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Between Worlds - Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Paperback)
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Between Worlds - Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Paperback)
Series: Jewish Culture and Contexts
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Between Worlds Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism J. H.
Chajes "An exciting, persuasive, and well-written study and another
key addition to a subject central to early modern
religions."--"Jewish Quarterly Review" "Chajes's excellent new book
. . . succeeds in demystifying the subject of Jewish spirit (i.e.,
"dybbuk") possession by placing it within a broader cross-cultural
and historical context, a s sophisticated methodological approach
he calls a 'historical anthropology of spirit possession.' . . .
His work is both a history and a phenomenology of Jewish spirit
possession during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries."--"Choice" "This is a major contribution, not only to
early modern Jewish studies but to the subject of spirit possession
broadly conceived in the Christian world."--Edward Peters,
University of Pennsylvania After a nearly two-thousand-year
interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the
great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age
of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to
proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near
East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both
benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most
characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society.
Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers
this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been
paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology,
Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of
possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed
by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders. Seeking to
understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full
complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework--chiefly
the doctrine of reincarnation--while exploring its relation to
contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit
possession as a form of religious expression open to--and even
dominated by--women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women
in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he
examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of
spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost
stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the
turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.
Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and
poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the
first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious
landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the
living and the dead. J. H. Chajes teaches Jewish history at the
University of Haifa. Jewish Culture and Contexts 2003 288 pages 6 x
9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3724-5 Cloth $55.00s 36.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-2170-1
Paper $24.95s 16.50 World Rights Religion Short copy: Adopting a
comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers a strain of
Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. "Between
Worlds" provides fascinating descriptions of cases of possession as
well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic
exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders.
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