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Chapter i The Emergence o/Dybbuk Possession How did sixteenth-century Jews make sense of spirit possession? To what affliction did they bear witness when someone in their midst began displaying the characteristic signs of the possessed? What sort of spirit was doing the possessing?Why and how did the possession take place? How distinctive was the Jewish construction of spirit possession in this period? These are the central questions we shall take up in this chapter. Here it would be apposite to say something regarding the identity of ghosts of the evil dead and demonic spirits in Jewish sources. This view could be found in Greco-Roman antiquity, whether in Plato's general claim that the demons were souls of the dead or in the more specific belief that Josephus articulated, according to which they were ghosts of the wicked.1 Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, an eighth-century midrashic work likely composed in the Land of Israel, asserts that the generation of the biblical Flood would not rise at the Resurrection, having been transformed into ruhot (spirits) and mazzikim (destructive spirits).2 Jewish mystical sources occasionally enlarged upon this view, construing that all mazzikim were the metamorphosed souls of the wicked dead, as in the zoharic passage "in the name of R. Judah, that the souls of the wicked are the demons of this world."3 Some decades later, the fourteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi would cite Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer as proof that shedim were souls of the wicked dead.4 In Ashkenazi's mystical transmigratory vision , however, anything could very well turn into anything else.5 R. Eliezer Ashkenazi, the earliest recorded recipient of the broadsheet from Safed detailing a dramatic possession case from the early 15705, adduced the account in the context of discussing his assertion that it is the fate of the wicked to turn into demons. "It has been explained that [to become] demons [shedim] is the punishment and ultimate destiny of evil people," wrote Ashkenazi in his 1583 work, Maasei ha-Shem.6 In a philosophically informed discussion, Ashkenazi explains that their bodies "are from the hylic element that receives 12 Chapter i the forms ... [enabling them to] appear at times in animal form, and at other times in the form of people. Moreover, what people have said of them—that they roam in flight—should not be cause for bewilderment, since their bodies are from a fine, simple substance." Idolaters of old used to animate their idols with impure spirits so that they might speak. Their punishment was to become like the very impure spirits they used to animate these idols. Ashkenazi adduces Psalm 135, verse 18, "they who make them become like them," in support of this thesis. Ashkenazi then continues to extend his structural analogy to the workings of wind instruments. Understanding their principle of amplification enables one to understand why the wicked dead demons enter a human to commandeer his or her organs of speech. [Bjodies that are from that same fine element are so highly refined that "their voices are unheard" (Psalms 19,4). Just as we see that when a sound comes to the hollow of instruments such as trumpets, rams' horns, or the like, it will amplify and sound. So too the voice from that body, due to its delicacy, is inaudible. But when it comes to the hollow of the throat of that fallen person [ha-nofel], the throat is an apt vessel to make the voice audible, notwithstanding its fineness. Thus the body will make its voice and its speech heard in that throat, without moving the lips at all.And people commonly say7 of the fallen that an evil spirit [ruah ra'ah] has entered them, for they too call them a wind/spirit [ruah]. Ashkenazi largely conflates demons (shedini) and spirits (ruhof) in his attempt to provide a cogent "natural" explanation for the phenomenon of spirit possession.8 His analysis attempts to conform to contemporary natural philosophical notions of the nature of occult bodies, while referring repeatedly to biblical texts and contemporary dybbuk accounts to demonstrate the correctness of his thesis. His concerns were exclusively theoretical and metaphysical , and the consequences of his terminological conflation on the practice of exorcism were of no concern to him. Yet even before such conflation, confusion reigned. The terms ruhot, mazzikim, and shedim were used interchangeably in Jewish literature from the rabbinic era to the early modern period. This terminological fluidity was...

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