Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes

Concern over these types of verbal offenses, known in Spain as palabras, seems to have been particularly prevalent in the mid-sixteenth century. In addition to her angrily spoken words, the woman had thrown down the stone and rag in frustration. Such an act, like cursing, was traditionally considered an invitation to the demonic forces to act, as we read, for example, in zoharic passages.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, according to our account, Vital could not accept the idea that a woman could be possessed for letting an ill-chosen word, rock, or rag slip on that cold morning. The spirit, for his part, was forthcoming with a more serious transgression that indeed justified his siege. Here, we return to the issue of skepticism; the curse was merely the outward expression of a deeper heretical posture.

      “Know,” the spirit tells Vital, “that this woman’s inside is not like her outside.” Although she participated in the religious observances of Safed’s Jewish community, the widow had her doubts. “For she does not believe in the miracles that the Holy One, Blessed be He, did for Israel, and in particular in the Exodus from Egypt. Every Passover night, when all of Israel are rejoicing and good hearted, reciting the great Hallel⁹⁵ and telling of the Exodus from Egypt, it is vanity in her eyes, a mockery and a farce. And she thinks in her heart that there was never a miracle such as this.” At this point, Vital turns his attention away from the spirit and focuses upon the widow.

      Immediately the Rav said to the woman, “Do you believe with perfect belief that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is One and Unique, and that He created the heavens and the earth, and that He has the power and capacity to do anything that He desires, and that there is no one who can tell him what to do?” She responded to him and said, “Yes, I believe it all in perfect faith.” The Rav, may his memory be a blessing, further said to her, “Do you believe in perfect faith that the Holy One, blessed be He, took us out of Egypt from the house of slavery, and split the sea for us, and accomplished many miracles for us?” She responded, “Yes, master, I believe it all with perfect faith, and if I had at times a different view, I regret it.” And she began to cry.

      This confrontation concluded, Vital speedily exorcises the spirit with little difficulty.⁹⁶ Finally, in an epilogue that again raises the issue of the woman’s skepticism and religious identification with the traditional community, we are told that the spirit continued to threaten the woman after its exorcism from her body. Concerned, her relatives returned to Luria, and he again sent Vital as his emissary. This time, Vital was to check the integrity of the mezuzah of her home to ensure that she was adequately protected from evil. Upon inspection, however, Vital discovered that the woman did not even have a mezuzah on her doorpost!⁹⁷ The mezuzah, a parchment-based phylactery based on Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, verse 9, was regarded as affording protection to those within the houses bearing them, the inscription on the outside of the parchment, ShD”I (“the Almighty”), being taken as an acrostic for “Keeper of the Doors of Israel.”⁹⁸ Tradition also allowed for the possibility that the affixing of a mezuzah might even successfully exorcize one possessed in the house. An eighth-century collection of rabbinic literature, the Sheiltot,⁹⁹ includes a version of a story from the Jerusalem Talmud, in which Rav’s affixing of a mezuzah on the door of the palace of the Artavan, last of the Parthian kings, sufficed to expel the evil spirit that possessed his daughter.¹⁰⁰

      Once again, then, we are confronted with an account that presents a possessed woman who, by virtue of her possession, is able to function as a type of clairvoyant figure in the community, providing “services” not far removed from those provided by figures such as Luria. She attracts many people and is able to discern their hidden sins and desires. Her visionary ability also results in a caustic encounter with Vital, which he recorded in his journal years later. Evident discomfort with aspects of this scenario is suggested by our comparison of the various versions of the account, the bowdlerization of unsavory details, and the heightening of didactic elements signifying later redactions of Vital’s original. Moreover, the spirit’s presence in the woman fulfills the functions considered above: his appearance before and among the living demonstrates the persistence of life after death, whereas his suffering dramatizes and embodies the doctrine of punishment for the wicked. Although there is little that suggests a relationship between the spirit and the widow, he is not unknown in the community and soon establishes himself as a former student of a leading rabbinic figure in Safed. Finally, the sins of the spirit, and those of the widow no less, by stark transgression, cast in bold relief the values and aspirations of the rabbinic writers who crafted the account, if not broader sectors of the cultural environment. Sexual licentiousness and popular skepticism emerge in this account, as in others we have examined, as fundamental threats to communal leadership struggling to establish a community on the basis of pietistic ideals.

      In seeking to understand the apparent proliferation of the phenomenon of spirit possession in sixteenth-century Safed, these efforts to forge a pietistic community cannot be forgotten. In addition to the Iberian cultural influences that we have stressed, Safed was a “pressure cooker,” uniquely capable of stimulating apparitional contact with its dead through the idiom of possession. We recall that in northern Germany, Midelfort discovered twice as many cases of possession in this period as in southern Germany, with the greatest frequency “among nunneries and among the most gnesio-Lutheran areas.” In his estimation, this concentration was due to the fact that “in both situations the attempt to live an ever more perfect life may have led to stronger temptations [manifested as demonic possession] than those felt in other parts of Germany.”¹⁰¹ How apt is this observation to the religious environment of sixteenth-century Safed, the epicenter of the possession phenomenon in Jewish culture.¹⁰² As Gershom Scholem described it, “Ascetic piety reigned supreme in Safed. At first the religious ideal of a mystical elite only, asceticism now allied itself to an individual and public morality based on the new kabbalism; it struck deep roots in the collective consciousness.”¹⁰³ The “megalomaniacal” posture that reigned in Safed in this period has been well depicted by Joseph Dan:

      The very pretension of Safed to be a spiritual center and the epicenter of ordination in the Jewish world after the destruction of the center in Spain has within it something of megalomania: a remote village, which even in its apex of development had a population smaller than scores of Jewish communities in Europe—and which lacked the vitality of a large and crowded assembly of Jews, with a high level of culture and organization—dared to aspire to serve as a replacement for the tremendous center that was destroyed in Spain, and to carry the miracle of redemption to the whole community of Israel.¹⁰⁴

      In short, every element was present in the culture of mid-sixteenth-century Safed to make it the epicenter of a resurgence of spirit possession in Jewish society. A substantial number of Iberian refugees, conversos among them, had made Safed their new home. With them, they brought stories and memories, theory and praxis, inner conflicts and turmoil, elation and despair, faith and skepticism. Now in the Ottoman Empire alongside Arabic-speaking coreligionists, they were also in close proximity to Islamic traditions, popular and orthodox alike, sharing similar demonological views and familiar with forms of spirit possession and their magico-therapeutic treatment. For its part, the rabbinic leadership of Safed was leading a campaign to make of this fledgling community a new spiritual center for world Jewry, and producing didactic texts designed to inculcate its values and to discipline its people. Finally, embracing the cemetery at its heart, the people of Safe were living with their dead in exceedingly close proximity. With visionary mystics beholding apparitions at every turn, with farm animals being revealed as deceased relatives, and, no less, with the quotidian brushes with death faced by a society beleaguered by plagues and the tragic mortality of the young, possession by the dead was only natural. Its etiology was certainly familiar to all; if each possession case required careful diagnosis and inquiry to be established as authentic, no doubts were voiced as to its fundamental plausibility. The men and women who were thus possessed were full somatic participants in the ferment that characterized their cultural environment. Their experience and its diffusion through the accounts carefully drafted by leading Safedian rabbis was to resonate for centuries in Jewish communities around the world for whom Safed, itself long since in decline, had come to represent pietistic aspiration and achievement.

       Chapter 3