Gideon Bohak

Prolegomena to the Study of the Jewish Magical Tradition

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 transmission. Finally, such a study must flesh out the place of magical practices and practitioners within the Jewish society of different periods, and within different Jewish communities.

Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages

Magical practices, such as various forms of divination, amulets or the use of incantations, were part and parcel of that concept of paganism, and they helped Christianity set up clear-cut boundaries by defining what is permitted from a Christian point of view and what is not. The late seventh and early eighth centuries marked an important turning point in the references made to magic and paganism in Western Europe. When considering the nature of magic and magical practices in the early medieval West, one has to keep in mind that magic was closely intertwined with the Christianised world-view of the post-Roman Barbarian world. No doubt people in the early medieval West possessed amulets and phylacteries, turned to witch doctors in times of illness and distress and attempted to intervene in the course of nature by swallowing potions or reciting incantations. These acts were interpreted by various Christian authors as magical and, more often than not, as pagan and diabolical.

Some "Mass Produced" Scorpion-Amulets From The Cairo Genizah

This chapter publishes three Genizah texts which attest to a different, and less sophisticated, mode of mass producing amulets, namely, the copying of numerous amulets, and the subsequent cutting off of individual amulets upon demand. The first and most interesting specimen, a sheet of prefabricated scorpion amulet, currently known to the author is found in the Taylor-Schechter collection of the Cambridge University Library, and its shelf-mark is AS 143.26. Each of the texts on the verso contains both a brief text and a crude design of a scorpion, and they are separated from each other by horizontal strokes at the bottom of each text. The two mass produced scorpion amulets consist of an excommunication of the scorpion, in the name of Rabbi Judah son of Ezekiel, a famous Babylonian rabbi of the 3rd century c.e. who, among his many other deeds, effectively cursed those who offended him. Keywords: Cairo Genizah; mass produced scorpion amulet; prefabricated scorpion amulet

Catching a Thief: The Jewish Trials of a Christian Ordeal

The magical texts from the Cairo Genizah are a rich, and mostly untapped, source for the study of Jewish magic from Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and to the Modern period.1 Of several thousand Genizah fragments relating to magic and the occult sciences, and dating from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, less than 150 fragments have so far been published, and even those that were published deserve much further study.2 Identifying, transcribing, reconstructing, editing and analyzing all the Genizah magical texts is a task that could keep scholars fruitfully busy for many years to come, and would shed much light not only on the Jewish magical tradition, but also on many other aspects of Jewish history and Jewish culture.3