JEWISH MAGIC: A HISTORY - NOTES

INTRODUCTION: A CONFLICT IN TERMS

• in fact, it took a complete outsider – an Indian anthropologist and novelist – to admit that a very large number of the documents in the Geniza . . . consist of magical formulae, and treatises related to esoteric rites.”
• While the deliberate neglect of Jewish magic might be characteristic especially of older scholarship, still constrained by age-old Jewish apologetics and the Enlightenment’s disdain for all forms of magic and superstition, it is in no way uncommon in contemporary scholarship as well.
• The entirety of page 10
• Why do people say theres no such thing as Jewish Magic? Well, there are 5 big reasons:
• 1) Magic is forbidden by the bible, therefore torah observant jews shun it
• 2) Magic is irrational, and therefore must be the soil of the lowest, least educated jews
• 3) Magic is non-monotheistic, and must exist outside the divine will
• 4) Magic is not a definable set of practices, simply the name given to practices of The Other
• 5) Magic is riven through jewish history, inexorable from it
• All of these claims deny the fact that there is a distinct Jewish magical tradition
• It seems like magic is generally a very conserevative thing in jewish culture
• “These distinctions notwithstanding, the biggest difference between the Jewish holy men and the magicians seems to have been that the former relied on their own innate powers, and on readily available paraphernalia, to perform their miraculous deeds. The magicians, on the other hand, relied on an acquired body of technical knowledge – whose changing contents are the main focus of the present study – and often also on specifically magical implements, materials, words, and symbols, to perform their own miracles.“27
• the Hebrew Bible displays a deep-seated conviction that many striking feats – from the cleaving of rivers to the destruction of mighty walls – could be achieved not only by men of God, but also by the correct manipulation of God’s sacred objects. Similarly, the Greek distinction between “true piety” and “superstition,” that is, religious behavior which simply made no sense to a rational (Greek) observer, was quite meaning-less to most ancient Jews. 38
• This, then, is the first answer to the question of Jewish magic and Jewish rationality in antiquity. There never was a clash between the two, for the simple reason that the second phenomenon did not yet exist. 38

Does Magic work? 41

• Sometimes
• Theres a jewish spell for killing mice that involves filling their holes with three ingredients, including arsenic.

The Manipulation of Emotions:

• “Presumably, the same was true for many other Jews, who never turned to exorcists for the solution of medical problems whose origins certainly were not demonic, or turned to them only when all other physicians failed to solve their problem.”
• Its very possible that magic was a last resort
• “Emotionalist” explanations claim that the magic has some sort of significant psychological effect on the body, but that doesn’t explain all magic
• Like teleportation.

The manipulation of symbols and cultural-specific assumptions

• “The rationality of magic mmust be sought in cultural specific terms”
• Ex. If every force has an angel administering, why not abjure that angel?
• This search for culturally specific meaning can get lost in data
• “In other words, it shows us how a ritual might “work” in the cultural sense of the word,but not how it might actually work in achieving the results it proclaims.”
• We should try to understand the notions of the past, but not without giving up on our own
• Rational: That which makes sense, and/or that which works.

Statistics and excuses

• Magicians, faced with the failure of a spell, had to come up with some reason why the spell failed, leading to their professional attitude..
• Moreover, as we shall see throughout thepresent book, there are many more interesting questions to ask when studying ancient Jewish magic than the banal question, “But did it work?” Even if we could offer a reliable analysis of the efficacy of each magical ritual employed by ancient Jews, the answer would probably not be worth the effort invested in reaching it. And even if our answer would be mostly negative, as suggested above, this would not make the study of ancient Jewish magic any less interesting – and perhaps even more so. For it is precisely when human convictions are demonstrably false yet stubbornly persistent that their study becomes most rewarding.

Magic and Monotheism

• “Monotheistic gods are immune to magic.” < wrong

THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

Introduction

• There is an important distinction to make between Insider and Outsider views of magic
• There is a difference between Magicians, and how magicians were depicted by people who were not magicians
• Do stories of magical practicioners from fiction reflect real-world practices?
• 
  
• Theres little evidence from this period, and what we have is fragile
• We dont get solid evidence until the 5th and 6th centuries with Palestinian Amulets and Babylonian demon bowls
• 
  
• Two big Questions:
• (1)What was the Jewish attitude to magic and magicians in the Second Temple period?
• (2) What types of magical rituals were practiced by Jews at the time?

the jewish discourse of “magic” in the second temple period

• Two big things defined the second temple period:
• Social Upheaval
• Diversity, fragmentation and social division
• 
  
• “Josephus, writing in Rome in the last three decades of the first century ce, neatly divided Jewish society into three “schools” – the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes – to which he added a fourth wheel, the Zealots, who were like the Pharisees in all else but were fanatic in their rejection of Roman rule. “
• However, basically no modern scholar finds that archealogical evidence falls neatly into these schools (74)
• Bohak says that the reality is more like the three schools were sorta “bundled” into combinations kinda like cable packages.
• This period saw an explosion of development
• “It saw the rise of new institutions (a non-Davidic kingship, the synagogue, a non-priestly class of Torah-interpreters), groups (Sadducees,Pharisees, Essenes, Therapeutai, followers of Jesus, and so on), beliefs (in an afterlife, in an approaching eschaton, in the Messiah, in elaborate demonologies and angelologies), attitudes (extreme iconophobia, avoidance of intermarriage with non-Jews, sectarian and dualistic mindsets, and so on), practices (fighting on the Sabbath, the acceptance of Gentile converts, and the forced conversion of the Jews’ neighbors), and modes of biblical exegesis (allegorism, pesher, etc.), some of which were short-lived, while others are still with us today.” 75
• Also, Jews were now willing to kill and die for god
• The social turmoil only ended with the de-judaization of Israel and the defeat of the bar-kokhba revolt by physically eliminating the people causing the problems
• You would expect a period of theological diversity to be full of accusations of magic, but this isnt the case. Josephus never mentions it, and the Dead Sea Scrolls make myriad use of the term “Sons of Darkness” but never “magic” 75
• “Babylonian Talmud or the Toledoth Yeshu traditions, which gleefully describe Jesus
• as a magician,” 75
• Basically, Jews almost enver accuse other Jews of magic. Maybe being demons, or being posessed, but never magic.
• “Jewish opponents of Jesus, they pile up many nasty accusations, but never accuse their Jewish opponents of practicing magic” 76
• The Septugant, translated into greek during the 3rd century, tells us a few things: “We thus learn that not only necromancy, augury from birds, and other divinatory techniques are entirely forbidden, but also the dabbling in pharmaka (plural of pharmakon, which means both “poison” and “magical procedure,” not to mention the meaning “medicine,” whence the English word “pharmacy”) and the reciting of incantations.”
• Around

Philo:

• Around 20 BCE, Philo wrote that all the Pharmaka in his community should be executed
• “[philo] explains that there are two types of magic. On the one hand, there is true magic, which is a scientific endeavor by which the facts of nature are revealed, a revered and much sought-after discipline which is of interest even to the greatest kings, and especially those of Persia, who cannot even become kings unless they first joined the race of the Magi.”
• 
  
• On the other hand, there is a counterfeit of this, most properly called an evil art, pursued by mendicant priests and altar parasites and by the basest of the women and slave population, who make it their profession to deal in purifications and disenchantments and promise with some sort of philters and incantations to turn men’s love into deadly enmity and their hatred into profound affection
• Its important that this distinction between Good and Bad magic does not have its roots in the bible, which does not draw such a distinction.
• Originally, the term Magic came from the greek Mageia, from contact with the persian Magi, the term meaning “That which the Magi do.” The term was negative, but also a term of admiration.
• Late antiquity saw greek Magos and Latin Magus keep the terms connotations
• “In the Gospels’ world, as in that of other contemporary Jews, the Persian Magi were the carriers of a hoary oriental wisdom, not the teachers of forbidden witchcraft and sorcery.” 80
• Also in the third century we have the Book of Watchers, which says that angels had children with humans, these bastards taught humans many new arts
• “the loosening of keshaphim, the cutting of roots, and the use of plants.”
• 
  
• “ the blanket condemnation of all types of magical practice was not without its problems, since it implicitly entailed a decision to forego many types of healings which were considered highly beneficial at the time” 81

Book of Jubilees

• Heavily based on Enochic literature
• Noah’s Kids have a demon problem
• Noah prays to god, who sends angels to bind the demons
• The demon leader, Mastema, (Hatred) begs for clemency, so god lets one demon go, and the rest have to teach their healing arts to man.
• This created a new category of practice that couldn’t be classified as keshaphim
• Left the door open for other practices as long as they could prove themselves to be beneficial or apotropaic

Dead Sea Scrolls 82 - 83

• Authors were sectarian Jews, who probably read a ton of Enochic Literature
• DSS comes with two new rules on magic
• The First: No cursing The Name
• The Second: “whoever is ruled by the spirits of Belial and speaks apostasy is to be judged in accordance with the law of the ’ov and the yide‘oni.”
• Basically, the Qumran put anyone who practices magic under the purview of the existing prohibitions on divination
• However, the Qumran library has a shitload of exochistic texts, what are the implications of that? Who knows?

Josephus

• Josephus provides commentaries on Mosaic law, summarizing or subverting it neatly:
• “Let no Israelite whatsoever possess a pharmakon, neither a deadly one nor one which causes other harms. And if an Israelite is caught owning one, he should be put to death, suffering that which he would have inflicted on those against whom the pharmakon was intended.35”
• Now, all biblical prohibitions on magic are condensed into “Pharmakon”
• This would sound really similar to the Roman “Lex Cornelia de sicariis (et veneficis)”
• Or, “The Law of Assassins and Poisoners”
• Interestingly, there is no evidence that, within Josephus’s milieu, magic was forbidden for jews at all
• He reacalls that Drusilla’s marriage to a non-jew was against their customs, but had nothing today about a Jew pretending to be a Magus
• He then blames the disastrous revolt that ruined his country on fanatic rabble-rousers he calls goetes, which has a meaning more similar to sorcerer, but can also mean imposter or charlatan
• In spite of the obvious opportunity to do so, he never even implies that these goˆetes dealt in sorcery and witchcraft (or even in pharmaka), or that they should have been put to death in line with the biblical legislation on keshaphim.37
• When asked if Moses was a Goetes, he says:
• Moses didn’t invent his own laws, he got them from god
• Moses’s miracles beat the egyptian wizards, proving their superiority and difference
• Josephus also talks about sheltering two gentile noblemen in his house. A jewish lynch mob wanted to kill them, calling them pharmaka-mongers
• Josephus laughs off the accusation. Saying that the Romans had so many troops tthey didnt need Pharmaka
• Josephus clearly depicts himself as the rationalist, who does not believe in the reality of military magic, but in many other instances (for example, in discussing the feats of Pharaoh’s magicians), he clearly assumes that magic does work.
• Given Josephus’ general disinterest in magic, it seems quite clear that we cannot arrive at any clear sense of his (emic) definition of this term.

Summary

• On the one extreme, we noted Philo’s very Greek concept of magic, which distinguishes between the noble art of the Persian Magi and the base counterfeit of that art as practiced by women and slaves
• On the other hand, we saw the literary trajectory leading from 1 Enoch to Jubilees and to the Dead Sea Scrolls, with an elaborate demonological awareness, a conviction that magic is one of the evil things taught to humanity by the Fallen Angels, and a willingness in the Qumran sect to condemn any deviant member under the biblical rubric of the ’ov and the yide‘oni, as well as a willingness to use many techniques that we might see as “magic” in the daily fight against the forces of evil
• Josephus’ general disinterest in “magic” as a concept, his downplaying of the relevant biblical legislation, and his pride in such ancient Jewish practices as the exorcism of demons.
• multiplicity of views of magic and an absence of any real emic definition of magic as a legal or social concept. (87)

Jewish magical technology in the second temple period

• To avoid cataloguing evidence in a fragmentizing and tedious way,  we are going to focus on three specific spheres, analyzing their Insider and Outsider views:

Jewish Exorcisms:

• Lots of evidence here
• Also, the Insider and Outsider evidence is nice and congruent
• These mechanics seem to fall into three distinct types:
• the use of animal, vegetal, or mineral substances whose manipulation or fumigation automatically drives demons away.
  • Like in the book of tobit
  • The technique itself consists of fumigating the heart and liver of a certain fish from the Tigris river (the fish’s gall also serves to heal Tobit’s eyes, but not by way of exorcism),50 and Raphael promises the young Tobias that this will drive away any demon or evil spirit and keep them away forever (6.8, 16–17).
  • the text makes abundantly clear, it is the smell which drives the demon away, and no further actions – neither verbal nor written incantations, nor any additional implements or rituals – are needed to perform this task.
  • The ritual works via the laws of nature. Like how smoking herbs drives away mosquitos
  • Page 91, entire quote about Baaras Root
• The second depends less on the exorcistic technique than on the personality and innate powers of the exorcist himself.
• third type involves the use of elaborate incantations, as well as specific implements and rituals, by a professional exorcist who has mastered the right technique and uses the appropriate texts.48
• (A fourth type, exorcisms “in the name of Jesus,” is one of the earliest signs of the parting of the ways between Judaism and nascent Christianity, and will not be dealt with here.)
• Jewish Amulet Magic:
• Jewish Agressive and Erotic Magic: