Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (review)

Documents produced during the second half of the sixteenth century in the Jewish community of Safed attest to a significant spike in the number of spirit-possession cases. Most historians who have examined the textual evidence of these incidents have sought to explain the rise of paranormal events among early modern Jews in rational terms, interpreting these cases as a delayed response to the trauma of the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and frustration that messianic redemption had not yet occurred. Chajes brings a fresh perspective to these texts and the phenomena that they describe. He accepts early modern reports of spirit possession and exorcism on their own terms. Bringing together historical, anthropological, and literary methodologies, Chajes identifies an international, interfaith context as the backdrop against which these cases and their literary accounts should be read.

Between Worlds is an extremely ambitious work which challenges commonly held assumptions about normative Judaism, gender and female spirituality, rabbinic culture and authority, and the encounter between rational thought and belief in spirit possession. The author contends that the early modern history of Jewish spirit possession began on the Iberian peninsula before the expulsion of 1492. This concern with controlling the entry of dead spirits into living bodies was then exported to Safed, a hub of Sephardic mysticism and culture, where it became valuable currency in religious and cultural power brokering.

Chajes has divided his study into five thematic chapters, plus a theoretical introduction and an appendix containing critical translations of several spirit-possession narratives. Each chapter maps out its own distinct phenomenological and interpretive realm of investigation: Chapter 1 deals with the history of Jewish spirit possession; Chapter 2 addresses the interaction between spirits of the dead and their host bodies; Chapter 3 examines the history of exorcists and exorcism in Jewish tradition; Chapter 4 explores the distinctive role of women as victims of spirit possession; and Chapter 5 steps outside the mystical community of Safed and turns to Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam to consider the transformation of narratives about spirit or demon possession as skepticism about such phenomena became more widespread.

Chajes places early modern Jewish spirit possession squarely in the historical frame of early modern European religious history. Many of the chapters begin with thick contextual descriptions, frequently stretching back to late antiquity, to lay the interpretive groundwork. This means of organizing the material facilitates a close reading of a wide variety of sources. At times, however, the repetition of form—deep historical survey followed by close analysis of texts on more discrete themes— interrupts the flow of argument. The result is a narrative, a methodology, and an argument that sometime seem less than completely integrated. But this is a minor quibble. By balancing phenomenological descriptions; close readings of possession accounts as well as of mystical, legal, and magical texts; and analysis of the historical context in which this spirit-possession discourse flourished, Chajes normalizes spirit possession, magic, and exorcism as part of early modern Jewish religious expression and experience.