Between Worlds - J. H. Chajes Jewish Culture and Contexts

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accounts makes mention of the fact that the woman was in bed when Vital arrived. The choreography of the scene is modestly ambiguous. Second, all popular accounts claim that Vital used a “decree” to force the spirit to face him; no physical contact with the woman, which too might have been construed as immodest, was necessary.76 Finally, it is the spirit’s sinfulness that, in popular accounts, explains the spirit’s inability to face Vital, rather than its visionary insight of Vital’s spiritual grandeur. From these differences, we may see precisely the areas in which accounts that have some factual basis are reported quite accurately, but with omissions and additions that bowdlerize the texts where they might prove embarrassing, or insufficiently didactic. Apparently a portrait of Vital grabbing a visionary woman in her bedchamber was not what the writers and redactors of these accounts had in mind.77

      And sexual transgression is indeed at the heart of the case, the spirit’s sin being the fathering of bastards in an adulterous affair with a married woman. In his conversation with Vital, the spirit recounts his sins and, at greater length, the travails he has undergone since his death by drowning.78 Refused entry into Gehinnom by 10,000 protesting sinners ostensibly more worthy than he, the spirit attempted to find refuge in the body of a Jewish inhabitant of the city of Ormuz.79 To his chagrin, not a single Jew in that city could provide him with an inhabitable body. Here again, sexual transgression figures prominently. Owing to their “fornication with menstruating [Jewish] and Gentile women,” the bodies of these Jews are contaminated, filled, and surrounded with the forces of defilement. The account of this case, perhaps more than any other, is indeed rife with images of bodies filled—filled with forces of defilement, with souls of the living and the dead, and even with fetuses. When the spirit cannot possess a Jew in Ormuz without harming further his own reprobate soul, he enters a doe in the wilderness of Gaza out of sheer desperation.80 This doe, however, was itself an unsuitable container—“for the soul of a human being and the soul of a beast are not equal, for one walks upright and the other bent.” The spirit, then, is not what would be thought of today as “spiritual”; it has physical form and dimensions, and only the human body is contoured such as to make it an apposite host. It is matter, albeit of a much finer grade than that of which the body is formed. “Also, the soul [nefesh] of the beast is full of filth and is repulsive, its smell foul before the soul of a human being. And its food is not human food.” In the spirit’s description of his travails, he makes clear that the host’s pains and pleasures are fully shared by the temporary, unwelcome squatter. And if the mismatch wasn’t uncomfortable enough given the differences of form and diet, the spirit explains that in this case, the doe was pregnant and was therefore already quite full. The result was pain for the spirit and the doe alike, for “three souls cannot dwell together” in a single body. The doe, in agony, ran wildly in the hills and through rocky terrain, her belly swollen, until it split open, pouring out the three occupants with her death.81

      The next bodily container for the spirit was to be a Kohen (a Jew of the priestly caste) in the city of Nablus. This gentleman, apparently realizing that he was possessed, called in the local expert exorcists for assistance. In this case, the spirit tells us that Muslim clerics were summoned, not kabbalists. This detail accords well with what we know about Jewish life in mid-sixteenth-century Nablus. Unlike the Jews in Safed who lived in a separate Jewish quarter, the Jews of Nablus lived in mixed Jewish-Muslim neighborhoods.82 It is also indicative of the acceptance of non-Jewish magical healers in Jewish society that we shall consider at greater length below. The Islamic holy men—using incantations, adjurations, and amulets—do, in fact, succeed in exorcising the spirit from the Kohen. Here again, it is the bodily vessel and its contents that determine the matter. Responding to Vital’s astonishment that the Muslims’ magico-mystical arsenal was capable of effecting the exorcism, the spirit explains that the techniques employed by the Muslims infused the Kohen’s body with so many defiling spirits that he had to leave to avoid the kind of contamination he had feared contracting from the impure contents of the bodies of the Jews of Ormuz.83 This fascinating turnabout takes us from what at first appears to be a model of magico-therapeutic syncretism to a devastating critique of such syncretism. The ambivalence felt in the wake of a successful exorcism performed by the “competition” is articulated in terms that authorize that power while simultaneously undermining its religious credibility; they won the race but failed the drug test. This critique, moreover, is somewhat ironic given the widespread use of demonic adjurations to expel evil spirits found in Jewish magical manuscripts. Such demonic adjurations work along similar lines, essentially forcing out the spirits by their own malevolent presence and potency.84

      What motivated the spirit’s possession of the widow? Early modern Christian attitudes regarding demonic motivations underlying possession reflected theological premises quite remote from Jewish conceptions. In his Traicté des Energumènes of 1599, Léon D’Alexis (Pierre de Bérulle) explained the Devil’s motives in a manner that reveals how broad the gulf could be between Jewish and Christian views. The Devil, he argued, being “the ape of God,” is dedicated to incarnating himself in men, as did Christ himself.85 This, he suggested, accounts for the proliferation of possession since the birth of Christ.86 Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century also assumed that demonic possession was most likely to occur as a punishment for the sins of the possessed, whereas popular accounts most commonly portray victims of possession as “pious young Christians.” Is there a similar disparity between learned and popular views of this issue in Jewish culture? R. Moses Cordovero stated in his Drishot be-‘Inyanei ha-Malakhim (Inquiries Concerning Angels) that “the types of ‘ibbur depend on a man’s moral and spiritual state, whether his soul is entered by a good soul—because he has done a miẓvah—or an evil soul—because he has committed some sin….”87 Even though we have few sources that can directly provide a “popular” Jewish conception of the typical victim of spirit possession, we may be able to infer a disparity of this kind from the degree of inner confusion on this point displayed in Jewish sources. Early modern Jewish possession accounts shift inconsistently between affirmations of the innocence and even piety of the victim, and ascriptions of blame—often of the same person. When the exorcists in the Falcon case asked the spirit of Samuel Ẓarfati what allowed him to possess a “kosher” woman, he replied that the woman had inadvertently cast some mud upon him as he was hovering in her midst.88 In the case currently under consideration, we know that the most egregious sin of the spirit was sexual, but what of the widow? The sin that allows for the possession to take place seems not much less trivial, though “justifiable” on the basis of the positions staked out in the contemporary Jewish demonological literature. As Vital himself wrote in his treatise on transmigration, “it sometimes happens that notwithstanding the presence in a person of a pure and sublime soul, he may come at some point to anger. Then, [that soul] will depart from him, and in its place will enter another, inferior soul.”89 Before concluding his exorcism of the widow (and the woman in Case 7), Vital asks the spirit how he obtained permission to enter his victim’s body: “The spirit responded: ‘I spent one night in her house. At dawn, this woman arose from her bed and wanted to light a fire from the stone and iron, but the burnt rag did not catch the sparks. She persisted stubbornly, but did not succeed. She then became intensely angry, and cast the iron and the stone and the burnt rag—everything—from her hand to the ground, and angrily said, ‘to Satan with you!’ Immediately I was given permission to enter her body.’” What appears to us as a small matter, a casual curse out of frustration, was evidently taken quite seriously. This severe approach to cursing had its basis in the strict enforcement of the third commandment, and traditional Jewish law prescribed penalties for such verbal crimes that paralleled those meted out to witches and idolaters.90 Sixteenth-century Jews were not alone in regarding the consequences of cursing most gravely; many Christian tales of possession dealt with the consequences of the curse “the devil take you.”91 Maureen Flynn has recently noted that “blasphemy was the most frequently censured religious offence of the Spanish people in the early modern period, far outnumbering convictions on charges of Judaism, Lutheranism, Illuminism, sexual immorality or witchcraft.”92 J. P. Dedieu’s work has shown, moreover, that, as in the expression by the woman in the possession case under our consideration, the Spanish Inquisitors were concerned with “petty crimes

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