hardy—or effective—to supplant with Luria’s meditations. In this context, I also consider exorcism as a magical healing technique and show how licit exorcism exemplified the latitude provided by Jewish religious authorities to employ counter-magical magical techniques, even when the practices involved were clearly demonic or the practitioners gentile. Chapter 4 constitutes my exploration of gender and spirit possession among early modern Jews. Although scholars have noted the preponderance of female victims of dybbukim (pl.), none have analyzed cases of positively valued or sacred spirit possession among Jewish women, nor considered the whole problem of the “discernment of spirits”—that is, deciding whether the spirit was divine or demonic.52 At the heart of this chapter is the account of a possessed girl who, after being exorcised, mastered her spirits and functioned as an oracle in her community. This young woman seems to have been a protégée of the leader of a circle of clairvoyant, visionary women active in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century centers of Safed, Jerusalem, and Damascus. A challenge to the regnant notion that women were absent from the Jewish mystical tradition, Chapter 4 represents the first examination of this circle of Jewish women mystical adepts. Having analyzed the extant sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century accounts of spirit possession, I devote Chapter 5 to a case study in their reception history: an analysis of the use of possession narratives in a work that sought to combat the metaphysical heresies that shook Amsterdam Jewry in the mid-seventeenth century. Finally, the major early modern Hebrew accounts of dybbuk possession are provided in my translation in the Appendix.
Chapter 1
The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession
How did sixteenth-century Jews make sense of spirit possession? To what affliction did they bear witness when someone in their midst began displaying the characteristic signs of the possessed? What sort of spirit was doing the possessing? Why and how did the possession take place? How distinctive was the Jewish construction of spirit possession in this period? These are the central questions we shall take up in this chapter.
Here it would be apposite to say something regarding the identity of ghosts of the evil dead and demonic spirits in Jewish sources. This view could be found in Greco-Roman antiquity, whether in Plato’s general claim that the demons were souls of the dead or in the more specific belief that Josephus articulated, according to which they were ghosts of the wicked.1 Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, an eighth-century midrashic work likely composed in the Land of Israel, asserts that the generation of the biblical Flood would not rise at the Resurrection, having been transformed into ruḥot (spirits) and mazzikim (destructive spirits).2 Jewish mystical sources occasionally enlarged upon this view, construing that all mazzikim were the metamorphosed souls of the wicked dead, as in the zoharic passage “in the name of R. Judah, that the souls of the wicked are the demons of this world.”3 Some decades later, the fourteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi would cite Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer as proof that shedim were souls of the wicked dead.4 In Ashkenazi’s mystical transmigratory vision, however, anything could very well turn into anything else.5 R. Eliezer Ashkenazi, the earliest recorded recipient of the broadsheet from Safed detailing a dramatic possession case from the early 1570s, adduced the account in the context of discussing his assertion that it is the fate of the wicked to turn into demons. “It has been explained that [to become] demons
