a (Eng) Final

Prolegomena to the Study of the Jewish Magical Tradition*

Gideon BohakTel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

[email protected]

Abstract

Recent years have seen a steady rise in the scholarly interest in Jewish magic. The present paper seeks to take stock of what has already been done, to explain how further study of Jewish magical texts and artifacts might make major contributions to the study of Judaism as a whole, and to provide a blueprint for further progress in this field. its main claim is that the number of unedited and even uncharted primary sources for the study of Jewish magic is staggering, and that these sources must serve as the starting point for any serious study of the Jewish magical tradition from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Such a study must both compare the Jewish magical texts and practices of each historical period with those of the contemporaneous non-Jewish world, and thus trace processes of cross-cultural contacts and influences, and compare the Jewish magical texts and practices of one period with those of another, so as to detect processes of inner-Jewish continuity and trans-mission. Finally, such a study must flesh out the place of magical prac-tices and practitioners within the Jewish society of different periods, and within different Jewish communities.

keywords: adjurations, amulets, cross-cultural contacts, exorcism, halakha, Judaism, magic, magical texts, magicians, rabbis.

Currents in Biblical Research© The author(s), 2009. Reprints and Permissions:

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 8.1: 107-150iSSn 1476-993X doi: 10.1177/1476993X09339445

*an earlier, and shorter, version of this paper was published in hebrew in Jewish Studies 44 (2007): 9-36. The research for this paper was supported by the israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 725/03).

108 Currents in Biblical Research 8.1 (2009)

Introduction: The Academic Study of Jewish Magic

despite some progress in recent years, the academic study of Jewish magic is still in its infancy. as one example out of many, let me mention a book which has not yet received any scholarly treatment, in spite of its poten-tial interest. it is called (in hebrew) Practical Kabbalah, Medicines and Segulot, Written in the Hand of the Late Hakham Meir ben Izri, ca. 1896 (Meiri 1998). it was published privately by david Meiri, who thus made public a manual of modern Jewish magic which he had found in his own home, a manuscript copied and used by his grandfather in kurdistan in the late-nineteenth century. The editor also sent one copy, free of charge, to Tel aviv University Library, and this is how i got hold of it. This is not a proper academic edition of the manuscript in question, and is not even accom-panied by detailed photographs of the original manuscript (for a similar publication, see also Yitzhaky 1976). it is a labor of love, and unfortunately is quite useless from a scientific point of view, but the editor could not have known this, since he had no model on which to base a scientific edition of a modern compendium of Jewish magic. he also had no academic address to turn to in order to obtain a detailed analysis of the manuscript’s contents and its relative significance for the study of the Jewish magical tradition as a whole. it seems that thus far there have been no real attempts to publish modern Jewish manuscripts of magical contents in their entirety, and the number of academic studies of Jewish magical texts stands in inverse pro-portion to the number of manuscripts, which may be found in their thou-sands in libraries in israel, europe, the US and elsewhere, as well as in the hands of numerous private individuals. (When i tell ordinary israelis that i am interested in Jewish magic, they often start telling me of the manu-scripts they had inherited or bought, and when i teach seminars on Jewish magical texts, some of the students end up working on the manuscripts that lay hidden in their attics for a generation or two). To date, there has been no real attempt to map this wide field, or to offer even the most basic historical survey of the Jewish magical texts of all periods (cf. dan 1972).

This scholarly neglect of much of the Jewish magical tradition is not due to some technical difficulties or to a lack of appropriate sources (which are both numerous and readily available), but to a clear ideological bias which makes these texts and artifacts seem unworthy of serious study. Until recently, most scholars in Jewish Studies were quite willing to accept Balaam’s famous claim, ‘There is no divination in Jacob, and no augury in israel’ (num. 23.23), and to ignore the existence of a rich and variegated

Bohak Prolegomena 109

Jewish magical tradition which is continuously documented at least from late antiquity and all the way to the twenty-first century. To be sure, some attempts were made to edit, or at least describe, Jewish magical manu-scripts (Steinschneider 1862; Gollancz 1903 and 1914; Campbell Thomp-son 1906–1908), to analyze Jewish magical practices (daiches 1913 and dan 1963), and even to write more systematic surveys of ancient or medi-eval Jewish magic (see esp. Blau 1898 and Trachtenberg 1939, to which one may also add Montgomery 1913), but these attempts were few and far between, and did not lead to a sustained scholarly study of the Jewish magical tradition.

only in the last generation can we see a certain shift in scholars’ attitude towards Jewish magic, as may be seen from two related developments. on the one hand, a few important sets of Jewish magical texts have finally been edited and published—and here one may note especially Marga-lioth’s groundbreaking publication of Sepher Ha-Razim (see Margalioth 1966, Fodor 2006, and Rebiger and Schäfer 2009), Benayahu’s lengthy analysis of ms Sassoon 290 (Benayahu 1972), Scholem’s edition of the Havdala de-Rabbi Akiba (Scholem 1980–81), Tocci’s edition of the Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa (Tocci 1986, which i hope to replace with a better edition), harari’s new edition of the Sword of Moses (harari 1997, to be compared with Gaster 1896), Wandrey’s edition of some versions of Sepher Ha-Yashar and Sepher Ha-Malbush (Wandrey 2004), and Rebiger’s forthcoming edition of Shimmush Tehillim (Rebiger 2009). in addition to these more ‘literary’ books of magic, one may also mention Joseph naveh and Shaul Shaked’s excellent publications of metal-plate amulets, Mesopo-tamian incantation bowls, and Genizah magical texts (naveh and Shaked 1985 and 1993), the publication of more Genizah magical texts by Schiff-man and Swartz (1992) and by Schäfer and Shaked (1994–forthcoming), and the publication of numerous incantation bowls, most notably by Segal (2000), Levene (2003), and Müller-kessler (2005). all these publica-tions already made an important contribution to our knowledge of ancient and medieval Jewish magic, but even here the number of known but still unpublished magical texts and artifacts is much greater than the number of the published ones. and when we move to later periods, we can see that almost nothing has been done thus far, but for a few publications of modern Jewish amulets (e.g., Spoer 1904; Casanowicz 1916 and 1917; Schrire 1966; Shachar 1971; Bowman 1976–77; Rosen-ayalon 1990; davis and Frenkel 1995; Jansson 2004; Leiman and Swarzfuchs 2006), a few surveys of printed Jewish magical texts (Matras 1997 and 2005), and preliminary descriptions of some of the many medieval and modern manuscripts of


Jewish magic (Zafrani 1986: 381-410; Barel 1991; herrmann and Rohr-bacher-Sticker 1989 and 1991–92; Bos 1994; Verman 1999; Petrovsky-Shtern 2004; Buchman and amar 2006). Thus, we may safely state that in spite of some progress in the last few decades we are still far from exhaust-ing, or even mapping, the impressively rich textual remains of the Jewish magical tradition.

a second change which took place over the last few decades has to do with the academy’s attitudes towards magic. Whereas most Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries preferred to ignore Jewish magic and hoped it would soon disappear, today many scholars are much more open to this aspect of the Jewish cultural heritage, as may be seen from several recent monographs, edited volumes and journal fascicles devoted to different aspects of Jewish magic (e.g., Janowitz 2002; Goldish (ed.) 2003; Shaked (ed.) 2005; Bohak 2008; harari forthcoming), and from several recent Phd dissertations on magic-related topics (Cohen-alorro 1989; Seidel 1996; eshel 1999; davidson 2004; Saar 2008; Weiss 2008; and see also Stein 2004: 169-267). But more than anything, it may be seen in a long list of studies that seek to emphasize and describe the place of magic in Jewish culture through the ages (Goldin 1976; Gruenwald 1996; Schäfer 1997; idel 1997 and 2001; Bar-Levav 2002; Bloom 2007). Thus, it sometimes seems as if the deliberate ignoring of Jewish magic has now been replaced by an opposite trend, which emphasizes the place of magic in Jewish culture. This renewed interest in Jewish magic sometimes leads scholars to include under this rubric any practice or belief which presupposes the possibility to achieve material gains through techniques which cannot be empirically verified (idel 1997: 195), including any claims of the miraculous efficacy of Jewish religious practice or the miraculous power of Jewish men of God (idel 1995; Garb 2004; dolansky 2008). Unfortunately, this trend is no less detrimental to the study of Jewish magic than the decision to ignore it alto-gether, since the tendency to see every ritual act which seeks to change the world as an act of magic, and to classify every miracle worker as a magi-cian, means that much of the Jewish religion from biblical times to our very day is shot through with magical assumptions and practices, and that most members of the Jewish religious establishment and those who sought to join it could easily be classified as magicians. Such an attitude has some validity, and it certainly is useful in some polemical contexts today (just as similar views of magic often proved useful in inner-Christian polemics), but it leads us astray when we seek to study Jewish magic.

Jewish religious customs often were seen by their practitioners as pos-sessing the power to assure them longevity, health, protection from evil


and even the control of natural forces and of other human beings, and thus could be construed as ‘magic’ in this wider sense of the word. and Jewish charismatic leaders often were seen by their followers as the possessors of great powers whose benefits they might bestow upon those of whom they approve. But if every ritual act is magic, and every charismatic leader a magician, then Jewish magic may be found in every synagogue and every prayer book, and may be observed whenever a Jew puts on his phylacteries, has a mezuzah affixed to his or her door, or recites the Shema‘ before going to sleep, or whenever a religious leader blesses his community or claims to secure the well-being of his followers. Thus, there is no need to recon-struct the Jewish magical tradition from old manuscripts and manuals, and to ascertain the identity of their copiers and users, the antiquity of their sources, or the foreign influences they display, and the Jewish magical texts and artifacts may lie dormant in libraries and private collections, just as they did in the past. it is for this reason that i would suggest that the first step in the study of the Jewish magical tradition must be the recognition that there is indeed such a tradition, which was transmitted and practiced as a separate and independent sphere of action within the wider Jewish cul-tural tradition. This sphere of action is best represented by the large corpus of Jewish magical texts and objects, a corpus which is characterized by its specific technical-professional nature and by numerous specific features which set it apart from other Jewish spheres of knowledge and action.

in isolating the Jewish magical tradition as an object for special enquiry i do not wish to deny the importance of some magical components within the Jewish religion, whose leaders often tried to domesticate magical prac-tices and turn them more ‘kosher’, or to use the lure of magical powers to market their own views of halakha, or to convince their followers that the mere observance of God’s commandments can make one’s personal or national wishes come true, or to enhance their appeal to would-be follow-ers by apparently performing great miracles. nor would i deny the exist-ence and wide diffusion of popular Jewish magic (as in ‘grandma’s favorite medicines’ or in ‘spit three times against the evil eye’), much of which was transmitted orally from one generation to the next. But i would insist that in addition to such phenomena one can also see a recurrent Jewish recourse to learned, professional magic, which was transmitted from one generation to the next and from one Jewish community to the other through the medium of written texts, and therefore often is surprisingly well attested in Jewish manuscript collections. The transmission and use of these texts normally was not a part of established Jewish religion (and was not strictly regulated by the religious authorities), but it was—and still is—an important part


of the Jews’ activities in each place where they settled. Similarly, while i would not deny that the Jewish magical tradition was influenced by devel-opments in halakha (religious law) and minhag (local custom), in prayer, mysticism (including kabbalah), or popular religion, and in turn influenced each of these spheres of action, i would insist that despite such influences and cross-fertilization, Jewish magic was and remains a separate sphere of knowledge and action, a sphere whose complex history and many transfor-mations have yet to be described. it is with this claim in mind that this essay will try to answer two major questions—why should we study the Jewish magical tradition, and how should we study it? and in answering these questions, i shall try both to describe and evaluate what has already been achieved—a kind of status quaestionis survey—and to outline the research which remains to be done and explain how it might be done. if this blueprint proves useful to present or future scholars—either as a goad to study Jewish magical texts along the lines suggested here or as a catalyst for the creation of better blueprints—it will have achieved its goal.

Why Study the Jewish Magical Tradition?

one of the first questions to be asked when we enter a new field of research is, ‘Why bother?’. This question is of special significance when dealing with Jewish magic, a subject which still arouses some suspicion, or at least a raised eyebrow, among some scholars, since Jews—it is commonly assumed—were not supposed to be involved with such activities in the first place. it is for this reason that i wish to explain why i think that we should be investing our time and efforts in the study of the Jewish magical tradition, and outline the kinds of efforts which must be invested in order to establish this old-new field of research and place it on a sounder footing.

The most obvious answer to the question of why we should study Jewish magic is the answer which George Mallory gave when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. everest. We must study Jewish magic because it’s there, and because its massive presence among the archaeological finds of late antiquity, the fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and every collection of medieval or modern Jewish manuscripts and printed books obliges all students of Jews and Judaism to treat this phenomenon in our reconstruc-tion of Jewish culture and Jewish history through the ages. Moreover, there is little doubt that many fields in Jewish Studies have now reached a point of saturation, and for this reason too we must develop those fields which have so far been neglected. at a time when many branches of the Jewish


cultural tradition already yielded their most interesting primary sources, and younger scholars merely rehearse the findings of their teachers and predecessors and heroically try to put new twists on old questions, the study of Jewish magic offers the pure joy of the primary historical-philological inquiry, and of the discovery and mapping of a terra incognita before it has been discovered by others. and as we know from the history of modern geography, and of many other fields of knowledge, there is nothing like a white spot in our map of knowledge to draw the attention and energy of the naturally curious. Thus, if we look at the study of Jewish magic in light of the sociology of knowledge and of the rise and fall of academic trends, we might even suggest that because of its general neglect in the past, this field is ripe for some major growth.

in light of these observations, i have no doubt that Jewish magic, like other fields which were unduly neglected by our intellectual forefathers, will win more attention in the future, and—as noted above—the first signs of this process may already be seen all around us. i also have no doubt that the current intellectual and religious climate in the non-Jewish and Jewish worlds will generate more interest in this intriguing field, and might even give rise to pseudo-academic scholarship of the kind that may already be found in many bookshops and websites devoted to the ‘new age’, to con-temporary Gnosticism, to popular kabbalah and to magic and ‘magick’ in all their varied forms. This process will only increase the suspicion of many serious scholars towards anything having to do with Jewish magic—and it is precisely for this reason that i wish to highlight this field’s impor-tance, and its potential contribution to the study of Judaism as a whole. i wish, in other words, to show that beyond the fact that the study of Jewish magic will shed much light on one important facet of Jewish culture—the intensive recourse to magic, in its many branches—this study could make important contributions even in fields which have nothing to do with Jewish magic, and even to scholars who instinctively shy away from magical texts and artifacts. To demonstrate this point, i shall try to survey some of the manners by which the study of Jewish magic may offer new sources and new perspectives with which to re-examine some well-known issues which have nothing to do with magic. i shall then try to sketch in broad lines some of the major tasks facing the study of the Jewish magical tradition, tasks whose completion would enable the sustainable development of this field of research for many years to come.

There is no doubt that the most important contribution of the systematic study of the Jewish magical tradition would be in shedding more light on Jewish magic of all ages, as the sources available for such a study simply


cry out for detailed analyses of the magicians’ identities and convictions, of their aims and presumptions, of the types of magical techniques and rituals they employed, and of the clients whom they served (see, for example, harari 1998: 136-226; Ben-naeh 2000; Chajes 2003a; Petrovsky-Shtern 2004). But beyond this obvious contribution, which is important in its own right, a study of the Jewish magical tradition could contribute much to other aspects of Jewish Studies, beyond the Jewish recourse to magic, and it is on these aspects that i wish to focus here.

The first topic to benefit from a serious study of Jewish magical texts and artifacts is the study of the discussions of magic, and attitudes towards it, of the non-magical Jewish texts and authors of the last two millennia. The Rabbis’ discussions of magic and amulets, the Geonic responsa concerning divine names and their powers, Maimonides’ descriptions of the magical texts he had read and the things he found there, the karaites’ fulminations against Rabbanite magic, the kabbalists’ analyses of the books of magic which came their way and even the Jewish englightenment maskilim’s mockery of the magical practices of their own days—all these must be read in light of what we find in the Jewish magical texts themselves. The study of ancient Jewish magic has already yielded many important obser-vations—including the magical rituals which are recommended by Sepher Ha-Razim and are explicitly forbidden by the Mishnah (as noted already by Margalioth 1966: 15), or the magical spell which amemar learned from a certain witch (‘hot dung in torn palm-fiber baskets into your mouths, you female witches!’), which is paralleled in the Babylonian incantation bowls (cf. b. Pesahim 110a with Gordon 1934: 327 and Bohak 2005–2006). These examples may easily be supplemented by others, since the reading of the magical recipes interspersed throughout rabbinic literature, and of the rabbis’ accounts of their dealings with magic and magicians, in light of what we know from the professional magical literature of their time, sheds much light on their use of the magical technologies of the day (Gruenwald 1994; Geller 2006; Levinson 2006; Bohak 2008: 351-434). To cite just one more example, we may note how the interesting recipe which is attributed to Rabbi Yohanan in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Shabbat 67a)—in which a simple bush is turned into the Burning Bush which was not consumed by fire and is then used to heal an inflammatory fever—finds close parallels in a Jewish magical recipe which is found in the Greek magical papyri (PGM XXXVi.295-311), in which a simple lump of sulfur is turned into the sulfur which once rained on Sodom and Gomorrah and is then used to ‘inflame’ the heart of the recipe’s victim with erotic desire (see Bohak 2008: 204-206, 411-14).


Turning to later periods, we may note how the study of medieval Jewish magic already contributed much, and could contribute much more, to clarifying the Geonic discussions of magic and mysticism, including hai Gaon’s famous responsum on the uses of God’s powerful names (recently re-edited by emanuel 1995: 124-46, and deserving of a fuller commentary), to analyzing the karaites’ anti-magic rhetoric (harari 2007b), to elucidat-ing the Tosaphists’ references to magical practices (kanarfogel 2000), and to contextualizing the attitudes of different kabbalists towards the Jewish and non-Jewish magical texts and practices of their times (idel 1993; 2002: 137-63; 2005; Garb 2002). The study of Jewish magic could inform even the study of Jewish literature of different periods, where magic and miracles abound, and where descriptions of magical activities often reflect contem-porary magical beliefs and practices. This is true of Josephus’ description of a Jewish exorcist in action (Bohak 2008: 100-105), of the Scroll of Ahi-maaz’s description of abu aharon the Babylonian’s re-enactment of the sotah ceremony (Bohak 2008: 294 and harari 2006a), of the account of nisi al-naharwani’s lock-opening spell in The Story of R. Nathan Ha-Babli (Bohak forthcoming b), of hayyim Vital’s references to the exorcistic and magical practices of his times, or of the polemical satires of the Maskilim (etkes 2001 and Werses 1995). it might even be true of some of the anti-Semitic claims in the Middle ages and the early modern period concerning Jewish dealings with magic, as beliefs and practices which were attributed to the Jews by their Christian detractors, and subsequently denied by the more apologetic proponents of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, sometimes do turn up in the Jewish magical texts (and see already Trachtenberg 1939 and 1943). Moreover, since many elements from the Jewish magical tradi-tion often crossed over into the non-magical spheres of Jewish culture, and many non-magical elements crossed into the magical tradition, the study of Jewish magical texts and objects could prove useful even for the study of issues which have nothing to do with magic. Thus, for example, we may note how the ketef hinnom amulets provide the earliest extra-biblical evidence for the use of the Priestly Blessing of num. 6.24-27, and are in fact the earliest biblical textual evidence we now have (Barkay et al. 2004), how the halbturn amulet sheds much light on the pronunciation and use of the Shema‘ formula in the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora (as will be noted in a forthcoming study by e. eshel, h. eshel and a. Lange), and how the Jewish incantation bowls from Sassanian Babylonia contain citations of Mishnaic passages which now provide the earliest Mishnaic ‘manuscripts’ to which we have any access (Shaked 2005a: 4-5 and 2005b: 5-6; Levene 2007). other bowls contain biblical verses not only in hebrew but also


in aramaic, and thus provide the earliest textual evidence for the diffu-sion and transmission of the Targumim in Sassanian Babylonia (Greenfield 1992; Müller-kessler 2001; Shaked 2005a: 3), and some bowls—as well as some Palestinian aramaic amulets—contain hekhalot-like materials which shed much light on one of the earliest stages in the history of Jewish mysti-cism (naveh and Shaked 1993: 17-22; Shaked 1995; Lesses 1998: 351-62; davila 2001: 217-28).

a second topic which has much to benefit from the study of the Jewish magical tradition is the study of Jewish languages. in their introduction to their first collection of aramaic magical texts, Joseph naveh and Shaul Shaked already noted the great contribution which the Jewish magical texts can make to the study of the aramaic language, and especially of the Jewish aramaic dialects of the Rabbinic and Geonic periods (naveh and Shaked 1985: 30-35). This aspect is highlighted further by Michael Sokoloff, who lists in the introduction to his Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic 152 Babylonian incantation bowls which he used as sources for his diction-ary, in addition to his use of both editions of the Sword of Moses (Sokoloff 2002: 62-66). as these bowls have since been joined by dozens of other recently-published bowls, and as the number of soon-to-be-published aramaic incantation bowls is in the hundreds, it seems clear that these will serve as indispensable sources in any analysis of Babylonian Jewish aramaic (see further Morgenstern 2005 and 2007). The same is true of the contribution of the metal-plate amulets and some of the Genizah magical fragments for the study of Palestinian Jewish aramaic, as may already be seen from the introduction to Sokoloff’s Dictionary of Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (Sokoloff 1990: 26-27), and as will become much more apparent when the unpublished Palestinian aramaic texts from the Cairo Genizah become more widely available (and note also the extensive use of all these textual materials in the Comprehensive aramaic Lexicon, which is acces-sible online). These texts will also shed much light on such issues as the Greek (and, to a lesser extent, Latin) loanwords in late-antique Palestinian hebrew and aramaic, an issue to which Sepher Ha-Razim already made an important contribution (Margalioth 1966: 1-5; Sznol 1989). To these exam-ples one may add the great importance of the Judaeo-arabic magical texts from the Cairo Genizah—texts which have so far been mostly neglected by students of medieval Jewish magic (with the partial exception of Shaked 1994 and 2000)—for the study of the arabic spoken and read by the Jews of the lands of islam in the Middle ages. For when we find in the Cairo Genizah elaborate Judaeo-arabic rituals for summoning demons (of the kind briefly studied by Scholem 1965), and note how the complex script includes both instructions in literary arabic and dialogues with the demons


who seem to speak and be spoken to in colloquial arabic, we can see these texts not only as fascinating sources for the study of Muslim and Jewish magic, but also as of great importance for the study of arabic and Judaeo-arabic diglossia in the Middle ages. and the same would be true of the Ladino, Yiddish, hebrew and other magical texts of later periods, all of which tell us much not only about the beliefs and practices of the Jews who used them, but also about the language(s) they used in their daily lives and in their magical activities. it therefore seems clear that in the lin-guistic sphere the magical texts could make a major contribution, and that some scholars already recognized their significance while others are slowly learning to incorporate these texts into their databases.

To these two important topics one may add other, and less obvious, examples of the contributions which the study of Jewish magic could and should make to the study of Jewish history and culture as a whole. To my mind, the most important of these fields is Jewish history, but i am fully aware of the paradox inherent in this statement, since the Jewish magical texts—like those of any other people—are essentially a-historical. They usually carry no dates, and almost never refer to contemporaneous histori-cal events or to important historical figures, except for a few magical texts and objects which were prepared by, for, or against well-known individu-als. They indiscriminately mix old and new sources, and they often insist, in a blatantly anachronistic fashion, that some patently ‘modern’ texts and practices go back to king Solomon himself, or were revealed to Moses or elijah. and, most important of all, the needs to which they cater—to harm one’s enemies, heal the sick, make one person love another, reveal the future, and so on—have not changed much over the millennia, and these texts therefore tell us little about the specific concerns of each historical period. But as we have all moved from a focus on political history to the study of social and cultural history, the magical texts provide very valua-ble—and grossly under-utilized—sources, which shed much light on issues which are at the forefront of current scholarship. For example, they have much to say about Jewish-Gentile relations in different periods, including the relations between a non-Jewish practitioner and a Jewish client or those between a Jewish practitioner and non-Jewish clients (Lacerenza 2002; Wasserstrom 2005). They also shed much light on the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish magicians, for when we find the papyrological remains of a multi-lingual and multi-cultural magical ‘workshop’—with fragments in Coptic, Greek, and aramaic—which was active in egypt in the fifth or sixth century ce, we are witnessing a close professional cooper-ation between at least one Jewish magician, at least one Christian magician, and probably some ‘pagan’ magicians as well (Marrassini 1979; Bohak


2008: 167-68). Such cooperation also goes a long way towards explaining the numerous Jewish elements found in the Greek and Coptic magical texts of late antiquity, and the recurrent entry of ‘pagan’ and even Christian ele-ments into the Jewish magical tradition, processes which have often been noted by students of ancient and medieval magic (Smith 1996; alexan-der 1999; Levene 1999; Shaked 1999; Bohak 2004 and 2007; Lidonnici 2007), but whose social implications have not always been considered by students of Jewish-Gentile relations in late antiquity and the Middle ages. and when we find in the Cairo Genizah a hebrew transliteration of a Latin prayer which served as a part of an ordeal for catching thieves in the mon-asteries of Southern Germany at the beginning of the thirteenth century, we learn some surprising facts about the contacts between some ashkenazi Jews and their Christian ecclesiastical neighbors, and this at a time which is not too famous for religious tolerance or inter-cultural cooperation (Bohak 2006; cf. Banitt 1972, Bohak 1999 and Leicht 2003). We also learn from the same example that a magic ritual borrowed by Jews in one cultural context could very quickly be transmitted to the other end of the Jewish world and re-surface in a totally different cultural context, ready to be trun-cated and wedded to more local materials (cf. Leicht 2005). and when we find in the same Genizah magical recipes and adjurations which are written in Judaeo-arabic, and therefore are demonstrably Jewish, but which are in fact Muslim magical texts which have not even been ‘Judaized’ in any meaningful manner (as may be seen, for example, from their frequent cita-tions of the Quran or from their references to Muslim holidays), we get a glimpse of yet another facet of the amazing Muslim-Jewish cultural sym-biosis which shaped the culture of the Jews of the lands of islam from the Middle ages to the twentieth century (Friedländer 1907; Scholem 1965; Golb 1967; Shaked 1994 and 2000). Moreover, the more we realize how easy it was for Jewish magicians to borrow non-Jewish magical technolo-gies, and the more we know about the foreign magical techniques which were adopted by the Jewish magicians with great zeal, the more we can point to certain things which these Jewish practitioners preferred not to borrow from the ‘pagan’, Christian, or Muslim magic of their neighbors. This too can teach us much about their self-perception, and about their own understanding of the borders between what was permitted and what was forbidden to them as Jews. These borders clearly changed from period to period, from community to community, and perhaps even from one Jewish magician to the next—but it is precisely these changes which make the study of the magicians’ reticence and self-imposed censorship during the process of intercultural borrowing so worthy of much further study. For


it is here, more than in any other area, that we can see the ‘Jewishness’ of Jewish magic, and sense what its practitioners felt to be ‘un-Jewish’ to the point of exclusion (Bohak 2008: 341-48; Saar 2008: 281-344).

a further example of the importance of the Jewish magical texts for current debates among students of Jewish history is the question of the conservation of ancient Jewish literature in later periods. For when we find an elaborate exorcistic formula which is attested already in the dead Sea Scrolls (11Q11 col. V) re-emerging in several unpublished Babylonian incantation bowls and, even more clearly, in a magical recipe from the Cairo Genizah (Cambridge University Library, Taylor-Schechter k 1.123), we are immediately confronted by the need to explain how such formulae were transmitted from one exorcist to another for over a millennium, and where else they might still emerge (Bohak 2008: 303-304, and forthcom-ing a). and when we find in the Jewish magical texts of late antiquity and the Middle ages more and more exorcistic hymns which are attributed to david or Solomon, we must ask ourselves whether these are new composi-tions, made up by the practitioners of late antique Palestine and Babylo-nia and even of later periods, or copies of copies of those hymns which were already in circulation in the Second Temple period, as may be seen from their fragmentary representatives among the dead Sea Scrolls (Bohak 2005–2006: 259-60). Similarly, when we learn that pottery shards from horvat Rimmon of the fifth or sixth century ce (naveh and Shaked 1985: 85-89) on which an erotic spell was etched before they were fired were produced according to the instructions of a recipe which remained in circu-lation in the Jewish magical tradition and is attested in the Cairo Genizah (naveh and Shaked 1993: 216-19), in late-Byzantine Jewish magical texts, in ottoman Palestine and even in Mosul of the early twentieth century (Campbell Thompson 1906–1908: 166), we cannot but marvel at the proc-esses of copying and transmission which assured the preservation and use of this recipe for over 1,500 years. Given the fact that Jewish magical texts never were canonized or codified, the ways they traveled from one genera-tion to another and from one geographical region to the next must arouse not only our admiration, but also our scientific and historical curiosity. This is especially true when we find out that the Jewish magicians of later periods had more access to ancient textual materials—such as the story of the Fallen angels which is known to us from the ‘apocryphal’ literature of the Second Temple period—than we would otherwise have imagined. Thus, in a totally unintentional manner, these texts tell us much about the ‘underground’ transmission of some texts and traditions over long stretches of Jewish history.


one final example of the possible contribution of the study of Jewish magic for the study of Jewish history is the recurrent use by the Jewish elite in different times and places of magical powers and practices to enhance and maintain its own social and religious power. no reader of the biblical exodus stories can fail to note how each time Moses’ authority is ques-tioned and challenged and the israelite population becomes restive to the point of rebellion, he pulls this or that miracle out of his staff and calms the clamoring masses. and the same is true of the new Testament or of rab-binic literature, where time and again we find the exorcising of demons, the healing of the sick, or the harming of one’s opponents with a powerful word or a fiery gaze, all serving as means for the creation and upholding of the leadership positions of individuals or larger groups (neusner 1969 and 1970; harari 2006b). in all these cases, we are dealing with supposedly ‘innate’ powers, with the natural charisma of those who need no magical techniques in order to draw water out of a rock, feed the multitudes with a few loaves of bread, heal the sick or ‘put their eyes’ upon someone and turn him into a heap of bones (Turan 2008). But in many other cases it is quite clear that leaders who did not enjoy such great powers felt it neces-sary to employ elaborate magical practices in order to obtain the power and authority which they thought they deserved. The beginnings of this phenomenon may already be found in the Second Temple period (at least if we trust the rabbinic claim, in y. Yoma 1.1 (38c), that the high priests of the time used to kill their competitors with aggressive magic), and it becomes fully visible in rabbinic literature, where we find Rabbi Yehoshua using a complex magical procedure in order to subdue a nasty witch (y. Sanhedrin 7.19 (25d)), Rav Yoseph recommending an aggressive magical ritual to be practiced in the cemetery in order to kill a bully who was pestering a rabbinic disciple (b. Moed Qatan 17a-b), and several stories of rabbis who used complex magical techniques in order to subdue ‘heretics’ whose exegetical acuity proved too much for the rabbis to handle (Bohak 2003). Reading such stories, we understand why Rabbi Yohanan said (b. Sanhedrin 17a and b. Menahot 65a) that knowledge of magic was one of the prerequisites for sitting in the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court of law—not only in order to detect and deter magicians, but also in order to beat them at their own game, and to gain the upper hand against other offenders as well.

and in later periods, we may note the stories of abu aharon the Babylo-nian, a magician and a halakhic authority whose judicial powers are extolled by the Scroll of Ahimaaz (harari 2006a), or the constant tension between innate powers and magical technologies among kabbalists, would-be Mes-siahs and ‘Masters of the name’ (etkes 1995 and 2005: 259-71; oron 2002;


Petrovsky-Shtern 2004; idel 2003 and 2006), or the constant use by rabbis in different times and places of exorcistic and magical technologies—including the expulsion of demons, the writing of amulets, the harming of dangerous opponents, and many other feats—in order to enhance their fame and status (Yuval 1991). and here too the study of the Jewish magical tradition could help us identify the types of Jewish and non-Jewish magic utilized by those who led, or hoped to lead, the Jewish people in different periods, and perhaps even explain the failure of the medieval rationalist philosophers to uproot magic from Jewish culture. We might also learn something about the ways in which the decline of magic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the decline of the authority of the rabbis in those Jewish communities which were deeply influenced by the enlightenment and its anti-magical values (Chajes 2007).

To these few examples many more could be added, but history is not the only field which could benefit from a closer study of the Jewish magical tradition. another field which has much to profit is the study of Jewish philosophy and Jewish halakha, since the tendency to ignore Jewish magic, or to treat it as a set of popular practices which have little to do with the glorious structure of halakhic Judaism and its normative worldviews, was not only facile but also downright wrong (cf., for example, Urbach 1975: 97-134, with Sussmann 1993: 73-74, n. 148). First, a closer look at the Jewish magical texts and objects shows that large segments of the Jewish population in most periods were deeply involved in a wide range of magical activities or turned to the expert magicians for practical help. Second, there is no doubt that throughout most years of their long history most Jews, including the most learned and enlightened ones, were con-vinced that magic, or at least some of it, really works, and that those who know how to use this technology correctly can create real changes in the physical world and in human society. even those Jews who opposed magic, from the biblical period onwards, usually did so out of a firm belief in its efficacy, thus admitting that it is effective, but insisting that it is forbidden to Jews, or that only some of it is permitted, while the rest is forbidden. Those who totally denied the power of magic—with Maimonides as their greatest champion—were just a minority voice in Jewish cultural history, and even they often admitted that some magical practices do in fact work, and both recommended and applied some magical recipes in their own medical practices (cf. Ravitzky 2002 with Freudenthal 2005, and Maimo-nides, Pirkei Moshe (=Aphorisms) 22). Third, it is clear that the use of magic was not limited to the uneducated masses, but was actively sought after by the learned elite as well, since we often find professional scribes copying, translating, and reworking complex Jewish magical texts (Swartz


1990), and we often find magical recipes intended to enhance knowledge and memory, including knowledge of Torah (Swartz 1996; harari 2004).

once we admit that the Jewish magical tradition was not the sole domain of women and marginal figures, but of the intellectual elite as well (idel 1989), we must try to understand this aspect of their Judaism, and place it in a wider religious and philosophical context. More than anything else, we must admit that the complex and interesting halakhic, philosophical, and mystical world developed with great efforts by the rabbis of late antiquity and all their medieval and modern heirs did not provide a fully satisfying answer to the needs and wishes of the Jews who abided by its rules, and sometimes not even to the needs of those elites which helped set the rules. and if we may borrow Freud’s observations about ‘civilization and its dis-contents’, that is, about the gap between what the human instincts demand and what any human culture can provide, as well as what it then demands of each individual in return, i believe that we may use Jewish magic as an interesting point of entry into the ‘unease’ within Jewish culture, and into the gap between the tools and promises provided by the Jewish religion and the daily lives of its Jewish users. after all, the thousands of magical recipes for love, for hate, to heal the sick, to foretell the future, to find treasures and to exorcize demons which are strewn throughout the Jewish magical tradition clearly demonstrate the inability of more normative Jewish frame-works to answer many of the needs of ordinary Jews, who therefore had to look for answers in the magical texts and among their practitioners. Some of these practitioners lived and practiced outside the rabbinic establish-ment, and perhaps even were negatively disposed towards it, but many others were deeply implanted at the heart of this establishment. in both cases, the very need for such wide-ranging extra-halakhic activities, which often were highly questionable from a halakhic point of view (and think, for example, of the adjuration of angels and demons, of animal sacrifices and the offering of incense at the time when the Jerusalem Temple was no longer standing, or of the use of ‘names of impurity’, all of which are widely attested in the Jewish magical tradition), tells us much about the shortcomings and failures of the Jewish religious system as a whole. it is for this reason too that we must study all aspects of the Jewish magical tradition, and focus not only on the heritage of the People of the Book, but also of the people of the magical recipe books, who often turn out to be the very same people. and when we ask such questions, we should always keep in mind the thriving Christian and Muslim magical traditions, both of which furnish much further proof that magic is endemic within all three monotheistic traditions, in spite of their insistence that it is not, and that if it does appear here and there, it certainly should not be tolerated.


in addition to the above-mentioned fields, the study of Jewish magical texts has much to contribute to many other fields as well. The sociological study of Judaism has much to learn from such a study, including the eluci-dation of the Jewish constructions of gender—with the male claims about female witchcraft often contradicted by the magical texts themselves, most of which were written by Jewish men (aubin 1998; Lesses 2001; Mock 2001; Janowitz 2001: 86-96; Stratton 2007; and cf. elior 2008). The same is true for the study of ‘elite’ vs. ‘popular’ culture in Jewish communities of different places and periods, or the study of local Jewish minhagim and magic (Sabar 2006; Sperber 2008), or the study of the borders of the obe-dience to normative halakha, which supposedly forbids any dealing with magic, and certainly forbids many of the specific magical practices which are widely attested in the Jewish magical tradition (note Sharot 1982, whose observations could greatly be improved in light of the Jewish magical texts). Students of Jewish folklore will surely benefit from a huge corpus of texts whose significance already was noted by scholars such as Grunwald (1900–27) or Patai (1949), but which seem to have been neglected by more recent generations of Jewish folklore scholars, who sometimes study Jewish magical practices, but rarely dig into the Jewish magical texts themselves (Ben Simhon 1991; Sabar 2000 and 2002). Moreover, the study of Jewish magic will also aid in highlighting the differences between the warnings of the Babylonian rabbis or the Testament of Rabbi Judah the Pious—against sitting under a drain, sleeping in an empty house, building a house in a hith-erto uninhabited location, and so on—and the detailed magical practices which were developed or adopted by the Jewish practitioners for the han-dling of much greater dangers and for the accomplishment of much greater feats. The study of Jewish mysticism will make an important step forward when it finally drops both Gershom Scholem’s understanding of Jewish magic as the ugly stepdaughter of Jewish mysticism and Moshe idel’s view of much of Jewish religion and almost all of Jewish mysticism as suffused with magic, and would become more acquainted with the Jewish magical texts themselves and more accustomed to seeing the Jewish magical tradi-tion as a sister—sometimes an older sister, sometimes a younger sister, and mostly a distant sister—of the Jewish mystical tradition (cf. Liebes 2004). and the study of Jewish art would be exposed to a new corpus of Jewish iconography (Wolfson 2001 and Swartz 2005), which is quite different from what we usually think of as ‘Jewish art’—be those the images which accompany many of the Babylonian incantation bowls (which are currently being studied by naama Vilozny), the anthropomorphic demons which are found in a handful of Genizah magical texts written in Judaeo-arabic and displaying extensive Muslim influences (see Baker-Polliack 2001: Pl. 21),


the images which are found on some Renaissance and later Jewish magical manuscripts (Rohrbacher-Sticker 1993–94 and 1995), or the printed images and iconographic metal works on modern Jewish amulets (Sabar 2002 and forthcoming; Behrouzi 2002). The study of Jewish codicology and book production has much to learn from the study of the Jewish magical com-pendia of the Middle ages in their different forms—be they vertical scrolls (rotuli), makeshift booklets or full-fledged codices—and from a detailed analysis of the ways in which some of the owners of magical recipes uti-lized old pieces of paper, recycled outdated documents, and made ample use of the blank pages of non-magical manuscripts for recording and trans-mitting their magical know-how (Veltri 2005; Shoham-Steiner forthcom-ing). The study of Jewish literacy will derive great benefits from a close examination of the magicians’ handbooks in order to study their abilities and limitations as authors, compilers, translators and copyists, and from a systematic appreciation of their linguistic abilities, their general education, their knowledge of sacred Jewish texts, and their interest in the claims and achievements of non-Jewish practitioners. in this context, it would also be interesting to compare different versions of the same magical recipe as they appear in different manuscripts, in printed books of Jewish magic, and in the testimonies of contemporary users and polemicists, in order to study the transmission history of single recipes and their transformations during the shift from oral to scribal, and from scribal to printed modes of textual transmission. all these fields, and many others besides, have much to gain from a greater acquaintance with the rich textual remains of the Jewish magical tradition.

How Should We Study the Jewish Magical Tradition?

how, then, should we approach the study of Jewish magic? My own answer would be very simple—we must study Jewish magic in the same manner, and with the same tools, used in any other field of humanistic studies. First, we must identify the sources at our disposal, on which any future research will be based, and find out the best ways to classify and analyze them. in this case, the process of identification is relatively simple, since one of the characteristic features of the Jewish magical tradition, at least from late antiquity onwards, is the existence of a written body of magical recipes, recipe books, and more ‘literary’ books of magic (such as Sepher Ha-Razim or the Sword of Moses, or the magical sections of Sepher Raziel). in the First Temple period most of the magical activity conducted by Jews apparently


was both transmitted and performed in an oral fashion, and such written artifacts as the ketef hinnom amulets (Barkay et al. 2004), or the use of writing in the sotah ceremony of num. 5.11-31, are mainly the exceptions which prove the rule. in the Second Temple period, we already have much evidence for the writing down of exorcistic hymns (nitzan 1994: 227-72; eshel 2003), but no real evidence for the use of magical recipe books or even of written amulets (cf. Swartz 2001, Bohak 2008: 70-142, and Cohn 2008). But from the third or fourth century ce, and probably under the influence of Graeco-egyptian magic, of the kind reflected in the Greek magical papyri, we witness the rise of a fully scribal Jewish magical tradi-tion, in which writing is used both in the transmission of magical know-how and in the magical praxis itself (Bohak 2008: 281-85). Moreover, once the Jewish magical tradition became fully scribalized, it has remained so to this very day, even if and when some traditions and practices (esp. what we might call ‘folk remedies’) continued to be transmitted orally as well. Thus, the Jewish magical tradition has left us an incredibly large and varied body of magical texts, which often is characterized by specific formal and linguistic features, including the appearance of magical signs, words, and images, the proliferation of adjuration formulae (harari 2005b), or the frequent boasts that a certain recipe is ‘tried and tested’. Thus, it is clear that the first, and most essential, stage in the study of the Jewish magical tradition must consist of identifying, classifying, cataloguing, editing, and translating as many Jewish magical texts as possible, in order to place the study of the Jewish magical tradition on a sound textual basis, and to allow as many scholars as possible easy access to this branch of the Jewish cul-tural heritage.

as a rule, the textual remains of the Jewish magical tradition may be divided into five main types, as follows

1. The Jewish Magical Texts of Late AntiquityWhile the quantity of Jewish magical texts from the Second Temple period is quite small, and might remain so in the future, from late antiq-uity onwards we have a large body of Jewish magical texts and artifacts (alexander 1986; Swartz 2006; Bohak 2008: 143-226), and this body will grow much larger in coming years, with the edition of many new magical texts which are currently being prepared for publication, and with the likely discovery of many more such texts. on the one hand, we have a few dozen metal-plate amulets, and a smaller number of aggressive and erotic magical artifacts, stemming from late antique Palestine and its environs (naveh and Shaked 1985 and 1993; kotansky 1991a and 1991b (republ. in


kotansky 1994, no. 56); kotansky, naveh and Shaked 1992; Tsereteli 1996 (with Shaked 2006); McCollough and Glazier-Mcdonald 1996; McCol-lough 1998; naveh 2001 and 2002; Müller-kessler et al. 2007; Puech 2008; and cf. hamilton 1996 for an amulet whose authenticity is doubtful). These items will soon be joined by a few dozen artifacts which are cur-rently found in private collections, in archaeological museums, and in the hands of the archaeologists who discovered them, and whose publication is eagerly expected. To these, one may add a handful of aramaic magical papyri, all in a sorry state of preservation (Bohak 2008: 165-69), which also will have to be edited, or re-edited, in one form or another. on the other hand, we have a few hundred published Babylonian aramaic incan-tation bowls (e.g., Montgomery 1913; Gordon 1937 and 1941; Jeruzalmi 1963; isbell 1976; Franco 1978–79; Geller 1980 and 1986; naveh and Shaked 1985 and 1993; Segal 2000; Levene 2003; Müller-kessler 2005; Moriggi 2005; see also the larger surveys by Juusola 1999; Levene 2002; Morony 2003). These will soon be joined by many hundreds of such bowls which are currently flooding the antiquities markets and are being bought mostly by private collectors. To this rich corpus, whose exact size cannot even be determined, one might add other magical materials whose origins seem to lie with the Jews of late antique Babylonia, such as human skulls inscribed in aramaic and apparently containing some magical incantations (Levene 2006), and perhaps also metal-plate amulets on which the text was written in ink, rather than incised with a sharp nail in the usual manner (Geller 1997; but cf. naveh 2002: 232). Moreover, to these ‘archaeologi-cal’ sources we may add the more ‘literary’ books of magic, transmitted in medieval manuscripts both inside and outside the Cairo Genizah, such as Sepher Ha-Razim, the Sword of Moses, or the Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, all of which shed much light on the shape of the Jewish magical tradition in late antique Palestine and Babylonia.

2. The Magical Texts from the Cairo Genizahalthough the Cairo Genizah was ‘discovered’ in 1896, and continuously studied ever since (Reif 2000), its numerous magical fragments have mostly been ignored by earlier Genizah scholars (Cohen 2006). The serious study of these fragments began when Mordechai Margalioth, in search of Rabbinic fragments in the Cambridge Genizah collections, chanced upon a folder which contained ‘kabbalistic writings, amulets and adjurations, and so forth’, all of which he skimmed ‘in haste and without much interest’, and ran into a magical recipe intended to make chariots win the chariot races and written in good rabbinic hebrew. Feeling that the fragment was too interesting to be ignored, and goaded by Professor Saul Lieberman,


Margalioth went on to identify other Genizah fragments, and non-Genizah manuscripts, of Sepher Ha-Razim, and eventually reconstructed the entire book (cf. his own description of his discovery in Margalioth 1966: ix). But even this sensational discovery, which caused quite a stir in some schol-arly circles, did not wake the study of the Genizah magical texts from its slumber, and only in the 1980s did they begin to receive the attention they deserve. We still lack a comprehensive catalogue of these important frag-ments, and the number of published fragments currently stands at less than 150, out of many hundreds of publishable texts (naveh and Shaked 1985 and 1993; Schiffman and Swartz 1992; Schäfer and Shaked 1994–forth-coming; Geller and Levene 1998; Saar 2007; and cf. the broader surveys by Schäfer 1990; Wasserstrom 1992 and 2005; Seidel 2003, and the non-Genizah amulet from afghanistan published by Shaked 2009). Moreover, because of the specific interests of the scholars who published them, the published Genizah magical fragments tend to focus on those texts which are likely to be copies of copies of late-antique originals, and those which show some linguistic, textual or phenomenological resemblance to the hekhalot literature and early Jewish mysticism. other types of Genizah magical texts, and especially those whose origins lie in the Muslim/arabic magical tradition, have received very little attention (Golb 1967; Shaked 1994 and 2000), and most have never been published. during the last few years i have been studying all the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah, based on a preliminary handlist prepared by Professor Shaul Shaked and on my own survey of the entire Cambridge Genizah collection, in search for more magic-related fragments, and i am currently preparing both a cata-logue of the magical fragments from the Cambridge Genizah collections, and a series of publications of Genizah magical texts and studies of specific features of these texts (including Bohak 1999, 2005, 2006, forthcoming a and b). it must be stressed, however, that both the sheer quantity and the great inner diversity of the Genizah magical texts, including magical frag-ments in Coptic (see Meyer and Smith 1994: 197-99; all the Coptic magical texts from the Cairo Genizah will be published by Professor Jacques van der Vliet), Judaeo-Persian (Shaked 1988), and Ladino (Gutwirth 1983 and 1989), and many different types of magical practices and technologies, call for the participation of many more scholars in this wide and intriguing field of research.

3. The (Non-Genizah) Jewish Magical Manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the Modern Eraif the study of the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah has only just begun, the study of all other Jewish magical manuscripts has yet to begin,


and at present we do not have even a most basic map of this almost virgin territory, and not even a single Jewish magical manuscript has been edited from cover to cover (for the best we now have, see Benayahu 1972), and this in spite of the availability of some useful models from the non- Jewish world, on which to base such an edition (kieckhefer 1997; hedegård 2002). in the future, i hope to produce one such edition, of a large fifteenth- century compendium of magical and kabbalistic texts, manu-script Sassoon 56 = new York Public Library 190, which contains many hundreds of magical recipes in hebrew, aramaic, and Judaeo-arabic, some of which can be shown to be copies of late-antique originals, while others are of a demonstrably Muslim or arabic origin, and others are of a Spanish- Jewish or ashkenazi-Jewish origin. But complete editions are only one way of approaching Jewish magical manuscripts, and in the long run a more fruitful approach would include a comprehensive survey of all, or many, of these different manuscripts (cf. Scholem 1930 and 1974: 182-89). at present, the only reasonable point of departure for such a survey would be the catalogues of hebrew manuscripts of individual libraries, and especially the electronic catalogue of the institute for Microfilmed hebrew Manuscripts (iMhM) at the Jewish national and University Library in Jerusalem, which covers all types of Jewish manuscripts of all periods and in all libraries and private collections. Given its compre-hensive nature, the iMhM catalogue includes many hundreds of magical manuscripts, and even more manuscripts of non-magical contents which also contain some magical texts, but it unfortunately provides relatively little information concerning the magical contents of these manuscripts, and that information often is wrong or inaccurate and in need of much further improvement. Moreover, we do not have even a most rudimentary typological framework for the classification of such manuscripts, beyond establishing their estimated dates and geographical provenances accord-ing to the standard palaeographical and codicological criteria and examin-ing the languages they use and the sources they mention (and when we are dealing with magical materials, many texts mention no sources, and many others claim to be derived from sources that are patently bogus or apoc-ryphal). Thus, one of the first tasks facing scholars in this vast area is the creation of a basic methodological infrastructure for the classification of these materials, such as the distinction between learned magic and popular magic or between magic transmitted in ‘literary’ books of magic such as Sepher Ha-Razim or the Sword of Moses, in clusters of recipes arranged in some predetermined order (such as Shimmush Tehillim, which lists the magical uses of different Psalms), or in free-form magical handbooks


with endless sequences of magical recipes for every conceivable aim. another useful distinction would be between magical texts and practices whose origins lie in late antiquity, those whose origins are to be sought in the Muslim world, and those which stem from the Latin-Christian or the Byzantine-Christian worlds. We will also need a better set of distinc-tions between magical texts and practices which may be identified by their contexts as ‘practical kabbalah’ in the narrow sense of the world (i.e., magic which is based on kabbalistic worldviews, speculations, and practices), those which are entirely uninfluenced by the kabbalah and its many offshoots, and those which were incorporated into the world of kab-balah, in spite of some kabbalists’ vehement objections (idel 1983; Garb 2002; Chajes 2003b). Finally, we will need a detailed study of the manners by which magical texts and recipes were written and transmitted in the same manuscripts with non-magical materials, such as halakhic compen-dia, prayer and liturgy, kabbalah, biblical exegesis, and so on—all of which will tell us much about the identity of the transmitters of the Jewish magical tradition, and about their other scribal and devotional activities. only once we have developed all these basic analytic tools and edited a few magical manuscripts in a way that highlights their unique nature and explains their specific contents, will we be well equipped for a thorough survey of all the materials identified as magic-related by the iMhM cata-logue, and of manuscripts such as that of Meir ben ezri in late-nineteenth century kurdistan. in so doing, we will be making a crucial contribution to the study of the Jewish magical tradition as a whole.

4. Printed Books of Jewish Magicof all the different manifestations of the Jewish magical tradition, the books of amulets, segulot (literally, ‘properties’, but usually just an inof-fensive code-word for ‘magical recipes’), healings, and ‘practical kab-balah’ which were printed during the last few centuries, and are still being printed and utilized today, are the easiest to handle, mainly because they are so readily available and—being printed—so easy to read. and yet, here too there is much room for further study, and whereas the magical handbooks of ashkenazi Jews have received some attention (Matras 1997 and 2005), as did some types of printed Jewish amulets (Juhasz 2004) those of the Jews of islam—such as the many printed books of magic of the nineteenth-century Rabbi abraham hamuy—have yet to receive the attention they deserve (and the latter are currently being studied by nissim hamoi). it must be noted, however, that in the history of Jewish magic the shift from manuscripts to printed editions was accompanied by much


censorship, and especially self-censorship, by their collectors and printers. Thus, in spite of the great importance of such books as Toledoth Adam, Mif‘alot Elohim, Davek me-A’H, or Abi‘ah Hidot for the study of modern Jewish magic, their significance for the study of the Jewish magical tradi-tion in earlier periods often is much less than that of the modern magical manuscripts of some oriental Jews—who were far less exposed to print culture than their european brethren, and far less bothered by issues of censorship—manuscripts which often preserve older and more ‘authentic’ magical texts.

5. Contemporary Jewish Magicone last important source for the study of Jewish magic is that which is still practiced today (Ben Simhon 1991; Bilu 2000; Varol 2002; harari 2005a and 2007a; kaspina 2006; alexander and Papo 2006–2007). Such materi-als suffer from some major methodological problems, including the need to distinguish between specialized magic and mere popular knowledge (such as the use of chicken soup, or mint tea, to heal various ailments) and between ‘authentic’ magicians and quacks and new agers, who merely pretend to be relying on age-old Jewish traditions. Moreover, even the ‘authentic’ and well-versed magicians sometimes turn out to rely in part on magical texts which they have read only in modern, scientific editions, so that academic scholarship now replenishes the magical arsenal of the magicians whose forefathers’ manuscripts it seeks to study (almagor 2006). and yet the use of these kinds of sources has some great advantages as well. First, they enable us to study closely sources the oral and written sources utilized by the magicians themselves, and to see how well contemporary practitioners know the recipes, practices and spells which the scholar knows so well from the other sources at his or her disposal. Second, they allow a close examination of how the owners and users of these magical technologies see their own activities—do they describe themselves as ‘magicians’, as ‘ba‘alei shem(ot)’ (literally, ‘masters of name(s)’, i.e., of powerful names of God through which one can work miracles), or as experts in ‘practical kabbalah’? or perhaps they are completely disinterested in such issues, and remain totally oblivious of our scholarly need to classify them accord-ing to their practices and assign them a well-defined social status? Third, they allow us to study aspects of Jewish magical praxis which are simply not covered by the magical manuscripts and handbooks we have, such as the relations between the practitioner and his (or, far more rarely, her) clients, the practitioner’s own views about the efficacy of his practices (has a ‘tried and tested’ recipe really been tested, and how?), and his attitudes


towards orally-transmitted magical recipes and those which were transmit-ted in written form, or towards those derived from Jewish sources and those whose origins are demonstrably non-Jewish. Moreover, a detailed study of contemporary Jewish magic could help elucidate the mechanisms by which some segments of the Jewish population can ignore the existence of this rich cultural world and its great appeal to many Jews, and go on insisting that ‘Jews don’t do such things’.

These, then, are the main types of sources at our disposal, and it is the detailed analysis of these sources that must form the first stage of any study of the Jewish magical tradition. But during the process of mapping, cataloguing and editing of all those textual sources scholars should also constantly compare the different types of sources, since there are many similarities, overlaps and continuities between them, and we can often understand magical texts of one period by studying parallel or similar texts from another period. one important component of this process would be the identification and reconstruction of all those books of magic which were mentioned by the Geonim, the karaites, the philosophers and the kabbalists, for even after the discovery and edition of books such as the Sword of Moses and Sepher Ha-Razim, there are still quite a few ‘literary’ books of magic which await a detailed reconstruction, and their textual remains are strewn in all the above-mentioned manuscripts. Moreover, the reconstruction and edition of more such texts would also greatly facili-tate the study of their interrelations and of their ultimate origins, as older magical materials often were ‘recycled’ into new magical compositions (see Rebiger 2005 and Leicht 2006: 187-294, for the sources of Sepher Raziel). another important task would be the identification of parallel or similar recipes in different magical recipe books, and the examina-tion of the ways in which single recipes, or clusters of recipes, or specific magical technologies, were transmitted from one generation to the next and from one Jewish community to another (cf. daiches 1913). Similarly, a detailed comparison of the Jewish magical texts and the contempora-neous ‘pagan’, Christian and Muslim practices would be of great help in the identification of some of the sources mined by the Jewish magi-cians in their search for new and up-to-date magical technologies, and in mapping the processes of translation, adaptation, copying and transmission of non-Jewish magical books and recipes into the Jewish magical tradi-tion. The comparison between the practices enjoined by the magical texts themselves and those described in the non-magical literature would help us identify, date and contextualize the Jewish magical books and recipes


and document their actual use in different periods. This would include all the rabbinic, Geonic, and medieval halakhic discussions of magic and magicians (Zimmels 1952; Shatzmiller 1982–83; Sperber 1994; Weinroth 1996; kanarfogel 2000; Veltri 1997 and 2002; alexander 2005), the karaite polemics against Rabbanite magical practices (Mann 1935: 75-83; harari 2007b) and the discussions of magical practices by philosophers and bibli-cal exegetes (klein-Braslavy 2000; Schwartz 2005). it would also include the descriptions of magic and magicians by kabbalists (huss 2000: 212-24 and 2004), composers of mussar literature (Bar-Levav 2003) and hasidic story-tellers (nigal 1983 and 1994), as well as the descriptions of Jewish magic in the writings of Christian and Muslim authors (Trachtenberg 1943; Lecker 1992). it must be stressed, however, that the last few sentences entail an amazing amount of scholarly spadework, much of it extremely tedious, which will have to be divided between many different scholars, each working within his or her sphere of interest and linguistic expertise. no living scholar can read all the Jewish magical texts in their original languages—from hebrew and aramaic, through Greek and Judaeo-Per-sian, to Judaeo-arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, and all the languages of modern europe—nor is such a scholar likely to emerge in the future. This, however, can hardly be considered a serious handicap, since, as in any other field of cultural and religious studies, the study of Jewish magic must rely both on a synchronic perspective (which would include the detailed study of the magical practices of every Jewish community and the comparison of these practices with those of the contemporaneous non-Jewish world in which it lived) and on a diachronic perspective (which would pay attention to processes of continuity and transformation within the Jewish magical tradi-tion itself). only an interdisciplinary cooperation between many different scholars could achieve these goals, and establish a sophisticated and bal-anced field of research which would be open to many different approaches and research methods.

and here we move to the next stage in the study of Jewish magic, in which, in addition to, and in line with, the textual mapping and analysis, we must also try to sketch the different stages in the history of Jewish magic, and the historical processes which shaped its development and continue to shape it today. To do so, we would have to rid ourselves of the notion that magic, by its very nature, is somehow timeless and unchanging, and admit that it too has its history. When we read the magical recipes of a Jewish magician in nineteenth-century kurdistan, we cannot help noting not only the great continuity of Jewish magical practices from late antiquity to his own days, but also the great transformation they underwent along the way. at every stage in the development of the Jewish magical tradition we can


see how certain ancient elements continue to be transmitted and developed while others wither away, and how new influences—both from within the Jewish world and from the outside—enrich the Jewish magical tradition with new elements which were not there before. The study of these proc-esses is still in its infancy, both because the few scholars who dealt with Jewish magic tended to approach it from an a-historical perspective and within narrow chronological and geographical frameworks, and because until now no one has ever tried to present a complete history of the Jewish magical tradition, a kind of Major Trends in Jewish Magic, out of which and in reaction to which other scholars might develop deeper analyses of the changing features of the Jewish magical tradition in different times and places. Such a synthesis would be an essential step towards the establish-ment of this field of research, and a sound basis on which to base further progress. Without such a broad historical picture—even an incomplete and partly misguided picture—it would be difficult to organize and analyze the thousands of pieces of data which will be gathered during the text-based analyses.

The third stage of this research, which could be carried out in part simul-taneously with the first two and in part only once they have been completed, will be the synthetic stage, in which Jewish magic will be fully integrated into the history of Jewish culture and of the Jewish people. Today one can still publish an encyclopedia of medieval Jewish culture without any entry on Jewish magic and with no references to medieval Jewish magical texts and practices (Roth 2003), or a guide to Jewish Studies which completely ignores Jewish magic or its study (Goodman (ed.) 2002), but if we wish to study Judaism as it really was, or as it really is, we must assure that in the future no study of any Jewish community would so easily ignore the Jewish magical beliefs and practices. in some of the older scholarship (e.g., Güde-mann 1880–88), magic was treated as a part of the Jews’ daily lives, but in more recent scholarship there is a sad tendency either to ignore it alto-gether, or to isolate it as a special sphere of activity which must be studied separately. This might be a good solution for the time being, given the sheer quantity of the evidence and the need to study it in great detail, but in the long run we must assure that the results of the study of Jewish magic do not remain hidden in their own specialized publications and lay covered by a thick patina of specialized academic jargon, but become accessible and appealing to all scholars of Jews and Judaism, and to all scholars of religion and society as well.

in all three stages of the proposed research, we must employ all the tools developed for the synchronic and diachronic study of cultural and religious activities, including the philological, phenomenological, comparative,


anthropological, sociological and folkloristic analyses, as well as any other method which has proven useful in other fields of humanistic studies. Jewish magic, like the magic of other peoples, is not sui generis in any way, and does not require its own tools of research, only a well-informed and sophisticated use of readily available scholarly methods. The arrested development of the study of Jewish magic is not due to some lack of meth-odological or conceptual tools, only to a distorted set of priorities in Jewish Studies in the two hundred years of their existence, and to the ongoing tendency to prefer the study of those aspects of Jewish culture which suit our own taste, at the expense of those Jewish beliefs and practices which many scholars disparage. Moreover, we must realize that the psychological hurdles we face here are not very different from those which were previ-ously felt by Classicists, who took many years to recognize the existence and significance of the Greek magical papyri and curse tablets (see esp. Brashear 1995), or to admit that there is much to be said not only about the Greek discovery of philosophy and rationalism, but also about The Greeks and the Irrational (dodds 1951; Collins 2008). They even learnt to make much use of such sources in reconstructing the social, cultural and religious history of the ancient world (e.g., Graf 1997; Faraone 1999), a process which has yet to happen when it comes to Jewish magic. and a look at the history of the study of Christian magic shows that there too, a near-complete denial of the very possibility of Christian magic—and the use, mostly in Protestant circles, of ‘magic’ as a label with which to de-legitimize other Christian denominations (Styers 2004)—was gradually replaced by a growing willingness to incorporate magic as one important component of Christian beliefs and practices (Thomas 1971; kieckhefer 1990; Flint 1991; Meyer and Smith 1994). in light of such precedents, there is no need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to Jewish magic, only to learn from the experience of Classicists and scholars of Christianity and to follow in their footsteps. Rather than deny the existence of what might not suit our modern tastes, as some scholars still do (and as is still quite common, for example, in the study of Muslim magic), we must learn to study Jewish magic, to compare it to other magical traditions, and to see what is unique about it and what is not. if we are serious about the study of Jews and Judaism, and even if we only wish to study Jews and Judaism in order to learn more about Christianity, about islam, or about the human condition as a whole, then we must also learn to take Jewish magic very seriously, at least as seriously as it was taken by the Jews who produced, copied, used and transmitted the thousands of Jewish magical texts and artifacts which happen to have reached us.


Summary and Conclusions

in this bird’s-eye survey of the study of Jewish magic, i have tried to briefly summarize what has already been done, and especially to highlight the gap between what has been achieved and what still needs to be done, and to explain why such a study is so important. i also tried to sketch some of the ways in which such research could and should proceed in order to meet its goals. none of this would be easy, and i have no doubt that the voyage of discovery which i have described here will prove long and difficult, and would require the joint efforts of many different scholars. There is a great uncertainty when one ventures into an academic terra incognita, and a constant tension between the desire to classify and edit new sources in order to enable a sounder basis for future syntheses and the need to gener-ate preliminary analyses and syntheses of the currently available sources in order to place these sources in their correct historical and cultural contexts and highlight their significance and importance. But the great difficulty of venturing down unknown paths and generating one’s maps as one pro-ceeds also has some great rewards, in the form of surprising discoveries of hitherto unknown worlds which our intellectual forefathers chose not to discover at all. and if in the course of this new research we discover that we can not only incorporate the study of Jewish magic into the study of Jewish history and culture as a whole, but also show how it poses a challenge to established opinions and accepted wisdoms in many other subfields, then we would know that we are approaching our desired goal. The study of Jewish magic is of great importance not only ‘because it’s there’, and not only because this is a virgin territory which awaits its explorers, but because it can contribute much to our understanding of Judaism as a whole, in all its complexity and with all its internal inconsistencies and disturbing truths.

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Documents

a (Eng) Final