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

For some time, spirit possession has featured prominently in both general anthropology and the historiography of Christian Europe as an important indicator of how societies negotiate their relationships with angels and demons, gods and spirits, or just the general dead. Episodes turn into social dramas, with their own performances and theatricality, and exorcism in particular emerges as therapy, as communication, and, above all, as power. A previous spate of enthusiasm for the subject produced—for early modern Christianity—the historical studies of Robert Mandrou, Michel De Certeau, D. P. Walker, Cécile Ernst, Giovanni Levi, and Erik Midelfort, and more recently the debate has been continued by Lyndal Roper (for Germany), Sarah Ferber (France), María Tausiet (Spain), and Moshe Sluhovsky (Europe in general). J. H. Chajes now joins this discussion with a long-overdue study of a neglected part of the subject, spirit possession in the early modern Jewish world, triangulated on its intellectual origins in pre-expulsion Spain, its actual appearance in the sixteenth-century Galilean village of Safed, and its deployment against skepticism in the Iberian Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. And once again, the subject is shown to be central to the construction of an entire religiosity. Chajes's elegant and sensitive account is deliberately cast as a contribution to the wider, transconfessional field and as an answer to the question, did the reappearance of Jewish narratives of possession, after a millennium or more of silence, have anything to do with the "golden age" of the demoniac in Christian Europe?

Many aspects of this study and several of its findings will, indeed, seem familiar to those who know the recent research on the equivalent Christian materials. Not least there is the methodology itself, which wisely refuses to translate possession behavior into the categories of modern psychology or other clinical diagnoses, as if contemporaries had a "'wrong' understanding of the phenomena" (p. 89). Following the literature specialist Diane Purkiss on this issue, as well as historical anthropologists as a group, Chajes agrees that we should be able to discuss the supernatural historically without transforming it into something else. His very choice of chapter themes also invites comparison with most currently useful work on spirit possession, both in history and anthropology. First, there is a "making sense" chapter—a quite difficult chapter (which should possibly have come second) covering the cultural genealogy of the theories and practices, current in the literature in or about pre-expulsion Spain, that gave meaning and coherence to Jewish spirit possession and made it believable. Second, comes a chapter of cases—an account of the spiritual economy of Safed, the pious town on which they epicentred, recounting in wonderful detail its amplified engagement with death, its propensity for visionary contact with the dead (a kind of "morbid ecstasy," p. 34), and its experience of possession episodes in the 1570s, partially under the guidance of the exorcists R. Isaac Luria and R. Hayyim Vital. Third, there is a chapter on rituals of exorcism that focuses on Rabbi Luria's only partly successful attempts to develop reformed techniques responsive to the association between possession and the transmigration of souls. Chajes's invaluable contribution at this point is to pay attention to the ritual texts themselves, a kind of reading and an attention to language that are virtually absent from the historiography of Christian exorcism in the same period. The fourth chapter is the "gender" chapter, which asks the now-standard questions about possession as a potentially positive form of women's religiosity in a culture suspicious of female mysticism (and subsequently forgetful of it), though not without its female mystics. Close analysis of the two cases of Anav (daughter of R. Raphael Anav) in Damascus in 1609 and Rachel Aberlin in Safed (both recorded in R. Vital's diary) allows Chajes to explore the implications of their spirituality and adept-hood via the issues of clairvoyance and the discernment of spirits, the latter another only partially...