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

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historians and anthropologists offer various competing theories to account for the disproportionate number of women possessed by the spirits, that is, participating in the cultural construct of spirit possession.26 The oft-cited 2:1 ratio of women victims of possession has been said to reflect a protofeminist attempt to take advantage of the license possession offered women to preach in public.27 Young women have been seen as struggling with sexual anxieties expressed through the idiom of possession, often construed as a rapelike penetration of their bodies by the lascivious spirit.28 Devout women, under the pressures of extreme religious demands and wrenching sectarian conflicts, are understood as having expressed their religious disturbance somatically.29 At the heart of this historiographical debate is the question of the volition of the possessed. To what extent could victims use the phenomenon to advance their interests?30

      Although the shocking rise of witch-hunting in early modern Europe has been well documented, there is less evidence to demonstrate a similarly exponential rise in contemporary cases of spirit possession. Unlike witchcraft, being possessed was not a criminal offense, so it was not subject to serialized documentation.31 The absence of legal sources makes it impossible to chart the incidence of possession statistically—as has been done with so much success with the witch trials. Nevertheless, a marked increase in the incidence of possession beginning in the mid-sixteenth century is evident. According to H. C. Erik Midelfort, spirit possession, part and parcel of the “growing demonization of the world” in the sixteenth century, “became epidemic … only after about 1560.”32 D. P. Walker also claimed that there was a rise in the incidence of possession in this period. In addition to expressions in the sources attesting to the novelty of these events, exorcisms became more common as they came to be used, according to Walker, first as a form of religious propaganda—most commonly by Catholics against Protestants—and later as an intrinsic element of witch-hunts.33 Indeed, Walker stressed that exorcism became one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the early modern Catholic Church for demonstrating in a public, theatrical, and tangible manner that its doctrines and sacraments were true and that its priests were empowered by God to work miracles.34 Of course, it may be an exaggeration to refer to a proliferation of spirit possession in the early modern period, though such a description is not lacking in the historiography. Perhaps Stuart Clark put it best in remarking that “the known examples suggest that [spirit possession] was a general phenomenon that intensified as demonism and witchcraft themselves grew to be major preoccupations.”35

      What influence could this new Christian preoccupation with demonism and witchcraft have had upon the reemergence of spirit possession in early modern Jewish culture? The temporal correspondence between “the demonization of the world” that historians have discerned in sixteenth-century Europe, with its attendant witch-hunts and possession epidemics, and the sudden reappearance of Jewish possession accounts is suggestive. So, too, are the many similarities between the Jewish and Christian idioms of spirit possession, from the symptomatic behaviors of the possessed to the rituals of exorcism designed to expel the spirits.

      But we should not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that before us is a case of clear Christian influence on an occult facet of Jewish culture. Safed, the clear epicenter of the Jewish reemergence, was far from the centers of the European phenomena. Yet the cultural location of Safed was anything but simple. Safed’s population had been in a state of flux, its communal composition changing rapidly in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of 1517. Jews were arriving in significant numbers from around the world, and the economic, political, and religious advantages of Safed were manifold. It became the proverbial melting pot, with a multicultural population estimated by scholars to have reached up to ten thousand Jews, including Spanish and Portuguese exiles, Maghrebi and Ashkenazi immigrants, and a good number of the indigenous Mustaribs. By the mid-sixteenth century, Iberian Jews had become the large majority.36

      Might Spain have served as the common denominator between the proliferation of possession in European Christendom and the Jewish Galilee? We know that the Spain left behind by the exiles was a hotbed of paranormal phenomena, from ecstatic forms of prophecy to esoteric techniques of binding the souls of the dead to the souls of grave-prostrating mystics. New Christians, Old Christians, and Jews could be found among the prophets and Illuminati of the period.37 In mid-sixteenth-century Safed, the Sefardic rabbis Moses Cordovero,38 Elazar Azikri,39 and Judah Hallewa40 recalled Iberian precedents for what was going on around them. Indeed, Yosef Kaplan has noted that “the deeper one delves into the literary sources of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, the stronger one’s impression becomes that many of the keys for the understanding of their views and concepts are found in the Iberian Peninsula.”41 A European background of the reemergence is also suggested by the Italian Jewish cases of the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

      Nevertheless, Jews and Christians were not the only ones to suffer from spirit possession in this period, and in Safed no less than in Damascus and Cairo, they could witness Muslims falling victim to incursions by the spirits they called jinn.42 Muslims too employed complex magical rituals to expel them, and as we shall see, Jewish exorcists were ready to turn to sheikhs for their diagnostic expertise and powerful magic when the need arose. Our assessment of cultural influences will therefore have to be awake to various possibilities, including the recognition of this phenomenon as a particularly vivid case of cultural hybridity borne of the confluence of Christian, Islamic, and ancient Jewish traditions. The multivocal complexity of this cultural situation and the dearth of sufficient secondary literature, particularly on the early modern Islamic context, will inevitably render my own attempts at comparative analysis provisional and speculative.

      By pointing out the significance of the European background, I do not intend to argue for Christian influence on the construction of the Jewish idiom. The influence model is largely predicated upon a view of Jewish culture as foreign to its local environment. From this perspective, any parallels are a result of influence of the majority community upon the minority. My own view is more in keeping with the cosmopolitan conception of Jewish culture advocated by the late Professor Shlomo Pines and exemplified in any number of recent studies of Jewish acculturation in medieval and early modern Europe.43 Seeing Jews as integral to their local environment allows us to see them as full participants in broad cultural movements and mentalités that were no more owned by Christians than by Jews. The preoccupation with death, the ecstatic-prophetic modes of religiosity, and the attitudes toward the body, language, and illness were all undercurrents of a culture shared by all, the deep structures of the reality map that contemporaries held. The differences that existed might cast certain features of the map into relief, drop others into obscurity, magnify, or contour, but no single group owned the map. Of course, a good deal of the fascination of the early modern period derives from its constituting a transitional era from one “classical” reality map to another, distinctly modern one. The cultural historian of early modern Jewish culture thus has the task of elucidating the particular hues of the lenses through which Jews gazed upon the common map as it underwent profound transformation.

      The cosmology of the early modern period drew the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural very differently from the way its successors would. Although our postmodern reality map is perhaps more forgiving and less triumphalist in its celebration of reason’s vanquishing of superstition, it remains difficult to assess phenomena long since classified as supernatural without projecting the anachronistic boundaries of modernity’s map upon our subjects.44 Moreover, modern professional history is predicated upon the removal of God—or any other supernatural force or forces—as a causal factor. What we are left with, then, is a situation in which phenomena regarded in their time as natural are recast as supernatural; the supernatural is then dismissed or displaced in favor of a “scientific” explanation acceptable in the modern context. Needless to say, analytic reductionism, anachronism, and distortion are almost inevitable. In our case, what sorts of scientific-historical explanations of spirit possession are possible? Diane Purkiss summed up the situation neatly in her recent The Witch in History, noting, “History can say nothing about angels or demons or witches until they are psychoanalytic symptoms, chemicals, illnesses, political tools, or social categories.”45 Here is her sobering challenge to one who would attempt to

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