The Once and Future Jewish Exorcists

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Long ago, the legend goes, in the 16th-century Israeli town of Safed, a young woman was attacked by a spirit. As she fell to the ground, the spirit slithered inside her and coiled up in her body. When she rose, she’d changed. She shook, she wept, and she spoke in a different voice. It fell to a local rabbi, Hayyim Vital, to step forward and attempt an exorcism. Slowly he drew out the spirit’s name and history: It was the ghost of a wicked man, whose soul had found no rest in death. Denied entry into heaven or the purging of purgatory, it wandered, tormented endlessly by more powerful spirits, until it hardened into something different: a body-snatching horror called a dybbuk.

Like the more famous golems of Prague, the modern dybbuk is rarely more than a literary figure, a metaphor connecting readers to the distant past. But for 400 years, the threat of dybbuk possession bedeviled Jews across the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, a symptom of life both in the shtetl and in the Diaspora. At a time of year when Americans scare one another with ghost stories and hang plastic skeletons on their porches, it’s worth considering this uniquely Jewish apparition—and the people who protect us from it.

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Spirit possession is a common motif in cultures the world over, and though benevolent cases aren’t unheard of—Pentecostal Christians, for example, have a tendency to find themselves playing host to the Holy Spirit—more often the culprit is a demon. Yoram Bilu, an anthropologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has done extensive work tracing the history and psychology of dybbuk possession. In a recent interview, he said that the dybbuk emerged not out of demon folklore but from Kabbalistic writings of the 12th century.

At the time, it was widely held that a wicked or improperly buried ghost could not enter the afterlife and thus joined the ranks of the unquiet dead. But sages gradually developed the theory of transmigration: the idea that such spirits could slip inside newborn children, where they could complete unfinished business or rehabilitate themselves by living a second, reformed life. Transmigration quickly established itself as a fixture of Jewish mysticism, but the idea’s spookier implications wouldn’t appear for another 300 years.

Those centuries were painful ones for European Jewry. The golden days of Moorish rule in Spain faded, as the caliphate split under internal tensions and ferocious attacks by Christians eager to reconquer the region. In 1492, the Moors gone and the Inquisition in full swing, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella turned their attention to Jews, expelling them from Spanish soil.

Agnieskzka Legutko, the director of Columbia University’s Yiddish program and a specialist in dybbuks as a literary tradition, describes the event as a shockwave in the Jewish world, a diaspora that scattered refugees across the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. “The Jews spent 400 years as part of the [Spanish] community,” Legutko told me. “Suddenly, they had to deal with the horror of expulsion.” In 1548, during the aftermath of that horror and after three centuries of dybbuk dormancy, spirit possessions occurred among the Sephardic Jews of Safed.

At first the dybbuk was mostly limited to Sephardic societies, Bilu said, although they didn’t use the term, preferring to call the troublesome ghosts ruakh rajah, “evil spirits.” In “Taming of the Deviants,” a 2003 paper examining dybbuk possession cases, he describes cases appearing at first in Israel and later in Italy, where the Borgia pope had invited Jews to settle. Possession stories traveled rapidly, by word of mouth and by cheap pamphlets. In the 16th century, the geographic reach of the spirits widened, with new reports surfacing from Damascus, Cairo, and Turkey and sporadic possessions continuing in Italy and Safed. Only at the end of the 17th century did the first accounts of “evil spirits” reach the insular Ashkenazi communities of Poland and Russia.

The dybbuk formally acquired its name in Eastern Europe, Legutko said, from the Hebrew verb dibbūq, “to cling.” “It’s actually an abrogation of the phrase ‘the clinging of the evil spirit,’ ” she said. “It was first used in the 18th century … from then on, the term ‘dybbuk’ was used in reference to the phenomenon.” Dybbuk lore soon became a rich and remarkably consistent facet of life within the shtetls, nourished by the specific societal conditions and tensions within.

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Dybbuk possessions—for instance, that of the woman attacked in Safed—often began with a sudden fall, often accompanied by convulsions, aches, or constant weeping. Sometimes the symptoms were behavioral, a person refusing to participate in the congregation or rebelling against community standards. And sometimes they were mystical and unsettling—speaking in a strange voice and demonstrating knowledge of far-away events or secret sins within the community. Either way, victims were young, with few cases appearing in those over 35. Women were a common target—Legutko gives the figure at 65 percent of cases—while nine out of 10 spirits identified themselves as male. These masculine spirits were happy to possess either gender, Legutko said, while the rarer female dybbuks were confined to female hosts.

When the possession was identified by the community, a rabbi would be called for to dispatch the specter. These exorcisms usually took the form of grueling bargaining sessions between the rabbi and the spirit, with the rabbi attempting to convince the dybbuk to release its hold on its victim. Sessions took place in a synagogue laden with suitably gothic trappings: black candles, prominently displayed sacred items, and a crowd of onlookers pressed against the narrow pews. “The rabbi exorcist begins conversing with the dybbuk in order to know who the spirit is,” Legutko said. “Usually dybbuks are souls with unfinished business. They have to atone for sins or they’ve done something they have to repair—so a deal is made. The dybbuk will leave the possessed and the community as a whole will say Kaddish for him, or particular prayers, or give charity.”

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