Exorcism Schmexorcism: dybbuks, demons and Jewish spirit possession
Didn't know exorcisms were a thing in Judaism? Neither did I, until now...
Content note: mental illness, violence towards women
Of all the strange paths my existence in a pandemic-hit world has taken me down, I’m not sure I could’ve predicted that one of them would involve contacting an exorcist.
Gershon Winkler is a Danish-born rabbi who has not only written several books on the subject of Jewish mysticism (including a couple published by Penguin Random House) but has performed actual exorcisms. Although he can’t give me any specifics about these, as he likens doing so to being a doctor talking about the removal of a patient’s prostate. Were that patient to recognise any of the details mentioned from his procedure, Winkler writes in an email, he could identify himself and feel “violated”.
“My teacher warned us sternly not to share any of these things,” Winkler writes, “To do so can mar our relationship with other realms.”
These “realms” in question are something that I – until recently – wasn’t sure existed in Judaism. We tend to associate exorcisms with Christianity (Catholicism in particular). We think of the Roman Ritual and, of course, the 1973 film, The Exorcist. A film which my deranged, liberal parents allowed me to watch at the age of eleven, leaving me traumatised and obsessed with the idea of ceding control over my body to a foul-mouthed, occult entity.
Dybbuk, by Ephraim Moshe Lilien
Maybe the idea of exorcism – a cathartic expulsion of something malignant – is something deeply rooted in human instinct. From blackhead squeezing to enemas, “get this thing the hell out of me” seems to be at the crux of a lot of our compulsions. So I guess it was inevitable that, once religion became a thing, we’d invent a spiritual version of this. As well as Christianity, exorcism rituals are present in Islam, Hinduism and Taoism. But as a (secular) Jew, it never really occurred to me that this sort of procedure – with all its drama and casting out of the unholy – took up any space in my culture.
Growing up, it didn’t occur to Yossi Chajes either. Chajes - a professor of Jewish history at the University of Haifa - had a religious upbringing, but was not aware of Kabbalah (a predominant school of thought in Jewish mysticism) until he was an undergraduate. He went on to write Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (2003).
“This idea that a dead person can possess a living person emerges clearly only in the sixteenth century for Jews,” Chajes says, speaking to me over Zoom. This is what separates the Jewish take on possession from the Christian one; we’re not dealing with demons, but dybbuks. These are the wandering and duly pissed off souls of the dead, searching for bodily vessels through which they can accomplish some goal they failed to achieve while living.
Oddly, the first time I can remember hearing the word “dybbuk” was in an episode of Rugrats, when I was around five. Tommy Pickles’ hilarious Eastern European Jewish grandparents refer to one, prompting Tommy to ask Angelica, “What’s a dybbuk?” To which she replies, “Well, it’s kinda like a ghost, only scarier, and it lives in your bed.”
She’s right about the “ghost” part, at least. The word “dybbuk”, Rabbi Winkler writes, is “a derivative of the Hebrew word for ‘Cling’”. As in, when one thing is bonded to another, like a dybbuk is to its victim. Dybbuks made another brief appearance in popular culture, in the very silly 2012 horror film The Possession, in which Hasidic Jew/reggae star Matisyahu plays an exorcist (honest to God, this happened, look it up). This film (Rotten Tomatoes rating 40% in case you were wondering) is based on the true story of the Dybbuk box, in which a man from Portland, Oregon picks up a mysterious antique wine cabinet at an estate sale. Long story short: the box had belonged to a Holocaust survivor from Poland, it supposedly contained a malevolent spirit, it caused doom and gloom to all who owned it, and is currently in the possession of – drumroll – Post Malone. For some slightly more highbrow dybbuk content though, perhaps look to the 1937 Polish film The Dybbuk, which has the incredibly sad honour of being the last film made in Yiddish before the Holocaust.
still from The Dybbuk (1937)
As opposed to dybbuks, there are demons in Judaism, Rabbi Winkler clarifies, but they basically want nothing to do with our dumb, mortal lives. Which seems entirely fair. “They have no intentions of ‘possessing’ any of us and risking having to deal for a second with what we hapless mortals have to put up with daily,” he writes.
“So, if demons don’t possess us, who does? A wandering disembodied soul might.” In Christianity – Chajes later points out – the idea of being possessed by a human soul is actually heresy. So there you have it: Christian demons – petty and earthbound. Jewish demons: aloof. Busy with their own shit. Too cool for us.
The belief in dybbuks – according to Dr Renate Smithuis of the Center for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg – can mostly be traced back to the early modern period. In 2009 Smithuis discovered a rare fragment of text – likely originating in eighteenth century Egypt or Palestine – describing a Jewish exorcism.
In this short piece of Hebrew writing, we see a woman being exorcised of the spirit of her dead husband. Smithuis – who I also speak to over Zoom – describes this ritual, which would have taken place in a synagogue, as a “prophylactic” measure. The woman in question has remarried, and her new husband wants to protect himself, his new wife, and his children from any ill will the former husband may have, if he happens to be lingering on earth. This is, according to Smithuis, pretty tame as far as Jewish exorcisms go. In more aggressive cases – some of which resulted in the death of the “possessed” – having failed to talk the spirit out of the victim, exorcists would resort to smoking it out by burning substances like sulphur.
Smithuis attributes the early modern accounts of spirit possessions to the emergence of the printing press, which allowed for broadsheets containing stories of exorcisms to travel from the Middle East, across Europe. This was also the period in which Kabbalah began to make waves, and the esoteric side of Judaism entered the mainstream.
Likewise, accounts of possession were on the rise in Christianity and Islam. In 1486, the Malleus Maleficrum – an entirely serious treatise on witchcraft – was published and disseminated in Germany, a country which then became a hub in the European “witch craze”. Just over a century later, in 1599, King James IV of Scotland published Daemonologie, his (also entirely serious) guide to demons, black magic, necromancy and even – in parts – vampires and werewolves. Europe had become so obsessed with the idea of witches that it was executing innocent women, and to a lesser extent men, like it was going out of style (which, eventually and mercifully, it did).
Matisyahu battles a dybbuk in The Possession (Ghost House Pictures, 2012)
It’s important to remember though that, in early modern Europe, Jews were living in an almost constant state of persecution and expulsion. Jews, who didn’t have the autonomy to conduct a witch hunt, were – Chajes says – “more likely to be hunted and executed than to hunt and execute.” So perhaps exorcisms were a way of them getting in on the occult craze, without resorting to burning witches.
Either way, just as women were the primary victims of the sweeping witch trials, they were also the focus of the most cases of possession. Smithuis refers to the early modern period as a “time of aggression against women” and to exorcisms as just another weapon in the arsenal when it came to “controlling and abusing” women. However, Chajes theorises that appearing possessed may have been a liberating outlet for some women living under strict patriarchal conditions which allowed them next to no freedom whatsoever.
“It’s very important to remember that although being a witch was a criminal wrongdoing, being possessed was not,” says Chajes, “And in fact, being possessed meant that if you were doing something outlandish you were excused because you had no agency.” Essentially, “possessed” women were able to scream, shout and rail against the oppressive system in which they lived, without consequences. Unless, of course, the exorcism went sour and they ended up being suffocated in a cloud of sulphur. So maybe a lot of possessed people (Jews or otherwise) have just been engaged in unpoliced, cathartic outpourings. It should also be noted, of course, that the subjects of a great deal of exorcisms were likely to have been mentally ill. It occurs to me that, as a woman with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a condition that turns me into Regan from The Exorcist for two weeks out of every month, the men in my shtetl would’ve exorcised the hell out of me.
What’s more though, women could spin their experience of “possession” into clout. Chajes refers to one woman from 17th century Damascus who, having been possessed, became a spiritual medium who was “revered by some of the leading rabbis of her day”. And in a society where women aren’t allowed to study the Talmud, a woman making a career out of spiritualism is kind of a big deal.
Along with obvious factors like the invention of the printing press, Chajes speculates that the increase in cases of possession in the early modern period may be down to the rise of individualism. “You could try and make an argument that this is some kind of reflection of a new emphasis on the significance of the individual, that is expressing itself through the idiom of possession,” he says. It should be noted though, that all of what Chajes says about Jewish exorcisms is heavily caveated with the fact – according to him – that this was not a “statistically meaningful phenomenon”. Chajes points out that there are fewer than twenty cases of sprit possession present in early modern Jewish literature. But, even if not statistically meaningful, these cases are, he says, “culturally meaningful”.
But – anomalous though they may be - what actually happens during a Jewish exorcism? First, Rabbi Winkler writes, you need to be certain you’re dealing with an actual, bona fide possession. “We have strict criteria for determining an authentic possession,” he writes, “The fact an allegedly-possessed person is speaking in languages she could not have known before is not evidence enough that she is truly possessed.” Neither, he says, are seizures, which could be down to epilepsy, or other medical conditions. “We have to rule out all possible physical causes before we dare fiddle around with the doorknob of portals to worlds outside our own,” he writes, “Because, once we open that door, we’ve got no idea what’s itching to come through it and ruin our day.” Winkler stresses that spirit possession is phenomenally rare. He claims to have dealt with two authentic cases in his life, while he’s invalidated “numerous” claims.
Essentially, the voice of the “alien soul” needs to be heard coming from the possessed person, while the latter is “at rest” (not, for example, during a seizure). They need to be talking in old languages about things they couldn’t possibly know; “maybe even know which horse will win at the track,” writes Winkler. At this point, those performing the exorcism will chant “powerful incantations” and recite Psalm 91 (which asks for protection from God in times of danger). The exorcist will sound the shofar (a musical ram’s horn used in Jewish rites).
I ask Chajes, whose book contains accounts of a number of historical cases of possession, if any of these stories stand out for him as particularly unsettling. He recounts an example from the Italian city of Ferrara, which took place in the late 16th century, in which a young Jewish woman began behaving in a very un-Jewish way. She’d refuse to eat meat on a Friday, and say Christian prayers (Chajes jokes that this may have all been a ruse to get a little taste of prosciutto). The spirit, according to the author of this account, turned out to be that of a recently hanged gentile, who had entered the Jewish woman – in his own words – “Through her nakedness”. And, at this point, if you’re failing to see possession as a rape metaphor, I’m not sure I can help you. “I think it has a sense of tragedy,” Chajes says of the case of the Ferrara spirit.
Centuries later, Jewish exorcisms are still taking place according to Rabbi Winkler. Albeit incredibly rarely. “Most of the time, it is the people bringing the victim to the rabbi who need to be exorcised rather than the victim,” he writes.