He Said She Said: Hearing the Voices of Pneumatic Early Modern Jewish Women
- He Said She Said:Hearing the Voices of Pneumatic Early Modern Jewish Women1
Spirit possession—the state of being influenced or controlled by a spirit—has been interpreted by a generation of anthropologists and historians as a mode of women's religiosity.2 Taking their cue from cutting-edge scholarship emerging from a variety of disciplines, scholars have recently begun to explore the significance of spirit possession in various Jewish cultural contexts.3 As in most cultures, women predominated among the Jewish possessed by a margin of roughly 2:1.4 And so, if not deterred by those who would dismiss possession as more pathological than religious,5 we discover a rare phenomenon, exceedingly so in Jewish history: a public spiritual stage upon which women were prominent actors. Such prominence may of course have been a dubious honor. Judaism has not been regarded as a religion that featured a regularized possession cult bearing a positive valence; that is to say, being possessed would not ordinarily have been considered a good thing in Jewish societies. Yet the picture is far from straightforward; early modern Judaism (among other historical Judaisms) clearly did promote forms of benign spirit possession, and they were highly prized among leading rabbis. A basic research goal must be, then, to establish the nature of the relationship between the forms of spirit possession so valued by (male) elites and those affecting—or merely afflicting—Jewish women.
Of course, even a pernicious form of spirit possession might play a positive role in traditional society. From a functionalist and psychodynamic point of view, demonic possession provided otherwise deprived women with opportunities to express repressed feelings. Exorcism, in turn, seems to have been an effective means of reintegrating the victims into their communities while reinforcing traditional values.6 Cogent and compelling as such interpretations of the possession phenomenon may be, however, they are ahistorical and leave many questions unexplored. When and where did possession cases [End Page 99] occur? What was distinctive about these contexts? Who was involved in the events, and why? When were cases considered significant enough to memorialize in print, and for what reasons? How was the idiom transmitted and its lore received? Historical investigation has yielded a more ramified view of the possession phenomenon than we might have imagined on the basis of psychological or anthropological approaches alone.7
Spirit Possession and Sixteenth-Century Safed
The Galilean town of Safed became a magnet for pietistic and mystically oriented Jews in the decades that followed the Ottoman conquest of the Land of Israel in 1516.8 As was the case in contemporary European monasteries, the intensity of religious life in Safed seems to have generated an environment favorable to the proliferation of spirit possession.9 Early modern Jewish spirit possession, then, must be contextualized first and foremost within the framework of the religiosity characteristic of this unique environment.10 Indeed, in Safed, spirit possession found expression not merely as a peripheral aberration affecting deprived (and depraved?) female victims and their rabbinic exorcists. Quite the contrary: Spirit possession constituted a prominent feature of the mystical religiosity cultivated by the town's preeminent rabbis. R. Moshe Cordovero, the great systematizer of kabbalistic knowledge accumulated up to his time, asserted that practices designed to cultivate a sort of possession had been known in pre-expulsion Spain. Spanish rabbis had practiced grave devotions that called for their prostration in a channel dug above the remains of a deceased Jewish saint, in order to achieve "adhesion" (devekut) to the soul of the deceased.11 Cordovero also wrote extensively of another form of spirit possession called 'ibbur, or impregnation. In this scenario, one's own soul is joined by an additional soul, good or evil. In the mystical brotherhood led by R. Isaac Luria, Cordovero's younger contemporary and successor as the leading mystic of Safed, positive 'ibburim (pl.) were regarded as a key component of spiritual growth, catalyzing the development of the host by awakening or boosting the powers of the soul stratum corresponding to the saintly impregnation.12 The positive 'ibbur, unlike its negative analogue, was taken as introducing a quiet guest whose presence could be noticed only by...
