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Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology
Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah
Magic culture is certainly fascinating. But what is it? What, in fact, are magic writings, magic artifacts? Originally published in Hebrew in 2010, Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah is a comprehensive study of early Jewish magic focusing on three major topics: Jewish magic inventiveness, the conflict with the culture it reflects, and the scientific study of both.
The first part of the book analyzes the essence of magic in general and Jewish magic in particular. The book begins with theories addressing the relationship of magic and religion in fields like comparative study of religion, sociology of religion, history, and cultural anthropology, and considers the implications of the paradigm shift in the interdisciplinary understanding of magic for the study of Jewish magic. The second part of the book focuses on Jewish magic culture in late antiquity and in the early Islamic period. This section highlights the artifacts left behind by the magic practitioners-amulets, bowls, precious stones, and human skulls-as well as manuals that include hundreds of recipes. Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah also reports on the culture that is reflected in the magic evidence from the perspective of external non-magic contemporary Jewish sources.
Issues of magic and religion, magical mysticism, and magic and social power are dealt with in length in this thorough investigation. Scholars interested in early Jewish history and comparative religions will find great value in this text.
The first part of the book analyzes the essence of magic in general and Jewish magic in particular. The book begins with theories addressing the relationship of magic and religion in fields like comparative study of religion, sociology of religion, history, and cultural anthropology, and considers the implications of the paradigm shift in the interdisciplinary understanding of magic for the study of Jewish magic. The second part of the book focuses on Jewish magic culture in late antiquity and in the early Islamic period. This section highlights the artifacts left behind by the magic practitioners-amulets, bowls, precious stones, and human skulls-as well as manuals that include hundreds of recipes. Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah also reports on the culture that is reflected in the magic evidence from the perspective of external non-magic contemporary Jewish sources.
Issues of magic and religion, magical mysticism, and magic and social power are dealt with in length in this thorough investigation. Scholars interested in early Jewish history and comparative religions will find great value in this text.
604 pages, Hardcover
Published June 2, 2017
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334 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 2, 2019
This book was less a study of Jewish magic before the rise of Kabbalah and more a historiography of magic that spent the first three chapters looking for a definition of magic discussing all the possible definitions back to the armchair anthropologists and coming more recent. I'm willing to accept a porno definiton of magic, something like "I know it when I see it" in order to get on with it and talk about what they were doing and why they were doing it. It didn't seem like we were ever going to get on with it and discuss Jewish magic, so I wound up giving up on this book.
The book was really dense and hard to read, certainly on a graduate school level and not for anyone before that level. It was not at all entertaining. I came up with very little information I could actually use for teaching a class on magic and superstition in the SCA. Everything was like... those things that academics bicker about that don't matter at all. In this case it was several different people's definitions of magic that they're bickering about, and I fail to see that it is important at all. Just tell me the 5 W's. Or at least include the 5 W's.
The book was really dense and hard to read, certainly on a graduate school level and not for anyone before that level. It was not at all entertaining. I came up with very little information I could actually use for teaching a class on magic and superstition in the SCA. Everything was like... those things that academics bicker about that don't matter at all. In this case it was several different people's definitions of magic that they're bickering about, and I fail to see that it is important at all. Just tell me the 5 W's. Or at least include the 5 W's.
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February 17, 2019There was a quote, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and meant to be derogatory, "people who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing that they like."
Precisely, although without undertones of dismissal. If you enjoy reading critical academic treatments on topics you want to know more about, this book is a really good example of the genre. Harari is consistently coherent and makes it very clear when he is providing information and advancing an argument.
I thought the beginning, where he articulates and opines on the problem of defining magic, was particularly helpful and the last chapter was the most interesting to me, as a scholar and collector of rabbinic narratives.
Yeah, if this is your thing, this is a great thing.
Also, serious shout-out to Batya Stein for the translation. Translating academia is never easy and part of the reason I think this work was so readable was the effort she made to make sure that she wasn't writing just for people who expect to find sentences confusing.
Precisely, although without undertones of dismissal. If you enjoy reading critical academic treatments on topics you want to know more about, this book is a really good example of the genre. Harari is consistently coherent and makes it very clear when he is providing information and advancing an argument.
I thought the beginning, where he articulates and opines on the problem of defining magic, was particularly helpful and the last chapter was the most interesting to me, as a scholar and collector of rabbinic narratives.
Yeah, if this is your thing, this is a great thing.
Also, serious shout-out to Batya Stein for the translation. Translating academia is never easy and part of the reason I think this work was so readable was the effort she made to make sure that she wasn't writing just for people who expect to find sentences confusing.
February 4, 2019
This is not for the casual reader. If you are not interested in the topic of magic at an collegiate academia level than do not read this book. It is not entertaining. I’m sure it’s informative but I couldn’t really even finish it to find out.
December 26, 2022
So, this book was on my wish list for many years, and it was such a disappointment. I just didn’t find the subject as interesting as I thought I would. The first 100 pages were great, I enjoyed them so much, such interesting stuff. But then it went on to objects such as amulets and in all those amulets were only cursing, how so-and-so must die, fall ill... Yeah, those Jews seem lovely people. And then it just got very very uninteresting to me. But I liked the first part and so I went on because I am not a quitter. And I still hoped it would get interesting again at some point, but it didn’t. Probably for people who believe in God and stuff it is very interesting, but I am a secular humanist and I didn’t vibe with it. I loved the first part when it explained to me so well the difference between magic and religion, the explanation was that there was no difference. You can see mysticism and magic and religion as part of the same family, like different kinds of chemistry, but I actually see them as a continuum.
“Claude Lévi-Strauss expanded this claim into a theory of magic in general. In his article “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” he traces the source of the belief in magic held by the tribe members and by the sorcerer himself. He concludes that this belief rests on a deep psychological need to organize the chaos that prevails in reality and in the human soul and to endow it with meaning. In his view, magic thinking is an intermediate path between normal thinking, which seeks meaning in the world, and pathological thinking, which suffers from an excess of internal meaning:
“For only the history of the symbolic function can allow us to understand the intellectual condition of man, in which the universe is never charged with sufficient meaning and in which the mind always has more meanings available than there are objects to which to relate them.”
Magic bridges this gap. It provides a stable social pattern that enables humans to organize the chaos of reality and, more important, enables them to organize the closed and painful feelings evoked by the encounter with the external chaos.”
And I loved this question... Great question...
“How can we explain the gap between the legitimate status of the official (meaning religious) ritual practices and the repudiation of magic and the legal prohibition to perform it? Was the difference between religion and magic a matter of essence or of place in the web of power and social interests?”
“The ascription of magic to the lower classes appears to be the most prominent indication that Lieberman projected his own views about a dichotomy between magic and the religion of truth and its representatives’ idealistic faith onto the society he so skillfully studied and described. Magic, then, was first pushed out of the rabbis’ circle and ascribed to the masses and
then pushed out even further to the distant, poor, and ignorant margins of Jewish society.”
“The plots of these stories, which were purportedly real, attest to the superiority of the religious and ethical values preached by the rabbis in the struggle against demonic evil and in gaining protection from it. Incidentally, these stories also corroborate the relative superiority of the bearers of these values, that is, the rabbis themselves.”
“Unfortunately, however, rabbinic literature is pervaded by traditions about men and women
endowed with magic powers. At this point, the “masses of the people” enter the picture. Among “women and simple folk,” who we can assume were not properly educated, magic beliefs
and even magic actions were widespread. Again, unfortunately, aggadic writings explicitly
attest to the rabbis’ belief in human ritual power (not to say magic) and to the rabbis’ use of it! Furthermore, according to Halakhah, a sorcerer is defined as one who “carries out a (real) act” (‘oseh ma‘aseh), as opposed to one who merely creates illusions. Thus, contrary to his strong opening lines, Urbach half-heartedly admits that rabbis also had a share in magic. In his terms, this was a kind of compromise between their “fundamental recognition” and the pressure of the people, between religion as is and the foreign elements that had gained a foothold in it.”
“Rabbinic empirical thought did not exclude the possibility of action through supernatural
powers. It examined such actions suspiciously and affirmed them or rejected them ad hoc. In any event, no place was found for their agents outside rabbinic circles. The rabbis’ aspiration to monopolize all the knowledge tied to supernatural powers led them to reject whomever they suspected of possessing any ability to genuinely affect reality, through a power they sought to preserve solely for themselves.”
I chuckled when a rabbi called even Jesus a wizard. Yeah, that was funny considering the many women the Christian priests killed and tortured later on in history because they thought they were witches. Yeah, how about that? Plot twist. I did find many interesting things, and I was mean in the beginning when I said it was not fascinating. I mean I found out how evil peeps were, I mean all those revenge amulets, so many murder intents… Yeah, I have a war next to my country’s borders, I guess not so many things have changed since then. Now I understand better everything. Religion is a bunch of magic rituals accepted by an institutionalized elite of peeps who were more cunning than others. And the poor and voiceless, when they were practicing a ritual, that was magic, and they had to be killed. Yeah, great. It's all about the power.
“Claude Lévi-Strauss expanded this claim into a theory of magic in general. In his article “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” he traces the source of the belief in magic held by the tribe members and by the sorcerer himself. He concludes that this belief rests on a deep psychological need to organize the chaos that prevails in reality and in the human soul and to endow it with meaning. In his view, magic thinking is an intermediate path between normal thinking, which seeks meaning in the world, and pathological thinking, which suffers from an excess of internal meaning:
“For only the history of the symbolic function can allow us to understand the intellectual condition of man, in which the universe is never charged with sufficient meaning and in which the mind always has more meanings available than there are objects to which to relate them.”
Magic bridges this gap. It provides a stable social pattern that enables humans to organize the chaos of reality and, more important, enables them to organize the closed and painful feelings evoked by the encounter with the external chaos.”
And I loved this question... Great question...
“How can we explain the gap between the legitimate status of the official (meaning religious) ritual practices and the repudiation of magic and the legal prohibition to perform it? Was the difference between religion and magic a matter of essence or of place in the web of power and social interests?”
“The ascription of magic to the lower classes appears to be the most prominent indication that Lieberman projected his own views about a dichotomy between magic and the religion of truth and its representatives’ idealistic faith onto the society he so skillfully studied and described. Magic, then, was first pushed out of the rabbis’ circle and ascribed to the masses and
then pushed out even further to the distant, poor, and ignorant margins of Jewish society.”
“The plots of these stories, which were purportedly real, attest to the superiority of the religious and ethical values preached by the rabbis in the struggle against demonic evil and in gaining protection from it. Incidentally, these stories also corroborate the relative superiority of the bearers of these values, that is, the rabbis themselves.”
“Unfortunately, however, rabbinic literature is pervaded by traditions about men and women
endowed with magic powers. At this point, the “masses of the people” enter the picture. Among “women and simple folk,” who we can assume were not properly educated, magic beliefs
and even magic actions were widespread. Again, unfortunately, aggadic writings explicitly
attest to the rabbis’ belief in human ritual power (not to say magic) and to the rabbis’ use of it! Furthermore, according to Halakhah, a sorcerer is defined as one who “carries out a (real) act” (‘oseh ma‘aseh), as opposed to one who merely creates illusions. Thus, contrary to his strong opening lines, Urbach half-heartedly admits that rabbis also had a share in magic. In his terms, this was a kind of compromise between their “fundamental recognition” and the pressure of the people, between religion as is and the foreign elements that had gained a foothold in it.”
“Rabbinic empirical thought did not exclude the possibility of action through supernatural
powers. It examined such actions suspiciously and affirmed them or rejected them ad hoc. In any event, no place was found for their agents outside rabbinic circles. The rabbis’ aspiration to monopolize all the knowledge tied to supernatural powers led them to reject whomever they suspected of possessing any ability to genuinely affect reality, through a power they sought to preserve solely for themselves.”
I chuckled when a rabbi called even Jesus a wizard. Yeah, that was funny considering the many women the Christian priests killed and tortured later on in history because they thought they were witches. Yeah, how about that? Plot twist. I did find many interesting things, and I was mean in the beginning when I said it was not fascinating. I mean I found out how evil peeps were, I mean all those revenge amulets, so many murder intents… Yeah, I have a war next to my country’s borders, I guess not so many things have changed since then. Now I understand better everything. Religion is a bunch of magic rituals accepted by an institutionalized elite of peeps who were more cunning than others. And the poor and voiceless, when they were practicing a ritual, that was magic, and they had to be killed. Yeah, great. It's all about the power.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 2, 2017
Great place for beginners just learning about the history of Jewish magic to begin. It summarizes the work of 4-5 other books, and is more accessible than beginning with those.
July 12, 2023
Great recourse to understand orgins of Western Magic in Pagan Palestine. Accurate ideas of practices and basic principles on why rabbis are against magic and practices. 7 dense chapters.
February 12, 2025
חשבתי שיהיה יותר מידע על הכישוף היהודי עצמו -ולא רק מידע על החוקרים, מחקרים, תאוריות על דת, ועוד כל מיני דברים בסגנון. בסופו של דבר לא סיימתי את הספר, לא הגעתי לחצי אז אולי גם פספסתי את החלק שרציתי.
November 7, 2024
Here is a link to my review of this book that I wrote for Reading Religion which is hosted by the American Academy of Religion.https://readingreligion.org/978081434...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews