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Introduction

What therefore is the locus that authorizes me, today, to suppose that I can speak the other better than all of them? Lodged like them in knowledge that attempts to understand, with respect to the possessed I am reiterating the position—now with a few variants which must be evaluated—that formerly belonged to the demonologist or the doctor.

—Michel de Certeau ¹

In the early 1540s, a Jewish boy in the Galilean—and, for nearly a generation, Ottoman—village of Safed, was possessed by the soul of a sinner, a dybbuk.² Furious that the boy’s father had killed the dog in which he had formerly been lodged, the soul sought vengeance by killing the man’s son. The eminent sage who was called upon to exorcise the spirit, having forced it to speak with threats of excommunication, discovered that there was little he could do but rescue the boy by removing the intruder and banishing him to the wilderness. This he accomplished by intoning a classic Hebrew liturgical formula, though with a magical twist: the rabbi recited the words both forward and backward. More cases were to follow. Safed would again be the locus of possession episodes in the early 1570s, as would, to a less dramatic extent, cities in both Christian and Muslim worlds: Ferrara, Ancona, Pesaro, Venice, Damascus, Prague, Cairo, Tituán, and Turin.

The possessed Jews of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not alone. Convulsing, tearing off their veils, bleating like sheep, and climbing trees like cats, the nuns of Wertet, in the country of Hoorn, Brabant, were possessed in large numbers in 1550. So too the nuns of Xante, Spain, in 1560. Communities of nuns were overwhelmed by devils in Milan in 1590, in Aixen-Provence in 1611, in Lille in 1613, in Madrid in 1628, and, famously, in Loudun in 1634. Hundreds of accounts report the possession of individuals beyond these monastic communities as well.

The dramas of spirit possession episodes, macabre and in many cases sexually charged, have long been of interest to historians and lay readers. The fascination of the latter hardly requires explanation; by the sixteenth century, authors of the surviving accounts had realized that their tales would tantalize the reading public. Sharing this affection for colorful narratives, historians have made frequent use of possession accounts, recognizing the extent to which they communicate significant features of early modern culture. Exorcism rituals have also been subjected to a fascinating array of exegetical strategies and probed for their suggestive encryption of patterns of mentalité and theological suppositions. Whether used as indicators of shifts in the political and ecclesiastical realm or as signs of sexual and religious anxiety among the folk, materials related to the proliferation of spirit possession have been analyzed in various innovative ways by the conspicuously creative historians of early modern Europe.

Any attempt to treat spirit possession historically is challenged by the fact that it is a near-universal phenomenon of human culture.³ One need only take a cursory glance at the anthropological literature on the subject: a recent review article by Janice Boddy cites no less than 221 studies on spirit possession amid peoples on every continent.⁴ Yet this universalism must not obscure the distinctive place of spirit possession in different cultural settings. Its valence may vary diachronically, and at times it may occupy a more central or peripheral location in a given socioreligious group. A shift in the valuation or incidence of spirit possession may also be an indicator of broader cultural developments. And even when no such shift is evident, an analysis of the meaning and function of spirit possession may reveal deep structures of the religious culture under examination.

This study of spirit possession in early modern Jewish culture began with my realization that in the mid-sixteenth century, in the very period often referred to as “the golden age of the demoniac,”⁵ accounts of spirit possession among Jews suddenly begin to appear—this following a millennium during which no such sources were produced or from which none are extant. Although accounts of possession and exorcism are to be found in ancient rabbinic literature—and, of course, figure prominently in the Gospels—they are exceedingly rare in medieval Jewish literature.⁶ Might the apparent flourishing of this phenomenon be no more than the reflection of a new interest in the literary treatment of possession among Jews?⁷ This reasonable hypothesis can be tested, albeit impressionistically, by an inspection of the Jewish documentation for signs of shock at a sudden proliferation in spirit possession, as has been found among Christians in this period.⁸

Early Jewish possession accounts do, in fact, indicate in a variety of ways that a new phenomenon was confronting the rabbinic exorcists of the mid-sixteenth century. The deaths of the early victims, as well as the obvious confusion and lack of experience that Jewish exorcists showed in early accounts, is telling. So, too, is R. Gedalia ibn Yaḥia’s expression of wonder and bewilderment in his introduction to the 1575 Ferrara case—“The truth is, it [spirit possession by a disembodied soul] would seem to appear to be one of the wonders of our time and exceedingly strange.”⁹ Similar remarks were made by R. Eliezer Ashkenazi (1513–86) in his work of 1583, Ma‘asei ha-Shem (Deeds of the Lord).¹⁰ Ashkenazi wrote that he had heard “in this, our own time” of such cases of possession and that only “this year, in 5340 (1579–80)” had he become familiar with the phenomenon upon receiving a broadsheet from Safed, which may have reached him via Venice, describing such a case. Ashkenazi’s testimony seems to signal both the appearance of a new phenomenon in Jewish culture as well as an effort to publicize it. The significance of such a campaign emanating from Safed before 1579 cannot be underestimated, because the circulation of possession accounts may have been a significant factor in the diffusion of the phenomenon.¹¹

Although no narrative reports of spirit possession among Jews have been discovered from before the 1540s,¹² medieval manuscripts do preserve Jewish exorcism techniques from earlier centuries. This literary discrepancy is tantalizing and, although possibly deceptive, would seem to support the thesis that the sudden appearance of possession narratives in the sixteenth and, particularly, seventeenth centuries stemmed from a shift in literary conventions—for whatever reasons—rather than from the appearance of the phenomenon ex nihilo. We may imagine a situation in which exorcisms were carried out routinely for centuries, leaving traces only in the magical manuscripts that preserved and transmitted techniques over generations, the cases themselves left unrecorded. With a new interest in documenting cases of spirit possession emerging among sixteenth-century hagiographers, moralists, and other sundry rabbinic writers, the narrative possibilities of this genre are fully explored and exploited.

Such a scenario is not without medieval Christian parallels, though the order of literary progression is almost exactly the reverse. Although possession figured prominently in medieval saints’ vitae, by the fifteenth century demonologists had taken over the field. One looking exclusively at the vitae would thus wrongly assume that exorcism died out in the late Middle Ages.¹³ Although this imagined scenario has much to recommend it, we must also bear in mind that the presence of a magical technique in manuscript says little about contemporary practice. Magical manuscripts are notoriously conservative and preserve material that may long since have been out of use and even unintelligible to adepts. This in addition to the fact that as prescriptive rather than descriptive texts, they must not be assumed to reflect the historical realia of their period.

And something was new. The construction of spirit possession in Jewish culture had changed radically since antiquity. Gilgul, or reincarnation, had become a central concern of Jewish thinkers by the sixteenth century, and deeply penetrated the communal psyche. In keeping with this obsession with transmigration, Jews reconceptualized the phenomenon of spirit possession.¹⁴ The possessor was no longer a demon (which earlier techniques and ancient accounts suggest it had been for Jews and which it largely remained for Christians and Muslims), but a ghost, the soul of a deceased human being. Possession had become a subspecies of transmigration. The expressions of wonderment at the novelty of the noted phenomenon may well constitute responses to this etiologic development, for as we shall see, the ramifications of identifying the possessor as a disembodied soul were significant.

As an avid reader of the historiography of the early modern European witch-hunt, I could not help but wonder what all of this had to do with the golden age of the demoniac in Christian Europe. What sort of relationship could be reconstructed between Jewish and Christian cultures on this demonic ground? Did the cognate Jewish phenomena support or challenge the regnant interpretations of European historiography?¹⁵

European historians have long debated the reasons for the proliferation of witchcraft accusations and cases of spirit possession from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries.¹⁶ Although the two phenomena ought not to be conflated, they were not unrelated.¹⁷ Witch trials were typically initiated or exacerbated by accusations of the possessed, and demoniacs customarily ran the risk of being regarded as culpable witches. Indeed, major witch-hunts were triggered and perpetuated by demoniacs who blamed witches in their midst for their affliction.¹⁸ Jews entertained such a possibility, though the early modern accounts do not preserve a case in which such an accusation was actually leveled.¹⁹

Belief in witches and witchcraft was widespread, however, and Jews often shared the magical beliefs of their Gentile neighbors.²⁰ German-Jewish pietists from the High Middle Ages had a pronounced fear of witches, at least some of whom were apparently Jewish.²¹ The most heinous accusation leveled against these women was that they ate children and, even in death, continued to devour the living.²² Pietistic sources relate that at the moment of their vigilante-style executions, such cannibalistic witches might be offered the opportunity for atonement in exchange for knowledge of techniques that would render them harmless in the grave. One “witch” suggested driving a stake through their mouths, clear through to the ground beneath, whereas another suggested filling the mouths of her dead cohorts with gravel.²³ Notwithstanding these beliefs and the apparent willingness to pass on these distasteful suggestions, if not implement them, there could be no witch-hunt within Jewish society. Jews simply lacked the judicial autonomy necessary to carry one out.²⁴

Subtler relations between witchcraft and possession have been traced by historians who have correlated the development of the concept of the malevolent witch in the late Middle Ages with the gradual retreat from notions of positively valued embodied female spirituality attested to in many medieval vitae. This retreat left most embodied spirituality—especially where females were concerned—at best suspect and at worst demonic.²⁵ Thus rather than be lauded as prophets and healers, many women were accused of witchcraft or diagnosed as victims of possession. Although contemporaries thought it only natural that women be in league with the devil, historians and anthropologists offer various competing theories to account for the disproportionate number of women possessed by the spirits, that is, participating in the cultural construct of spirit possession.²⁶ The oft-cited 2:1 ratio of women victims of possession has been said to reflect a protofeminist attempt to take advantage of the license possession offered women to preach in public.²⁷ Young women have been seen as struggling with sexual anxieties expressed through the idiom of possession, often construed as a rapelike penetration of their bodies by the lascivious spirit.²⁸ Devout women, under the pressures of extreme religious demands and wrenching sectarian conflicts, are understood as having expressed their religious disturbance somatically.²⁹ At the heart of this historiographical debate is the question of the volition of the possessed. To what extent could victims use the phenomenon to advance their interests?³⁰

Although the shocking rise of witch-hunting in early modern Europe has been well documented, there is less evidence to demonstrate a similarly exponential rise in contemporary cases of spirit possession. Unlike witchcraft, being possessed was not a criminal offense, so it was not subject to serialized documentation.³¹ The absence of legal sources makes it impossible to chart the incidence of possession statistically—as has been done with so much success with the witch trials. Nevertheless, a marked increase in the incidence of possession beginning in the mid-sixteenth century is evident. According to H. C. Erik Midelfort, spirit possession, part and parcel of the “growing demonization of the world” in the sixteenth century, “became epidemic … only after about 1560.”³² D. P. Walker also claimed that there was a rise in the incidence of possession in this period. In addition to expressions in the sources attesting to the novelty of these events, exorcisms became more common as they came to be used, according to Walker, first as a form of religious propaganda—most commonly by Catholics against Protestants—and later as an intrinsic element of witch-hunts.³³ Indeed, Walker stressed that exorcism became one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the early modern Catholic Church for demonstrating in a public, theatrical, and tangible manner that its doctrines and sacraments were true and that its priests were empowered by God to work miracles.³⁴ Of course, it may be an exaggeration to refer to a proliferation of spirit possession in the early modern period, though such a description is not lacking in the historiography. Perhaps Stuart Clark put it best in remarking that “the known examples suggest that [spirit possession] was a general phenomenon that intensified as demonism and witchcraft themselves grew to be major preoccupations.”³⁵

What influence could this new Christian preoccupation with demonism and witchcraft have had upon the reemergence of spirit possession in early modern Jewish culture? The temporal correspondence between “the demonization of the world” that historians have discerned in sixteenth-century Europe, with its attendant witch-hunts and possession epidemics, and the sudden reappearance of Jewish possession accounts is suggestive. So, too, are the many similarities between the Jewish and Christian idioms of spirit possession, from the symptomatic behaviors of the possessed to the rituals of exorcism designed to expel the spirits.

But we should not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that before us is a case of clear Christian influence on an occult facet of Jewish culture. Safed, the clear epicenter of the Jewish reemergence, was far from the centers of the European phenomena. Yet the cultural location of Safed was anything but simple. Safed’s population had been in a state of flux, its communal composition changing rapidly in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of 1517. Jews were arriving in significant numbers from around the world, and the economic, political, and religious advantages of Safed were manifold. It became the proverbial melting pot, with a multicultural population estimated by scholars to have reached up to ten thousand Jews, including Spanish and Portuguese exiles, Maghrebi and Ashkenazi immigrants, and a good number of the indigenous Mustaribs. By the mid-sixteenth century, Iberian Jews had become the large majority.³⁶

Might Spain have served as the common denominator between the proliferation of possession in European Christendom and the Jewish Galilee? We know that the Spain left behind by the exiles was a hotbed of paranormal phenomena, from ecstatic forms of prophecy to esoteric techniques of binding the souls of the dead to the souls of grave-prostrating mystics. New Christians, Old Christians, and Jews could be found among the prophets and Illuminati of the period.³⁷ In mid-sixteenth-century Safed, the Sefardic rabbis Moses Cordovero,³⁸ Elazar Azikri,³⁹ and Judah Hallewa⁴⁰ recalled Iberian precedents for what was going on around them. Indeed, Yosef Kaplan has noted that “the deeper one delves into the literary sources of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, the stronger one’s impression becomes that many of the keys for the understanding of their views and concepts are found in the Iberian Peninsula.”⁴¹ A European background of the reemergence is also suggested by the Italian Jewish cases of the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

Nevertheless, Jews and Christians were not the only ones to suffer from spirit possession in this period, and in Safed no less than in Damascus and Cairo, they could witness Muslims falling victim to incursions by the spirits they called jinn.⁴² Muslims too employed complex magical rituals to expel them, and as we shall see, Jewish exorcists were ready to turn to sheikhs for their diagnostic expertise and powerful magic when the need arose. Our assessment of cultural influences will therefore have to be awake to various possibilities, including the recognition of this phenomenon as a particularly vivid case of cultural hybridity borne of the confluence of Christian, Islamic, and ancient Jewish traditions. The multivocal complexity of this cultural situation and the dearth of sufficient secondary literature, particularly on the early modern Islamic context, will inevitably render my own attempts at comparative analysis provisional and speculative.

By pointing out the significance of the European background, I do not intend to argue for Christian influence on the construction of the Jewish idiom. The influence model is largely predicated upon a view of Jewish culture as foreign to its local environment. From this perspective, any parallels are a result of influence of the majority community upon the minority. My own view is more in keeping with the cosmopolitan conception of Jewish culture advocated by the late Professor Shlomo Pines and exemplified in any number of recent studies of Jewish acculturation in medieval and early modern Europe.⁴³ Seeing Jews as integral to their local environment allows us to see them as full participants in broad cultural movements and mentalités that were no more owned by Christians than by Jews. The preoccupation with death, the ecstatic-prophetic modes of religiosity, and the attitudes toward the body, language, and illness were all undercurrents of a culture shared by all, the deep structures of the reality map that contemporaries held. The differences that existed might cast certain features of the map into relief, drop others into obscurity, magnify, or contour, but no single group owned the map. Of course, a good deal of the fascination of the early modern period derives from its constituting a transitional era from one “classical” reality map to another, distinctly modern one. The cultural historian of early modern Jewish culture thus has the task of elucidating the particular hues of the lenses through which Jews gazed upon the common map as it underwent profound transformation.

The cosmology of the early modern period drew the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural very 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.