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Chapter 2

The Dead and the Possessed

Several times I was with my teacher, may his memory be a blessing, walking in the field, and he would say to me: “Here is a man by the name of so-and-so, and he is righteous and a scholar, and due to such-and-such a sin that he committed in his life, he has now transmigrated into this stone, or this plant…. My teacher, may his memory be a blessing, never knew this person; though when we inquired after the deceased, we found his words to be accurate and true. There is no point in going on at length about these matters, since no book could contain them. Sometimes he would gaze from a distance of 500 handbreadths at a particular grave, one among twenty thousand others, and would see the soul [nefesh] of the dead there interred, standing upon the grave. He would then say to us, “in that grave is buried such-and-such a man by the name of so-and-so; they are punishing him with such-and-such a punishment for such-and-such a crime.” We would inquire after that man, and found his words to be true. [There are] so many and great examples of this that one cannot imagine.

—R. Ḥayyim Vital¹

R. Isaac Luria constantly beheld the dead in his midst. So recalled R. Ḥayyim Vital in the preceding passage, among many others. Luria gazed upon the dead, seeing souls suspended over their graves. Vital emphasizes that Luria did not merely feel the presence of the dead, nor did he conjure them up with his “sacred imagination”; he saw the souls of the dead “with his eyes.”² For Luria, the dead mingled with the living. They appeared with transparent immediacy in the rocks and trees of Safed and, of course, in and about its graves, marked and unmarked.

City of the Dead

Safed, then as now, is a city that lives with its dead, its stone domiciles and synagogues poised on sloping hills that are home to 20,000 dead, whose graves begin only a few steps beyond the homes of the living.³ Safed embraces its graveyard, which, like the stage of an amphitheater, is always within view, commanding one’s attention. Not far in the distance, every denizen of Safed can see hills filled with the graves of rabbinic-era sages, culminating with Mount Meron, graced with remains of the second-century R. Shimon bar Yohai, Moses of the mystics, and, in their eyes, author of their bible, the Zohar.⁴

Sixteenth-century Safed was a city shared by the living and the dead, a sacred space that might be compared to sixteenth-century Spanish churches, “where the dead were relentlessly buried under the worshipers’ feet.”⁵ Many who made their way to Safed did so to partake in this sacred space and the special benefits it afforded their souls. R. Moshe Alsheikh, Vital’s teacher in rabbinics,⁶ described Safed in his Ḥazut Kasha (Terrible Vision) of 1591 as a city

which has forever been a city of interred dead, to which people from throughout the lands of exile came to die. A holy place, a city of our God from the day of its founding, they come to die there and be buried. Within it are many more than 600000 men, not to mention the bones of men continuously brought to the righteous [dead] in its midst, beyond measure, for “there is no end to its corpses.” (Nahum 3, 3) Who from all the cities of the exile, near and far, does not have in her a father or brother, son or daughter, mother or sister, or some other kin, them or their bones?⁷

This depiction of Safed by an elder contemporary of Vital could hardly emphasize more vividly the exceptional nature of the place of the dead in the economy of the city, broadly construed. If historians have sensitized us to the regularity of medieval and early modern trafficking with the deceased, few contexts could claim the amplification of this relationship suggested by Alsheikh.⁸ According to other authorities of the period, living in Safed was conducive to penetrating the secrets of the Torah. The insights one could expect along scholarly lines were not unrelated to the qualities of the city that promised one a good death as well. R. Abraham Azulai wrote the following about Safed around 1619, some twenty years after his arrival in the Land of Israel:

Safed also adds up [numerically] to 21, and with the word [Safed] itself 22;⁹ this corresponds to the 22 letters of the Torah, and alludes to the readiness and receptivity of one in Safed to plumb the depths of the Torah and its secrets. For there is no purer air in the whole of the Land of Israel than the air in Safed …. And Safed also adds up to 570 [TK‘A],¹⁰ to allude that all who dwell in Safed have an advantage over all other cities in the Land of Israel. Since it is a high place with air purer and cleaner than any city in the Land of Israel, the soul of one who dies and is buried there speedily sails and takes wing to the Cave of Makhpelah,¹¹ in order to pass from there to the lower Garden of Eden.¹²

Mystical hermeneutics and auspicious death, according to Azulai, are Safed’s specialties.¹³ Its special atmosphere, here associated with the especially refined mountain air, is regarded as conducive to the spiritual study of Torah. This remarkable air also functions as something of a conduit, carrying the dead soul aloft in its breezes along occult passageways, linking Safed to the patriarchal tomb in Hebron, the gateway to Eden. The promise of safe passage, of a good death, may have encouraged the longing for death expressed by so many of its leading lights. This longing could find expression explicitly and literally in R. Joseph Karo’s wishes to be burnt at the stake, or esoterically and figuratively in the frequent meditations on death and martyrdom in the prayer meditations (kavvanot) of Luria.¹⁴

With so many interred in her midst, Safed was a natural locus for visionary contact with the dead. Quotidian encounters with apparitions pervade the literature produced in this hothouse of morbid ecstasy. Towering above all stood Luria: his clairvoyance and the visionary powers that enabled him to behold the dead before him (no less than the secrets of the living people and texts that came under his scrutiny) quickly became the stuff of legend. Vital’s accounts of his master’s abilities repeatedly underscore their exceptionality.¹⁵

Though few could see the dead quite as Luria seemed to, death was underfoot in Safed and its environs, its proximity never in doubt. The regional relics, the graves of myriad talumudic-era sages, did much to attract the leading lights of the Jewish world in the course of the sixteenth century. By virtue of its unique appeal, as well as its economic health, Safed soon out-stripped every other center in the Land of Israel both in the quantity and “quality” of its population.¹⁶ According to the Mufaṣṣal Defterler, detailed registers of the cadastral surveys undertaken by the Ottomans in Palestine, Safed’s Jewish population tripled between 1525 and 1555, from 232 to 716 households.¹⁷ During that time, the composition of the population changed markedly as well. By mid-century, Mustarib (native Arabic-speaking) Jews were no longer the large majority of the Jewish population. Their absolute number declined, as Jews from Portugal, Cordova, Aragon, Seville, Calabria, and other lands added hundreds of new households to the community. Conversos also chose to settle in Safed in substantial numbers.¹⁸ Safed thus took on a cosmopolitan character, with a strong European—and particularly Iberian—component. This Sephardic cultural prominence was not inconsequential in fashioning the particularly intense engagement with the dead we have noted. First there was the orientation to the grave and to death. Among Spanish Jews a positive, sacral orientation is evident, as the zoharic literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries exemplifies. Ashkenazic contemporaries, by contrast, regarded the world of the dead as “an abode of dread and danger.”¹⁹ It would be the zoharic image of Galilee and its holy relics that attracted many to Safed in the sixteenth century.

Although most did not see the dead hovering over graves or suffering in their transmigrations into the minerals, plants, and animals around them, the residents of Safed did have 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 a denizen of the world of the dead. Here, and throughout his account, Falcon emphasizes the embodied presence of the dead before the living, who, in large numbers, gathered to 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. In the process, she exposed herself immodestly, underwear not yet having been invented.⁵²

[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 “impregnates” male; the male-in-female scenario is the more common in Jewish accounts, by about a 2:1 ratio.⁶²

Although sexual transgression may be most prominent in this account, the Torah is also championed: by the dead who would still abide by its rules and by the implementation of its statutes even when lack of evidence, let alone judicial autonomy, prevented ordained penalties from being carried out. The Torah called for the choking of the adulterer, and choke he did. Thus the dead man continued to live; he was punished; he made claims of, and was dependent upon, the living; and his sins, manner of death, and ongoing participation in learned dialectical modes of argumentation reestablished core values of the religious tradition and its overall cogency.

The Luria Cases

Although already in Safed, neither Luria nor Vital participated in the exorcism documented by Falcon. They did, however, participate in other exorcisms in 1571, including one or two involving a possessed woman,⁶³ and another involving a possessed young man.⁶⁴ The reports of these cases became standard inclusions in seventeenth-century hagiographic works dedicated to Luria and his circle. R. Naftali Bacharach even went so far as to relate the case of the possessed widow of Safed twice in his 1648 work, ‘Emek ha-Melekh.⁶⁵ The other oft-published case involving a woman is so similar to the account involving the widow that it is likely a reworking of the same material. The two cases were not printed alongside one another until 1720, when a collector of these accounts, Shlomo Gabbai of Constantinople, failed to note their essential similarity. In addition to these widely circulated accounts, Vital’s “private” diary, Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot, provides some external corroboration of this case.⁶⁶ Indeed, although the report of the possession of the widow is presented by an anonymous narrator, the other reports purport to be first-person accounts authored by Vital himself.

The possession of the young nephew of R. Yehoshua Bin Nun is preserved in two distinct forms, one reported by an anonymous narrator, the other ostensibly reported by Vital. The two versions have much in common: a young man, suffering for years from a recurring illness, is diagnosed by Luria as possessed. In each, the spirit speaks at Luria’s command, and explains that he has possessed the nephew to avenge the wrong committed against him by the young man in a previous incarnation. In that previous life, the spirit had been a pauper in Rome; the young man, a charity warden. The refusal of the latter to provide the pauper with adequate support ended tragically, with the pauper’s death. The possession of Bin Nun’s nephew, then, is the pauper’s revenge. Yet Luria prevails upon the spirit to abandon his quest for vengeance and decrees that he leave the young man voluntarily. The spirit agrees, but on one condition: that the young man have no contact with women for a full week. While recognizing the difficulty of these terms, Luria accepts them. At this point, the spirit departs, and Luria establishes a watch over the boy. According to both accounts, the young man is left alone mistakenly in the course of the watch; during that time, his aunt arrives to celebrate his recovery. Finding the young man, she kisses him with joy. At that moment the spirit returns and chokes the lad to death. Having been associated with the episode, Luria quickly departs from Safed to escape punishment from the Turkish authorities in connection with the young man’s demise. According to the accounts, Luria’s speedy departure was accomplished through a magical path-jumping technique known as kefiẓat ha-derekh.⁶⁷

The Bin Nun account focuses upon the dramatic consequences of sin, exemplifying the indefatigable relentlessness of what we might call transmigrational lex talionis. Despite being blessed with magical gifts and extraordinary powers, even Luria is ultimately unable to rescue the poor young man from his deceased avenger. It may be no accident that this account is the only one in which Luria plays the active role of exorcist; in other cases, he provided others with the requisite instruction to expel unwelcome spirits. Despite Luria’s magical prowess, his effectiveness in this domain was limited, even he would assert, by his metaphysical nature, by his fundamentally gentle “soul-root.” As we will see below, an accomplished exorcist was thought to require the severity borne of more stern metaphysical sources. Moreover, the victim’s death could not be strictly attributed to Luria’s failure. This account preserves a depiction of the great master that does not detract from his awesome reputation. Luria’s account is more hagiographic than the possession accounts of Ḥallewa and Falcon: Luria manages in the course of this account to successfully diagnose the possession by means of his clairvoyant powers, to adjure the spirit to depart voluntarily without resorting to complex magical techniques, and to escape the authorities after the victim’s death by performing the famous path-jumping technique that spirits him from Safed to Tiberias “in one second.”

Although Luria’s role and its depiction in the Bin Nun account are fascinating, so too is the profile of the victim. The young eighteen-year-old is characterized as having suffered from chronic heart pain for a dozen years before Luria’s intervention and diagnosis. The victim is asked to cooperate in the exorcism process, an expectation that we have seen neither in the first early modern accounts nor in the classic tales of possession from antiquity. His full participation seems to bespeak the new level of involvement of the victim in the phenomenon, now reconceived as a transmigrational interaction in which possessor and possessed may be conceived as having been historically, even “karmically,” linked to one another. As in the account of the “Young Man in Safed” above, here again we have a male-in-male possession scenario. And although less sexually dramatic than the Falcon account, the Bin Nun account does have an obviously suggestive homosexual dimension. In this case, a psychodynamic reading of the story would note not only the male-in-male construction of the possession episode, but no less the terms of the spirit for a successful exorcism: the absolute isolation of the young man from women for a brief, albeit unreasonably difficult, length of time.

With the lengthy account of the possession of the widow of Safed, we return to a case of Falcon-like proportions. Unlike the Falcon report, however, this account opens without any didactic introduction.⁶⁸ We are confronted immediately by the penetration of the spirit into a poor widow, which has caused her great suffering. Her suffering notwithstanding, however, we are told that the immediate consequence of this affliction was her transformation into a public attraction in Safed. Visited by many people, the widow answers their questions and reveals their innermost troubles and desires. In two of the three versions of this account, the scene is portrayed in terms that normalize her newfound clairvoyant powers and relationship to her community.⁶⁹ These sympathetic versions reveal the spirit to be that of a learned rabbinic student, thus ratifying the integrity of the woman’s revelations, and lend support to the arguments in favor of regarding spirit possession as a potentially positive form of womens’ religiosity, arguments that will be developed below. In the version preserved in Sambari, however, the problematic nature of the possession episode never abates: the visitors do not cease to implore the spirit to leave the poor widow in peace so that she might support herself and her children. And the spirit’s clairvoyance is devoted to exposing the visitor’s sins, to their public embarrassment. When a sage finally visits the woman, the spirit indeed declares himself to be this rabbi’s former student, yet the spirit admits that he was often rebuked for his foul behavior.⁷⁰ In a sense, we can detect equivocation on the narrative level no less than in the reception history of this account. The scenario, by all accounts, is both thrilling and terrorizing, with large crowds gathering to behold a widow with newfound clairvoyant powers. Borne of her “impregnation” by the spirit of a rabbinic student, her impressive powers can also be directed against these voyeurs who have gathered around her in her hour of misery, revealing their sins. And even the character of a rabbinic student-spirit seems to suggest something right that has gone awry.

Finally, according to all accounts, the woman’s sufferings become so unbearable that her family seeks out the services of R. Isaac Luria, whom they hope will exorcise the spirit. Unable or unwilling to attend to the matter personally, Luria sends Vital to the woman after empowering him through the laying of hands, and furnishing him with mystical intentions and threats that were capable of evicting the spirit against its will.⁷¹ Thus prepared, Vital makes his way to the widow’s house. Vital never forgot this first meeting with the woman, and included a description of the encounter in his diary decades later. This private journal entry reads very closely to the versions presented in the three “popular” accounts.

The year 5331. When I was in Safed, my teacher of blessed memory instructed me to expel evil spirits by the power of the yiḥud that he taught me. When I went to him, the woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me to the other side. I told him to turn his face towards me to speak with me, and that he depart, but he was unwilling. I squeezed his face with my hand, and he said to me, “Since I did not face you, you struck me? I did this not out of evil, but because your face is alight with a great burning fire, and my soul is scorched if I gaze at you because of your great holiness.”⁷²

The clairvoyant powers attributed to the spirit in the woman are unabated, even though she was clearly afflicted and indeed bedridden. Avoidance of face-to-face contact with Vital, the spirit explains, was due to Vital’s sublime holiness, a quality of Vital’s that seems to have been appreciated primarily by men and women gifted with clairvoyant powers. Although Vital’s spiritual stature was recognized by Karo’s Maggid, Luria, R. Lapidot Ashkenazi, the Shamanic Kabbalists Avraham Avshalom of Morocco and Shealtiel Alsheikh of Persia, palm readers, Arab seers, and a number of visionary women in Safed and Damascus, he appears to have been underappreciated by those lacking visionary powers.⁷³ For Vital, this meeting with the possessed widow was recalled precisely because it constituted an encounter with yet another visionary capable of assessing his spiritual stature. Although Vital was quite willing to accept the testimony of visionary women to this effect, this short entry exhibits, through its fluid instability of pronouns, the volatility and ambiguity of customary conceptions of gender when confronting a visionary of this kind—demonic/clairvoyant/female/male: “The woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me … [and] I told him” Clearly, in Vital’s view, the woman’s body is little more than a physical frame containing the soul of the deceased rabbinic student with whom he is trafficking. Yet it would be wrong to downplay the significance of this bodily frame or to exaggerate Vital’s sense of its exceptionality. Far from being a pathological exception, Vital’s discussions elsewhere of the problems associated with the “normal” transmigration of male souls into female bodies suggest just how complex his construction of gender was. Vital believed, for example, that his own wife Hannah was in fact a male soul, the reincarnation of Rabbi Akiva’s father-in-law.⁷⁴

Vital perceived the refusal to face him as insolence and did not hesitate to use physical intimidation against the disrespectful spirit/woman, forcing him/her to face him. Positioned at the widow’s bedside, Vital “squeezed his face” to bring about the face-to-face encounter. Indeed, as he himself understood it, Vital’s soul genealogy inclined him to violence. Luria required Vital to be especially careful to keep this tendency in check, ordering him to avoid killing even fleas or lice. (Luria himself, Vital reports, killed no creatures intentionally.) Vital was also to remove knives from the table before reciting grace after meals and was never to function as a mohel (circumciser) or slaughterer-butcher (or even to observe them at work).⁷⁵ In this journal entry, nevertheless, Vital hides neither his immodest approach to the woman’s bed nor his assault, albeit limited, upon her body. Moreover, the rare opportunity to compare a revealing first-person description by the exorcist himself with the later popular accounts is particularly telling. Three clear deviations from Vital’s account may be discerned, all of which point essentially in the same direction. First, none of the three popular accounts makes mention of the fact that the woman was in bed when Vital arrived. The choreography of the scene is modestly ambiguous. Second, all popular accounts claim that Vital used a “decree” to force the spirit to face him; no physical contact with the woman, which too might have been construed as immodest, was necessary.⁷⁶ Finally, it is the spirit’s sinfulness that, in popular accounts, explains the spirit’s inability to face Vital, rather than its visionary insight of Vital’s spiritual grandeur. From these differences, we may see precisely the areas in which accounts that have some factual basis are reported quite accurately, but with omissions and additions that bowdlerize the texts where they might prove embarrassing, or insufficiently didactic. Apparently a portrait of Vital grabbing a visionary woman in her bedchamber was not what the writers and redactors of these accounts had in mind.⁷⁷

And sexual transgression is indeed at the heart of the case, the spirit’s sin being the fathering of bastards in an adulterous affair with a married woman. In his conversation with Vital, the spirit recounts his sins and, at greater length, the travails he has undergone since his death by drowning.⁷⁸ Refused entry into Gehinnom by 10,000 protesting sinners ostensibly more worthy than he, the spirit attempted to find refuge in the body of a Jewish inhabitant of the city of Ormuz.⁷⁹ To his chagrin, not a single Jew in that city could provide him with an inhabitable body. Here again, sexual transgression figures prominently. Owing to their “fornication with menstruating [Jewish] and Gentile women,” the bodies of these Jews are contaminated, filled, and surrounded with the forces of defilement. The account of this case, perhaps more than any other, is indeed rife with images of bodies filled—filled with forces of defilement, with souls of the living and the dead, and even with fetuses. When the spirit cannot possess a Jew in Ormuz without harming further his own reprobate soul, he enters a doe in the wilderness of Gaza out of sheer desperation.⁸⁰ This doe, however, was itself an unsuitable container—“for the soul of a human being and the soul of a beast are not equal, for one walks upright and the other bent.” The spirit, then, is not what would be thought of today as “spiritual”; it has physical form and dimensions, and only the human body is contoured such as to make it an apposite host. It is matter, albeit of a much finer grade than that of which the body is formed. “Also, the soul [nefesh] of the beast is full of filth and is repulsive, its smell foul before the soul of a human being. And its food is not human food.” In the spirit’s description of his travails, he makes clear that the host’s pains and pleasures are fully shared by the temporary, unwelcome squatter. And if the mismatch wasn’t uncomfortable enough given the differences of form and diet, the spirit explains that in this case, the doe was pregnant and was therefore already quite full. The result was pain for the spirit and the doe alike, for “three souls cannot dwell together” in a single body. The doe, in agony, ran wildly in the hills and through rocky terrain, her belly swollen, until it split open, pouring out the three occupants with her death.⁸¹

The next bodily container for the spirit was to be a Kohen (a Jew of the priestly caste) in the city of Nablus. This gentleman, apparently realizing that he was possessed, called in the local expert exorcists for assistance. In this case, the spirit tells us that Muslim clerics were summoned, not kabbalists. This detail accords well with what we know about Jewish life in mid-sixteenth-century Nablus. Unlike the Jews in Safed who lived in a separate Jewish quarter, the Jews of Nablus lived in mixed Jewish-Muslim neighborhoods.⁸² It is also indicative of the acceptance of non-Jewish magical healers in Jewish society that we shall consider at greater length below. The Islamic holy men—using incantations, adjurations, and amulets—do, in fact, succeed in exorcising the spirit from the Kohen. Here again, it is the bodily vessel and its contents that determine the matter. Responding to Vital’s astonishment that the Muslims’ magico-mystical arsenal was capable of effecting the exorcism, the spirit explains that the techniques employed by the Muslims infused the Kohen’s body with so many defiling spirits that he had to leave to avoid the kind of contamination he had feared contracting from the impure contents of the bodies of the Jews of Ormuz.⁸³ This fascinating turnabout takes us from what at first appears to be a model of magico-therapeutic syncretism to a devastating critique of such syncretism. The ambivalence felt in the wake of a successful exorcism performed by the “competition” is articulated in terms that authorize that power while simultaneously undermining its religious credibility; they won the race but failed the drug test. This critique, moreover, is somewhat ironic given the widespread use of demonic adjurations to expel evil spirits found in Jewish magical manuscripts. Such demonic adjurations work along similar lines, essentially forcing out the spirits by their own malevolent presence and potency.⁸⁴

What motivated the spirit’s possession of the widow? Early modern Christian attitudes regarding demonic motivations underlying possession reflected theological premises quite remote from Jewish conceptions. In his Traicté des Energumènes of 1599, Léon D’Alexis (Pierre de Bérulle) explained the Devil’s motives in a manner that reveals how broad the gulf could be between Jewish and Christian views. The Devil, he argued, being “the ape of God,” is dedicated to incarnating himself in men, as did Christ himself.⁸⁵ This, he suggested, accounts for the proliferation of possession since the birth of Christ.⁸⁶ Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century also assumed that demonic possession was most likely to occur as a punishment for the sins of the possessed, whereas popular accounts most commonly portray victims of possession as “pious young Christians.” Is there a similar disparity between learned and popular views of this issue in Jewish culture? R. Moses Cordovero stated in his Drishot be-‘Inyanei ha-Malakhim (Inquiries Concerning Angels) that “the types of ‘ibbur depend on a man’s moral and spiritual state, whether his soul is entered by a good soul—because he has done a miẓvah—or an evil soul—because he has committed some sin….”⁸⁷ Even though we have few sources that can directly provide a “popular” Jewish conception of the typical victim of spirit possession, we may be able to infer a disparity of this kind from the degree of inner confusion on this point displayed in Jewish sources. Early modern Jewish possession accounts shift inconsistently between affirmations of the innocence and even piety of the victim, and ascriptions of blame—often of the same person. When the exorcists in the Falcon case asked the spirit of Samuel Ẓarfati what allowed him to possess a “kosher” woman, he replied that the woman had inadvertently cast some mud upon him as he was hovering in her midst.⁸⁸ In the case currently under consideration, we know that the most egregious sin of the spirit was sexual, but what of the widow? The sin that allows for the possession to take place seems not much less trivial, though “justifiable” on the basis of the positions staked out in the contemporary Jewish demonological literature. As Vital himself wrote in his treatise on transmigration, “it sometimes happens that notwithstanding the presence in a person of a pure and sublime soul, he may come at some point to anger. Then, [that soul] will depart from him, and in its place will enter another, inferior soul.”⁸⁹ Before concluding his exorcism of the widow (and the woman in Case 7), Vital asks the spirit how he obtained permission to enter his victim’s body: “The spirit responded: ‘I spent one night in her house. At dawn, this woman arose from her bed and wanted to light a fire from the stone and iron, but the burnt rag did not catch the sparks. She persisted stubbornly, but did not succeed. She then became intensely angry, and cast the iron and the stone and the burnt rag—everything—from her hand to the ground, and angrily said, ‘to Satan with you!’ Immediately I was given permission to enter her body.’” What appears to us as a small matter, a casual curse out of frustration, was evidently taken quite seriously. This severe approach to cursing had its basis in the strict enforcement of the third commandment, and traditional Jewish law prescribed penalties for such verbal crimes that paralleled those meted out to witches and idolaters.⁹⁰ Sixteenth-century Jews were not alone in regarding the consequences of cursing most gravely; many Christian tales of possession dealt with the consequences of the curse “the devil take you.”⁹¹ Maureen Flynn has recently noted that “blasphemy was the most frequently censured religious offence of the Spanish people in the early modern period, far outnumbering convictions on charges of Judaism, Lutheranism, Illuminism, sexual immorality or witchcraft.”⁹² J. P. Dedieu’s work has shown, moreover, that, as in the expression by the woman in the possession case under our consideration, the Spanish Inquisitors were concerned with “petty crimes … of the word … that never attained the status of formal heresy, much less of unbelief.”⁹³ Concern over these types of verbal offenses, known in Spain as palabras, seems to have been particularly prevalent in the mid-sixteenth century. In addition to her angrily spoken words, the woman had thrown down the stone and rag in frustration. Such an act, like cursing, was traditionally considered an invitation to the demonic forces to act, as we read, for example, in zoharic passages.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, according to our account, Vital could not accept the idea that a woman could be possessed for letting an ill-chosen word, rock, or rag slip on that cold morning. The spirit, for his part, was forthcoming with a more serious transgression that indeed justified his siege. Here, we return to the issue of skepticism; the curse was merely the outward expression of a deeper heretical posture.

“Know,” the spirit tells Vital, “that this woman’s inside is not like her outside.” Although she participated in the religious observances of Safed’s Jewish community, the widow had her doubts. “For she does not believe in the miracles that the Holy One, Blessed be He, did for Israel, and in particular in the Exodus from Egypt. Every Passover night, when all of Israel are rejoicing and good hearted, reciting the great Hallel⁹⁵ and telling of the Exodus from Egypt, it is vanity in her eyes, a mockery and a farce. And she thinks in her heart that there was never a miracle such as this.” At this point, Vital turns his attention away from the spirit and focuses upon the widow.

Immediately the Rav said to the woman, “Do you believe with perfect belief that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is One and Unique, and that He created the heavens and the earth, and that He has the power and capacity to do anything that He desires, and that there is no one who can tell him what to do?” She responded to him and said, “Yes, I believe it all in perfect faith.” The Rav, may his memory be a blessing, further said to her, “Do you believe in perfect faith that the Holy One, blessed be He, took us out of Egypt from the house of slavery, and split the sea for us, and accomplished many miracles for us?” She responded, “Yes, master, I believe it all with perfect faith, and if I had at times a different view, I regret it.” And she began to cry.

This confrontation concluded, Vital speedily exorcises the spirit with little difficulty.⁹⁶ Finally, in an epilogue that again raises the issue of the woman’s skepticism and religious identification with the traditional community, we are told that the spirit continued to threaten the woman after its exorcism from her body. Concerned, her relatives returned to Luria, and he again sent Vital as his emissary. This time, Vital was to check the integrity of the mezuzah of her home to ensure that she was adequately protected from evil. Upon inspection, however, Vital discovered that the woman did not even have a mezuzah on her doorpost!⁹⁷ The mezuzah, a parchment-based phylactery based on Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, verse 9, was regarded as affording protection to those within the houses bearing them, the inscription on the outside of the parchment, ShD”I (“the Almighty”), being taken as an acrostic for “Keeper of the Doors of Israel.”⁹⁸ Tradition also allowed for the possibility that the affixing of a mezuzah might even successfully exorcize one possessed in the house. An eighth-century collection of rabbinic literature, the Sheiltot,⁹⁹ includes a version of a story from the Jerusalem Talmud, in which Rav’s affixing of a mezuzah on the door of the palace of the Artavan, last of the Parthian kings, sufficed to expel the evil spirit that possessed his daughter.¹⁰⁰

Once again, then, we are confronted with an account that presents a possessed woman who, by virtue of her possession, is able to function as a type of clairvoyant figure in the community, providing “services” not far removed from those provided by figures such as Luria. She attracts many people and is able to discern their hidden sins and desires. Her visionary ability also results in a caustic encounter with Vital, which he recorded in his journal years later. Evident discomfort with aspects of this scenario is suggested by our comparison of the various versions of the account, the bowdlerization of unsavory details, and the heightening of didactic elements signifying later redactions of Vital’s original. Moreover, the spirit’s presence in the woman fulfills the functions considered above: his appearance before and among the living demonstrates the persistence of life after death, whereas his suffering dramatizes and embodies the doctrine of punishment for the wicked. Although there is little that suggests a relationship between the spirit and the widow, he is not unknown in the community and soon establishes himself as a former student of a leading rabbinic figure in Safed. Finally, the sins of the spirit, and those of the widow no less, by stark transgression, cast in bold relief the values and aspirations of the rabbinic writers who crafted the account, if not broader sectors of the cultural environment. Sexual licentiousness and popular skepticism emerge in this account, as in others we have examined, as fundamental threats to communal leadership struggling to establish a community on the basis of pietistic ideals.

In seeking to understand the apparent proliferation of the phenomenon 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.