Jewish mystical and magical texts are remarkably relevant to some of the most central historiographical themes of early modern Europe; they are also remarkably esoteric and confounding to any nonspecialist. Providing a remedy to this incongruity, J. H. Chajes makes a major contribution to both Jewish and general early modern historiography with his first book, on Jewish spirit possession and exorcism. His work offers a useful narrative of the development of Jewish exorcism traditions, presenting the complex subject in terms that make it more approachable without over-simplification. At the same time, Chajes lends the material depth and relevance through sensitive analysis of the chronologically and geographically local circumstances of the most significant early modern treatments of the phenomenon. The appendix alone would be an offering of some significance, consisting of eleven original translations of early modern accounts of spirit possession, and this quality of presenting important raw material runs throughout the volume. Competent and detailed legwork is evident in the exposition of various exorcists' techniques from the ancient world and Middle Ages, through Luria's unique methods in sixteenth-century Safed, and up to later seventeenth-century attitudes to possession and demonology. Much of this material is in the first chapter, “The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession,” which argues that “there was something new in the sixteenth century” as a long percolation of diverse traditions culminated in the formation of the “classic” view of the dybbuk in a period of unprecedented frequency of possession and exorcism events.
