The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
Jewish Magic in Late Antiquity
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Gideon Bohak is a Professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. He is a specialist in Jewish magic, especially in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in the study of the Cairo Genizah. In this episode of the podcast, we spoke about Jewish magical practices of late antiquity and the use of Jewish amulets, incantation bowls, and manuals in Aramaic and Hebrew. You can purchase Professor Bohak's book Ancient Jewish Magic on Amazon.
Welcome to the Forensy Podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sorin. Forency is a podcast about Near Eastern history, language, and culture and is brought to you by forency.us, the premier language learning website for intermediate to advanced learners of Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian. Gideon Bohawk is a professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy in Talmud at Tel Aviv University. He's a specialist in Jewish magic, especially in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in the study of the Kairo Ghaniza. In this episode of the podcast, we spoke about Jewish magical practices of late antiquity and the use of Jewish amulets, incantation bowls, and manuals in Aramaic and Hebrew. Had a great time talking with him, and I hope you enjoy the show. When we look back at the Jews of late antiquity and I suppose other people from that time as well, what role did magic and the belief in supernatural powers and beings play in the lives of everyday people?
SPEAKER_01These are big questions, of course. Supernatural powers were all over the place. This is a whether you're what we would call a polytheist, you know, you believe in the gods of Greece or the gods of Rome or the gods of Egypt or any mixture of any gods, then you know they're all over the place, they're all around you. If you're a Jew or a Christian, you probably believe in a single god that's up there, you know, with or without Jesus and Mary and etc., but you also believe in a whole host of angels and demons and other supernatural powers. So supernatural powers are all over the place. Magic is slightly more complicated because the question is how do you define magic? But if you define it, for example, as an attempt to force the gods or force supernatural powers to do what you want, and this is a very common definition of magic, then again, magic is all over the place. One of the nice things about magic is that people leave behind a lot of written evidence of magical practices. And that's how we know so much about magic in late antiquity, and we know that it was in all strata of society, and it was common among Jews, among Christians, among what we call pagans, you know, quote unquote.
SPEAKER_00So it was clearly common throughout late antiquity. So when you're referring to late antiquity, what years does that cover and what were the major world powers?
SPEAKER_01This is flexible, but usually people, when when they talk about late antiquity, they usually talk about the period from the high Roman Empire, so let's say the 2nd century AD or CE, to the Muslim conquest. This is usually, you know, in the early 7th century, the Arabs come from what is today Saudi Arabia, they conquer much of the known world, they impose or they introduce Islam, so a whole new era begins. So late antiquity, more or less from the second to the seventh century. In the Jewish world, a nice and easier cutoff date would be the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD or CE. So again, in the Jewish world, I would say it's from 70 to around 630. So about six centuries.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And you wrote that there was an exponential increase in the quality and the quantity of Jewish magical texts in the fifth or sixth centuries. How do you explain that?
SPEAKER_01When you see a rise, a great and exponential rise in the quality and the quantity of things, then you want to ask, what am I seeing? Am I seeing a new cultural phenomenon? That is, are Jews much more interested in magic in the fifth and sixth century than they were, let's say, in the first or second century? This is one interpretation. It's not the one I subscribe to. I would say that what happens is that magic itself, the practice, undergoes a transformation, what I would call scribalization. That is, that instead of, for example, reciting oral incantations over something. For example, when a woman is pregnant and about to give birth, you can recite oral incantations over her, or you can write these incantations on a writing surface. And then again, the question from the historian's point of view is what writing surface do you happen to use? If you use a parchment or papyrus in a place like Israel, like Palestine, then it would rot after a few years, you know, a few 50 years, 100 years, it's gone. If you start using lamellae, thin sheets of metal, of gold or silver, and you etch on them the tech, this can last for 1,500 years. So suddenly from the 5th and 6th century, we have a lot of these amulets written on metal plates. And in Babylonia, in today's Iraq, we have a lot of these incantations written on clay bowls, which again is a very durable material. But is it because now they are doing more magic, or is it just because now they are doing more scribal magic and because they move to writing surfaces which happen to be more durable, I would argue the latter. So I would argue that magic was there all the time, but now they're moving to writing their magical spells instead of just reciting them, and they happen to write them on materials that are durable and they survive in the ground for 1,500 years, and then archaeologists or gravediggers or robbers come and excavate them, and then we have them as historians, we have them as a source for the study of Jewish magic and of Jewish society as a whole.
SPEAKER_00Is there any evidence for Jewish magical practices that existed or were widespread before late antiquity? So in the Roman period and the Second Temple period?
SPEAKER_01Definitely, yes. There's, for example, if you read rabbinic literature, rabbinic literature is full of references, A, there's some references to magicians, B, the references to spells and even citations of spells. So if you read the Babylonian Talmud, for example, which was edited around the 5th century, let's say around 500 AD or CE, if you read the Babylonian Talmud, it's full of citations of spells. You know, if you have a wound, you should recite this and this spell. If you have a fever, you should recite this and this spell. If you have an illness, you go to the river, you take water, you turn it around your head seven times, you recite a spell, and you pour the water back into the river, and that will take your illness away and pour it into the river. So the Talmud says all that, and he gives you the spell. The spell is, you know, river, river, lend us a cup of water because we have an unwanted guest, something like that. And then you pour the water into the river and you say, River, river, take back your water. Now, this is an entirely oral procedure. So this is magic. This is something where you know you try to solve. In this case, there's no appeal to supernatural forces, but there is an attempt to sort of transfer the disease to another element, from yourself or from your patient to another element through the use of a spell. The spell is cited, but nothing is written down. So we have a lot of evidence for oral magic in antiquity, but it cannot come from what I would call finished products, that is, from products produced by the magicians, because there were no products, there were just oral spells. So this kind of evidence will come from rabbinic literature, or it will come even earlier in the Qumran text from the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have some evidence of Jewish magic. So we have evidence of Jewish magic going back for a long time. Of course, it goes back even to the Hebrew Bible. You know, I would love to do what the so-called witch of Andor, I would love to know, first of all, whether she was Jewish or not, or Israelite or not, and second, what exactly she did. We know that she raised the ghost of Samuel from the dead, but how exactly, which rituals, you know, if I would have her manual telling her how do you raise dead people from the dead, it would be very interesting. I don't have that, of course, from that period. But I know people who were doing that because the Bible tells me so.
SPEAKER_00Is there anything that can be gained from looking at New Testament texts about the Jewish world in that time and practices?
SPEAKER_01Oh yes, oh yes. First of all, in the New Testament, you have several texts and several stories about magicians, you know, the seven sons of Skeva in the book of Acts. So there you have people who are magicians or at least exorcists. The commonest practice in the New Testament that's mentioned is exorcism, performed by various people. You have claims in the New Testament and especially slightly afterwards that Jesus himself was a magician. So, for example, Kelsus in the Second Temple period says, What is, you know, all these stories about Jesus healing the lame and the sick and exorcising ghosts and exorcising demons out of demoniacs, how is he different from the common magician you see in every street corner in Alexandria? So these kind of questions certainly show you, but also other stories, you know, a story like lepers or sick people waiting next to a pool in Jerusalem and seeing, you know, if there's a ripple in the surface of the water, they know that an angel or a demon is there and this is a good time to be healed. This all tells you a lot about the beliefs Jews shared during the Second Temple period, during the time when the New Testament was written, and about the magical connotations and magical implications.
SPEAKER_00To go back to late antiquity, what were the different cultural spheres and languages of Jews at that time?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so this is a big question. Of course, first of all, the most important thing to remember in late antiquity is that Jews are basically divided between two major and usually warring kingdoms. On the one hand, the Jews of Palestine, of the land of Israel, who live in places like Caesarea, in the Galilee, in Seppharis, and Tiberias, etc., etc. And there's also a whole Western diaspora about which we know less, but we know, for example, there were Jews in the city of Rome at the time. So this is, let's say, one half or one sphere of influence of the Jewish population. These are Jews who are living under Roman and eventually Byzantine Christian rule, who live in a world where Greek is the spoken language and where Greek and Roman culture are the major influences. On the other hand, if you move a thousand kilometers, you know, 600, 700 miles to the east, you move to Iraq and to Iran of today, there's a big Jewish community there. These are the Jews who produced the Babylonian Talmud. And these are Jews who live in a world where Aramaic is the main language, and where the main cultural impact comes from Sasanian culture, from Persian culture, from Zoroastrian culture, and with various leftovers, and this is a difficult question: how much leftovers from older Babylonian culture? So, for example, when you read spells in the Babylonian Talmud, do they have precedence already in the Akkadian tablets, you know, magical cuneiform tablets of a thousand years earlier? This is a big scholarly question. But there's no doubt that they are much less influenced. The Jews of Babylonia are much less influenced by the Hellenism that you see all over, let's say, the Jews of Palestine or the Jews of Rome.
SPEAKER_00Out of those groups, who left behind a larger trace of their magical activities and artifacts? Basically, it's a matter of coincidence.
SPEAKER_01What happens, as I said before, the Jews of Babylonia adopted the practice that was common in Babylonia or in Mesopotamia at the time, and that is of writing incantation bowls. That is, you take a clay bowl, a simple clay bowl which looks like a cereal bowl, you know, from unglazed clay, and you write on it, or a specialist would write on it with a brush and ink, you know, very regular writing, but on a convex writing surface, something very unusual, and you write on it a long spell and you bury it under your house, or you bury it in various places, usually upside down. You write on the inside of the bowl and you overturn it usually, or sometimes you even stick two bowls, you glue two balls together facing each other to create a kind of a demon trap. And these balls happen to be because they are clay, they happen to be very durable. So we have thousands, I say again, thousands of these bowls in several different dialects of Aramaic, the vast majority in what we call Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, that is the Aramaic used by Jews, and the script which is still used by Jews and Israelis today, so the standard what we would call the square Hebrew script. We also have bowls like that in Syriac, we also have bowls like that in Mandaics, or in other dialects that were not used by the Jews of Iraq at the time. So that's why we know it was a common practice, not just among Jews. And again, because these are durable, we have probably about 2,000 such bowls in Aramaic. About 500 have been published already, and many, many more than that number are still awaiting publication. So there's no doubt that we have more evidence from Babylonia. On the other hand, if you move to Palestine or to the land of Israel, to where Israel is today, their Jews did not write any of these polls. This was a local Babylonian Mesopotamian practice. In Palestine, what you get is amulets written on metal, like I said before, on sheets, on very thin and very small sheets of gold, silver, bronze, copper, etc. And of these, we have about a hundred known specimens. So again, it's quite a large number, but it's much smaller than the number of the bulls. But this is mostly for random reasons, you know, because they were writing on one writing surface and not on another. On the other hand, for Palestine, what also happened, we have a lot of magical texts from later, from slightly later periods from the Cairo-Geniza, that is from medieval Cairo, where the storeroom of a synagogue preserved a lot of texts, including a lot of texts that actually are copies of older texts. And there, for various historical reasons, there's more Palestinian material than Babylonian material. So there we suddenly find more evidence for the Palestinian magic of late antiquity than we find for Babylonia. So I would say if you ask this quantitatively, there's no doubt that Babylonian Jewish magic is much better documented. If you ask also qualitatively, that is different types of evidence, the Babylonian evidence tends to be unidimensional because you only get these balls and nothing else. Whereas for Palestine, we have much more, many more different types of evidence. And as a result, we can create a more nuanced picture of what ancient Jewish magic looked like in these places.
SPEAKER_00So we're talking about the incantation bulls. Did the Jews of that time ever write these bowls not in Jewish Aramaic or not something that could be easily identified as Jewish Aramaic?
SPEAKER_01This is a big question. Of course, people don't sign these bowls. None of my magical texts are signed. You know, people don't say I so and so wrote this and so and so. So we can never prove who wrote it. What we can do is we can A, see very easily script and dialect. So we can say, you know, this is Mandaic, this is Syriac, this is Syriac. There are several different types of script for Syriac, so we can say this is this script. This is easy. This is something that you know any child can do if you teach him the right alphabets. Then we can read the text and say, do these texts display Jewish motifs? Do they display Christian motifs? Mandaic motifs, because the cultures of these groups are different. For example, Mandaic culture is very different from Jewish culture. It has a whole range of vocabulary that you wouldn't find in Jewish texts. And what we see from the bowls that I've seen, for example, is that there's a correlation between the language and the script on the one hand and the type of cultural references that you find on the other. So in the Mandaic Bowls, you find tons of references to and uses of specifically Mandaic vocabulary. Similarly, in the Jewish bowls, you find a lot of citations, for example, of the Hebrew Bible, you find fragments of liturgical motifs that we know from, again, from very Jewish contexts. You sometimes even find references to rabbis, which are very Jewish cultural components. Sometimes you see that motifs can move. So, for example, you have some mandaic bulls that cite a very known formula, a very well-known formula that we know from the Aramaic bowls, from the Jewish Aramaic bowls that cites a rabbi, Rabbi Yoshua, Rabbi Khanina ben Dosa, and suddenly that or the ban of Rabbi Yoshua ben Prachia, for example, and suddenly that is cited in a Mandaic bowl. So then we will say, look, this is probably a Mandaean who is writing this, but he borrowed from his Jewish neighbor one motif that he knows is good in these kinds of balls. So this kind of thing you have, but generally we think there's a correlation between script and language on the one hand and cultural proclivities or whatever congregational belonging of the person who produced the bowl.
SPEAKER_00How do we think that they used these bowls? Were they placed in a certain part of the house? Were they hidden somewhere?
SPEAKER_01So, first of all, in some bowls it says this is very interesting. Another thing that I didn't say yet, when I talk about the cultural or congregational even identity of the scribe, I'm not certain, I'm not saying that this is the same as the identity of the client. So you could easily imagine that the client, for example, is a Persian Zoroastrian person who came to a Jewish magician or a Jewish bowl writer who produced a bowl for him. And that we don't know because we know the names of the clients. The clients are almost always mentioned by names. And in the bowls it's sometimes a whole family. You know, it's so-and-so, and his wife and his children, and you get all the names. So you can get a whole family, and the names, for example, could be Persian-sounding names. But then the question is: are these Persian individuals clients or are these Jews who happen to have Persian names, just like you know, Jews in the Middle Ages or Jews today would have, you know, typical American names or whatever? And you don't know. From the name, you cannot tell whether a John would be a Jew or a Christian. So maybe the same thing happened with someone who has a Persian name in 5th century Babylonia. So you were asking about I was asking about how they use them in terms of how they use them. So one of the things that the reason why I got into this digression, one of the interesting things you see on some bowls, you have a bowl written in Aramaic on the inside of the bowl, and on the outside, it would say in Pahlavi, in Persian, it would give you instruction where to place them. So, you know, for the kitchen, for the courtyard, for the entry room, you know, for the hall. So this tells us that probably the scribe who produced the ball was a Jew, but the client for whom it was made was a Persian. So you write the instructions. Now, what such a case tells us is that the producer told the client, you know, put these balls in this room, this bowl in that room, and presumably there was one ball per room, or maybe even several balls per room. We have instances where we think that balls were placed in corners of houses, you know, because a corner is a weak structural point, you know, there might be cracks there where demons come in. So you put in the in the, for example, if your room is square-shaped, in the four corners of the room, you put four balls upside down, and that will protect the room. There's a very, very famous picture that's always produced in studies of balls, where one of the first excavators to excavate such balls in situ took a picture of balls that he found. All of them were upside down. So he has several balls together, all of them in the ground, all of them upside down. Unfortunately, what happened over the last 30 years is that Iraq has been systematically robbed of its antiquities, including many, many of these bulls. So unfortunately, the vast proportion of the bulls to which we scholars have access have actually not been excavated, you know, by competent archaeologists who note down exactly how it was found, but by robbers. And they were smuggled out of Iraq and sold in antiquity markets all over the world. And then I cannot say, you know, how they were found and how exactly they were used. In that respect, the archaeologists, you know, in the archaeological context would have been very helpful. What we can say, again, what I said before, sometimes they were glued together and even glued with pitch, with bitumen. So you see the sides of the bitumen and you can see which bows fit together when you fit them, because you see that they have the same, they were glued in exactly the same places, one to the other. And sometimes they were even tied in ropes. So you really have an attempt to create a closed space, a bundled space, presumably to lock all the demons inside. So we know that, but we would love to know more when archaeologists start digging Iraq again, start excavating there, if they can send us pictures saying, you know, this is what it looks like when it's found in C2, that would be very helpful.
SPEAKER_00This would be like pure speculation, I suppose, but is there any indication that there are instructions to at some point turn the bowl over?
SPEAKER_01The bowl itself will say things like that. First of all, instructions we don't have. Apart from what I mentioned before, that sometimes you have like labels, you know, etiquettes on the outside saying for the kitchen, for the courtyard, for the horse table, you know, things like that. Other than that, we don't have instructions. The bowls themselves, some bowls, for example, begin with the spell hafiha, hafiha, hafiha. Overturned, overturned, overturned. You know, so so there's clearly a sense here, and overturned also has magical connotations because, for example, it can say things like, overturned are all the spells that were cast against the client, so and so, son of so-and-so. And this is a very common formula. So, like the overturning of the ball, the physical act, is analogical to the magical act of overturning all the witchcraft performed against that person. And you can start thinking also, you know, with anthropological comparanda, you can start thinking about people who are convinced that they were bewitched. And sometimes even think they know who bewitched them. Sometimes they don't know. But all kinds of bad things happen. So they say, okay, someone must have cast a spell on me. So let's go to this bull guy, and he can overturn these spells, and this is what some of these bulls try to do. So again, the overturning is probably a part of the ritual, but we don't have instructions. We would love to have booklets from Iraq, from you know, Sasanian Babylonia, from Iraq or Mesopotamia of the 5th, 6th centuries ADC saying, you know, if you want to produce a bowl, this is what you do, this is what you write, then you give it to the client, this is what you should do. You know, you spit three times, you whisper separate times. We don't know. All this stuff we just don't have.
SPEAKER_00So tell me a bit about the way that the text was written in the bowls, because if I understood it correctly from your research, a part of it was to kind of induce the demon to start reading in a spiral and go down into the bowl and be trapped, right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, although many times the spiral can go in both directions. But yes, many bowls, if you try to think, first of all, physically, how do if you want to write on a surface that's not two-dimensional, it's three-dimensional, it's a bowl. You can't write in straight lines as you would on a flat page, on a flat writing space. So the commonest type is to start to write in a spiral fashion, to start from the outside and then move to the inside, but also the other way around, to start from the inside and then move to the outside. I now even can't remember which type is more common. But in any way, I think starting from the inside is more common. So this idea of you know, the demon will read and read and read and read and eventually will, you know, lose his head and get uh dizzy and fall down. I'm not sure that will really explain it. I think it's more, you know, this is the most natural way when you want to write on such an unnatural writing surface. Another thing they sometimes do is they divide the holo of the bowl in four, and then they write on each quarter separately. So sometimes they do things like that. But again, the most natural way to do it would be spirally. I mean, just try. Just I saw that there's one course in one American university where they actually produce bowls in class. So, you know, you can ask them, you know, what's from their experience, what is the most natural or easiest way to write a bowl. How did they portray demons on the bowls that they created? Okay, so this is another thing. Here, you know, you should be sorry that you have a blog and not a website with pictures, because one of the interesting things and really nice things about these balls is that about 20% of the Jewish Aramaic bowls have pictures. The pictures usually come in the middle of the bowl, in the lower part of the bowl, but sometimes they cover even larger sections of the balls, and the pictures almost always are pictures of demons. And the reason why we know that these are demons, very few pictures have captions. So it's not like the captions tell us what is going on, although in a few cases there are captions, but almost all the figures are bound. They're bound with chains. You can really see, you know, that these are very strange figures, but they almost always have chains binding their legs, chains binding their hands, sometimes chains binding their necks. And since this imagery of chaining demons, of binding demons, is something that also appears in the texts. So we know that you know these texts are aiming either to expel the demons and drive them away, or to lock them up, even lock them up physically within the bowl. So the imagery is clearly trying to achieve the same thing. You know, you depict the demons locked up and chained, just like any prisoner or war prisoner in antiquity. And as a result, the interesting thing for us historians is that we get hundreds of images of demons on these bowls, so you can really get a sense of what these people think demons look like and how they try to depict demons. Now, I should say, you know, I'm saying pictures or images, artistically, these are very, very, very, very, very, you know, I can add 20 very more, very low-quality images. This is not high art. I mean, this is not Djr painting demons, and this is not Koya painting demons. This is really, really crude, very, you might call it folkloristic. It might even be the same guys who are writing, and they're good scribes, but they don't know anything about how to draw a realistic image or whatever. But they try, you know, from their imagination to draw images of what a demon looks like. And it's very interesting because demons mostly are hybrid creatures. You know, they can be part human, part animal. They have a human head. They usually have eyes staring directly at you, big eyes. This is almost in all the images, and then they have wings, and then they have chicken legs, and then they have thighs which look like chicken thighs, you know, with their feathers plucked out, and then they have fiery heads and hair and all kinds of really strange things. And, you know, if people want to look at these things, they can look, for example, in the UPAN Museum, they put some images of these bulls online, and you can just go and see what these images look like. It's very interesting. I have a student, a former student of mine, Mavilozny, who wrote a whole PhD and then published a book, unfortunately, only in Hebrew, on the iconography of the bulls and what they tell us. And it's very, very interesting. You can see, for example, that some of these bulls have crowns on their heads. And when you look at the shape of the crowns, these are crowns of Persian kings from the 5th and 6th century. So when a Jew wants to imagine what the king of the demon looks like, he makes a picture of a demon and puts on him the crown of the Persian king that he knows from, let's say, royal iconography, you know, that he sees in town or whatever.
SPEAKER_00So it's very interesting to think how do people conceive of demons? So, where did that hybrid concept come from? Was that something that was taken from Iran, Iraq, and that culture, or has that always been?
SPEAKER_01I think there are two different answers to that. If I were an anthropologist, if I would try to answer this from the perspective of anthropology or of comparative religion, I would say this is a universal trait of the demons. One of the things, wherever you will look, look at images of demons, and you will see that they're almost always hybrid creatures. I mean, look at Hieronymus Bosch. This is the most famous example, you know, the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, who was wonderful with demons. And unlike my ball guys, he was a real excellent painter, you know, one of the best. And you see how he imagines demons in all these really weird shapes and things. You know, read the book of Revelation in the New Testament, and you see that. So one answer would be yes, it's all over the place. Go to South America, go to East Asia, go to China, you will see demons as hybrid creatures. Another would be that some of the iconography is going back to older models in Mesopotamia. This is very hard to prove because the older Mesopotamian magic that we have ends about a thousand years before the bows begin. So, do the Boes still know, for example, the Lamashtu and Pazuzu iconography of older Akkadian amulets? This is a big question. This would be very hard to prove. But I'm sure that they've heard a lot of stories about, you know, about hybrid demons from people around them. By the way, again, when you read a Babylonian Talmud, when it describes demons, it tries to tell you what their shape looks like. And they would say things like, it looks like a cup, a steering spoon in a cup of beer, you know, turning around very quickly in a cup of beer. You know, descriptions like that, really weird description. And it's clear, you know, demons should be weird. They should have many heads, they should be fiery, they should be scary, they should move quickly. And demons are shapeshifters, they're not just hybrid. And again, it could be that the hybridity is an attempt also to show you that they can, and the text say that, you know, if you appear to me as a pig, I adjure you, da-da-da. If you appear to me as a horse, I adjure you, da-da-da. If you appear to me as a cow, I adjure you, da-da-da. So a demon can change shape and form. And again, this is, you know, probably a universal trait of demons. And then when you want to make an image of the demon, how do you do that? How do you depict something that changes form all the time? Go even today to popular websites about demons, they have horns. You see that in the incantation balls.
SPEAKER_00Apparently, this is universal. The thing that stood out to me was the trade about the chicken legs. I've definitely heard that before, even in Jewish mysticism from Europe in the Middle Ages.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00So do you think that made it from Mesopotamia, or that's just like you were saying, something that's been around forever as a widespread belief?
SPEAKER_01This is, of course, more specific, but this is found in the Babylonian Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud tells you that the world is full of demons. And the Babylonian Talmud tells you that if you want to seed them, the Babylonian Talmud gives you a ritual for how to do that. I won't give it here, but you know, very interesting. You burn afterbirths of cats and all kinds of things like that. But an easier thing, if you want to just be convinced that they are there all around, you take very fine ash, you know, from fire or whatever, very so it's like powder, and you strew it all around your bed. And when you wake up in the morning, you see footprints of chickens, chicken leg-like footprints all around your bed. And then you know that the demons were there all night long, and you know, these are the traces that they left. So the Babylonian Talmud tells you that you know, demons have chicken legs. This, of course, is where medieval Jewish mysticism took it from, because you know, for them the Talmud was canonical. The medieval mystics and Talmud interpreters, etc., they didn't know the Babylonian incantation balls. But they knew the Talmud. And the Talmud, again, it's not that the bulls know the Talmud and the Talmud knows the bull. They just live in exactly the same world. So this idea of you know, demons have chicken legs is something that apparently was well known at the time. Whether it goes back, you know, to older Mesopotamian demonology, I just don't know. You know, this is something we should ask an Akkadian specialist and you know, older Mesopotamian demonology. And what was the Aramaic word for demon? Shed. Shed. Okay, it's like in Hebrew. Like in Hebrew. The Hebrew word is shed, the Aramaic is sheddah or shida, and the Talmud would even say, you know, things like it would give you a spell le shida devetakise, for the demon who dwells in the toilet. Because toilets are very dangerous places for various things, including demons. You know, demons dwell in toilets, demons dwell in bathhouses, demons dwell in a house in your home, demons dwell everywhere, in forests, trees.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, we all know they dwell in toilets, but uh that's a topic for another podcast, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that the whole relationship between their notions of demons and our notions of germs and viruses, you know, and COVID and etc. I wrote a whole paper on that, making that comparison and showing where it's similar and where it's also very different. Because they didn't have our notion of contagion, you know, that if one person has a demon, ten people around him will be infected by the same demon. This is this is our modern virology. But they did have the notion, for example, that you know, dirty places are full of demons and demons are dangerous. So this is a little bit like our microbes and hygiene, and you know, you should wash your hands after the toilet. So there are some parallels and many differences.
SPEAKER_00This is pure curiosity, personal curiosity of mine. But are there any cultural practices in Iran or Iraq now that if is it bad luck if a bull breaks or something like that? Does that exist anywhere? Do you know?
SPEAKER_01Today, I wouldn't know. Today I just I have no idea how the people of Iran and especially Iraq, where most of the bulls are found, I have no idea how the local population treats these bulls when they find them. I just don't know.
SPEAKER_00Well, even I would I would say like regular, normal, you know, if you drop a cereal bowl and it breaks, is that considered bad luck? I would have no idea.
SPEAKER_01I would have no idea. What I can tell you from older literature is that the notion of demon traps, and that you shouldn't open them because they're full of demons and then they would come loose, you have seen the film The Exorcist. Do you remember if you remember the first scene of the film, this archaeologist excavates in Iraq and suddenly you get this Pazuzu coming out, and you get the demon, and then you move to modern America and the demon is there. So, this idea that if you excavate a place where people trapped demons before, then the demons might get loose. This is something that's very well attested. You know, there are stories about how Solomon trapped a lot of demons in, let's say, the basements or the cellars of the temple, and when the Romans destroyed the temple, all these demons got loose. So there are many stories like that.
SPEAKER_00So they might have this in the back today, I just don't know. You cite one example where there was one bowl where the author he's kind of calling upon like everything he has in his mythological arsenal, including Jesus and other Holy Spirits. Would that be pretty unusual for a Jewish incantation bowl to call upon Jesus, or is it was he writing for maybe a non-Jewish client?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so first of all, the answer to both is yes. We can do some statistics because as I said before, you know, we have about 2,000 bowls, out of them about 500, 400, 500 have already been published. There are three, four, five, six bowls that I know of that have Jesus references to Jesus. So it's clearly a very small number. And one explanation for why a scribe would add Jesus is that if he was writing for a Christian client, then why not? You know, maybe the client asked for him, maybe he's trying to be nice to his client and saying, you know, let's shape it, let's, you know, it's not one size fits all, but let's add a specifically Christian spell because this is what this client is looking for. So again, we can't prove it, but this is one explanation of why you would have something like that.
SPEAKER_00When we're talking about the mythical arsenal that these people had, when they're referring to different angels or archangels or other powers to protect them, how many of these are known to us from other texts, and how many are just lost to time that you see that and like that name doesn't appear anywhere else?
SPEAKER_01First of all, I have to tell you that, you know, in the 19th century, there was a big interest in trying to catalogue. You know, there's a big book by Mois Schwab on Jewish angelology where he takes a medieval manuscript and he tries to catalog all the angels, you know, to like write a dictionary of Jewish angels. This is more or less the last time that anyone ever tried to do that. We had one of my PhD students once try to create a database of angels mentioned in the ancient text. The problem is the numbers keep on growing. There's no fixed corpus of angels. So when you find angels, first of all, you find the usual suspects. You know, Gabriel and Michael and Raphael and Uriel are all over the place. So they're all over the place in all types of Jewish texts, including in the magical text. But then when you get, for example, a few days ago, someone asked me about this Syriac text where he has the angel Sarakael. So he asked me, does Sarakael appear in Jewish magical text? So I can look it up because I have a lot of these texts on my computer, so I can look up Sarakael. So Sarakael is not there, but Sarakiel is there. Is Sarakael the same angel as Sarakiel? Maybe yes, maybe no. You see, because there's no fixed corpus of angels, it's very clear that they didn't have a sense that you know there are 70 angels or 700 angels. There's a magical text from that time called Seferazim, which alone has 700 different angels mentioned in it. Some of which appear, like Michael, appear all over the place in other magical texts, and some of which, like Hud Hud, appear only there. You know, so so you know, all kinds of things like that.
SPEAKER_00And do those angels have different, I guess, responsibilities? Are they just like how in the ancient world, you know, like in Rome, there was a god of door hinges and a god of grass and things like that?
SPEAKER_01So, yes, but again, the map of which angel is in charge of what keeps on changing from one scribe to another. So it's very hard to say, you know, there are really fixed roles that all the Jews of the time know that this angel is in charge of that. What you often get is that the name of the angel is connected with his activity. So Raphael, for example, is connected with Refu', with health, with healing. So you would get, and this is something that already goes back to the book of Tobit and the Second Temple period. So in many texts, you will have Raphael connected with healing. Gabriel may be connected, for example, with gvura, with power, with things like that, although sometimes he gets other etymologies. And then you would have, for example, in this Sefira Razim that they mentioned before, the book of mysteries or the book of secrets, you get, for example, when you want to make a certain team of women in the chariot races, then you appeal, one of the angels you appeal to is Rahatiel. So Rahat is to run. So Rahatel is the angel in charge of horses running. Rahat doesn't appear a lot in Jewish magical texts. So for example, Nuriel Nur is fire. So Nuriel would be the angel in charge of fire. But then you can find Nuriel appearing in another text without any relation to fire. One of the things that to me is very clear, there's no overarching systematic theology that unites all these texts. They're very, you know, they have the same kind of notion that angels are in charge of specific activities. But if you would have, you know, ten of these amulet and bowl writers in the same room and ask them, you know, what do angels do, they would say, Oh, yes, angels are in charge of running. And then you say, okay, who is in charge of you know which angels? They would give you five different answers. But it's not like they had one book that they all follow.
SPEAKER_00Right. When we look at the naming conventions for these angels, you mentioned a lot of them that end in an L, E L. Is that the standard, or do you also see it ever ending in the Yahoo ending?
SPEAKER_01L is no doubt the commonest form of an angel in the Jewish world. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Nuriel, Sarakael, you know, any name you want, you add L to it, and you get an angel name. By complete coincidence, it also works in English, you know, with angel, but that's a complete coincidence. But then you can also have many other, you know, the one of the most famous angels in the Jewish world, which appears in the Babylonian Talmud and appears in the Babylonian balls, is Metatron. And again, Metatron doesn't end with El. He's sometimes even depicted as some kind of a demigod or a vice-regent of God. There's a debate about his name, you know, which may have come from Greek or from Latin. So he's one angel. There's the angel Sandalfon, who's mentioned in the Jewish world. He doesn't have the name El. And then the angels which have very, very funny names. For example, in one of the amulets, you have the angel Chatu'a. I can't even say it properly, you know, Chetetvain Chatu'a. And he's said to be the angel who helped the Jews come out of Egypt in the Exodus under Moses. Now he doesn't appear in the Bible, he doesn't appear anywhere else. Where did this guy get this angel name? Is this a code? Is this his invention? I don't know. But but you have many. This is not an isolated case. You have many, many cases of angels that have really strange names, you know, Masmiria, the angel Masmiya. So his name ends with Yah, with Yudhe, which are two letters from the tetragrammaton, you know, the name, the supreme name of God. And Masmer could be a nail. But why would you call an angel Masmiriya? I don't know. Again, it's not like that the system makes sense, and you can always say, you know, this angel would have that name. They seem to, in at least some cases, They seem to be making it up as they go along.
SPEAKER_00Right. So to shift back to the other sphere, to the amulets in Byzantine-Palestine and the surrounding regions, you had mentioned that they wrote these amulets on thin sheets of metal. Besides the fact that metal lasts, was there any other supernatural quality they attributed to these metal?
SPEAKER_01This is a very good question. First of all, I have to make clear that you have here the same phenomenon that you have in the East in Mesopotamia, where Jews and non-Jews are using these bowls. In Palestine and throughout the Roman Empire, people at that time are writing amulets on several writing surfaces, including thin sheets of metal. So you also have Christian amulets like that. You also have what we would call pagan amulets that are written on gold, on thin and small pieces of gold, of silver, bronze, copper, etc. So this is not a specifically Jewish thing. One of the advantages, and one of the big differences between these amulets and the balls, the balls, as we said before, you put them somewhere in your house. You can't carry them on you. In that respect, they're not an amulet in the strict sense of the word. If you think of an amulet as something you carry on your body, of course, you don't go around, you know, with clay balls on you. They would break the minute anything would happen. But with the thin sheets of metal, what usually happen, they are rolled, and then they become like a tiny cigarette, like half a cigarette, and then you put them in a special pouch, a cylinder, a metal cylinder that has loops for a thread or a cord, and then you hang them on your neck, or you hang them on your thigh, or you hang them on your ankle. So it's also a different way of carrying them. And the advantage of this thin sheet of gold or silver or whatever, it's very small, it's very light, so you can easily roll it up or fold it and even place it in a cloth wrapping and wear it on you, and then you take it with you everywhere. So this is why they do it like that, because this is a material that's durable, that can be carried on your body, that wouldn't be, you know, if you sweat on it, if you get wet in the rain, you know, nothing will happen to it. It will last for many years. I'm happy that they did it because it will last for many centuries. So then I can read what the text said. The clients maybe didn't even know what the text said. They had it on them and they felt much safer with it.
SPEAKER_00Besides the fact that it lasts and it's transportable. Do we have any indication that the metal surfaces had some kind of special meaning to them? So, for this, this is a big question.
SPEAKER_01That far as we understand with the Jewish amulets now talking, I didn't check the non-Jewish one, but with the Jewish amulets, as far as we can see, there's no correlation between the aim of the amulet and the material of which it is made. I I have a student who's now writing a PhD on precisely that question. And one of the things she did, she produced a table of all the amulets we know of, about 100 amulets, with one column stating which material it is made of, another column stating, you know, who the client is and whether it's a male or a female client, another column stating, you know, what the aim is. This is for general protection, for protection during delivery of a baby, for protection during pregnancy, for various other aims. And we try to find a correlation. I mean, do the silver amulets always use or even preferred for gynecological amulets, and do the other types of amulets require? And we didn't find any meaningful correlation. So it seems like you know, it probably was a matter of price, because you know, silver and gold are much more expensive than bronze. So it probably, you know, you came to the guy and you said they want an amulet, he said, okay, what can you afford? You know, I have various different things. You know, the best would be gold or silver, but if you don't have so much money, we can do it on bronze too. This is how I imagine it, but I don't have any proof for that.
SPEAKER_00So on that topic of coming to a guy to get an amulet, based off of the quality of the craftsmanship, do you see whether it's the amulets or the or the bowls, who were these people that were creating these materials? First of all, there probably was a range of people.
SPEAKER_01We see many amulets and many bowls that clearly were produced by highly professional people. And I say that in two different senses, which often overlap or correlate. One is the quality of the writing. You know, you can see, and especially when you write on unusual writing surfaces, to be able to write tiny letters, you know, each letter on these amulets is one millimeter in size. And you write, you know, on a tiny thing that's, you know, three inches by one inch, you write 25 lines of text. I couldn't do it. You know, if you gave me a sheet of gold and a nail and asked me to write an amulet, I would know what text to write. But the technical aspect I wouldn't be able to do. It takes a lot of training. The same with the bows. You can see that some scribes they write very neatly on a surface that's very hard to write on. So they're clearly very experienced. And what you can also see is that their spells are high-level spells. These guys know how to quote the Bible, these guys use sophisticated spells, these guys have long spells, these guys, you know, can do variations of things, their spelling is good, their Hebrew or Aramaic is good. So you can really see both for the Bosa and for the Amidas, that some of them were produced by highly professional people who probably were professional scribes, at least in some cases. That is, they also wrote other documents. And this is something that, again, anthropologists will tell you that in illiterate or partly literate societies, scribes often write many different kinds of texts. They write petitions for the judge when you know the guy got fined for something and he wants to, you know, write the petition, but he doesn't know how to write. So he goes to a scribe and the scribe writes his petition, but the scribe will also write his amulet. The same scribe, and this is how I imagine that it also happened, at least in some cases in antiquity. But then you get bowls which have pseudo-texts, they don't even have a text on them. What they have is squiggles. So the whole bowl is filled with squiggles. Now, someone who is illiterate wouldn't even know this because you know he looks at stuff, it's full of quote-unquote texts, but it's not text, it's squiggles. So, what is going on here? Is this a professional who is just reciting the text orally and he doesn't think that you even need to write it properly? Or what I think this is a charlatan. This guy will write you a ball, but if it cost you a hundred bucks, come to me, I'll sell it to you for ten bucks. And you don't even know you're illiterate. You don't even know that it's just full of squiggles, you know. And you get the same thing on the amulets too. You get some amulets where the writing is very high quality, there's a lot of text, you know, elaborate adjurations and spells. And sometimes you get just magical signs. Now you don't know, maybe this is what he knew to do, you know, that this was a shtick, and this is what he did, and then he didn't know any better. Or maybe he thought that this is enough. Maybe you know, if you paid him a lot, he wrote a very elaborate thing, and if you didn't pay him much, or he was angry at you, he just put a few squiggles on. But my feeling is that there were a lot of different types of people doing that, and that there was a high-end market, and then all the way down the line to pure charlatans who would just do, you know, they saw what other people are doing, what the professionals are doing, they said, you know, if they can do it, I can do it, even though I don't really know how to read and write.
SPEAKER_00Right. So let's go now to the manuals, and you mentioned one book, the Sefer Harazim, the book of mysteries. When does that start coming into the picture compared to the amulets?
SPEAKER_01So this is a big question, because here the problem is that the manuals would have been written on parchment and on papyrus. Remember, this is a period before paper. Paper was already invented by the Chinese, but people, you know, in my part of the world didn't yet know of it, and only later the Arabs would bring it to my part of the world, the part of the world I study. So paper is just a non-issue for them. They write on papyrus and they write on parchment. Both of these writing surfaces are perishable, they rot. So in Egypt, you know, if Jews were living in Egypt at the time, we would have a lot of material because we have a lot of papyri from Egypt, including a lot of magical papyri, pagan and sometimes Christian magical texts and amulets from Egypt, in Greek and in Coptic. We have very, very few Aramaic magical papyri in Egypt, very, very few, which is very fortunate because I would love to see because they date from the 4th, 5th, 6th century. So if we would have more of that, we would know what kind of magical recipe books they had. And we would also know more about amulets, because I assume that a lot of amulets were written on papyrus. I only have those that were written on silver and gold and other metals, but a lot of them probably were written on papyrus. What we do have, we have from the Chairogeniza. So from 400 years later, 500 years later, we have manuals with instructions, and in some cases we have good historical reason to think that these manuals go back or these are copies of copies of copies of copies of texts that were already in circulation in late antiquity. So this is how we would know. So for example, a book like Sefer al-Razim is a book of which we have no evidence from late antiquity, but we have a lot of medieval evidence, it's all over the place in the Cairo-Geniza, with I don't know, 70 or 80 different fragments. And we have good reason to think that the text was written not in the 10th century or 11th century, but in the 5th century, and not in Cairo, but in Palestine. For example, it has recipes for winning in chariot races. There are no chirate races in the world of the Chairoganesan. You know, this goes back to the Byzantine Empire, this goes back to the Roman world of the Hippodrome and the Chirate races. So this is a sign, one sign. There are more, that the text is earlier than the Kairoganizer. So we have only indirect evidence to the manuals of late antiquity.
SPEAKER_00Right. But that would indicate it's very clear evidence then that there is very high transmission of these texts from late antiquity up until the time that people were writing these manuals, that these spells and these formulas were being transmitted over the centuries.
SPEAKER_01In Palestine, yes, in Babylonia, either less, or we just the Kairo Ghaniza is not a good representative of Babylonian Jewish magic. This is where you know, as an historian, I always have to ask myself, how representative is the evidence and what does it tell us, especially when it comes from later period. So that's why I said this is another reason why before I said that Babylonian Jewish magic is more for us, more unidimensional, because we have these balls all over the place, and so many of them, but very little else. Whereas for Palestine, we have the eminence, but we also have many manuals from the Kairo Geniza that probably go back to late antique Palestine and help us complement the picture.
SPEAKER_00And it's, I mean, it seems like all of this was more or less accepted by the religious establishment at the time.
SPEAKER_01This is again a complicated question because the religious establishment, first of all, there's a question of what was the religious establishment at the time, because we know about rabbinic literature and we know about the rabbis, and the rabbis would like to think that they are the Jewish leaders of the world. It's a big debate today among historians of late antique Judaism how much of the Jewish world at the time was really led by the rabbis. We find in the Babylonian Talmud, because there's no doubt that, you know, in the Middle Ages the Talmud is the main text, unless you're a Cari. But, you know, if you went to Tiberias in the fourth century, how many people think of rabbis as the religious authority, or they have other religious authorities, or they're not so much worried about religion? This is a big question that I don't want to go into. But again, from rabbinic literature, rabbinic literature is very ambivalent about magic. Because on the one hand, it clearly believes in the existence of demons, and I gave you examples before. It clearly believes in angels. It doesn't like it when you verge on angelolatry, on angel worship. So you know it says explicitly when you have traba, you shouldn't pray to angels, you should pray to God. Now, in my magical text, it's full of prayers to angels. So here you can start saying this is probably the kind of things the rabbis don't like. The rabbis don't like, you know, I said before that angels are in charge of basically every human activity. But this is not rabbinic theology. The rabbis say God is in charge of every human activity. It's to God you should appeal. It's God who does all these things, it's God who brings rain, and it's God who's in charge of health. And you know, if you're a bad Jew, or if you don't do what God wants you to do, then he will punish you, and then you should pray and repent. And you know, this kind of theology. The magical text probably represents a different kind of theological, you know, back and forth between you and the supernatural powers. You know, it's the angels who are in charge of things, and maybe you should adjure them. And does it mean that you also go to the synagogue and pray to God, or maybe this comes instead? I don't know. So the rabbis are ambivalent and they're especially ambivalent. They don't like, let's say, cases where they have competing sources of authority. So they don't like witches, they don't like magicians, they don't like minim, you know, various followers of Jesus who come with their own healing practices and magical things and things and spells and incantations. So they clearly see this as a threat. And this is probably one reason why the Talmud, for example, the Babylonian Talmud is so full of magical spells and recipes, because this is their way of saying, look, if you want to use that stuff, we will give it to you. You know, don't go to these guys. We have it all here in Abed Midrash. We can give you all this stuff, we can teach you this stuff. You know, a good rabbi, and they say that, a good rabbi should know his magic, a good rabbi should know his spells, and they give you the spells as a part of the Babylonian Tamil. So clearly, this was a part of their curriculum in the Babylonian academies. And again, probably as a way to compete with others who offered you the same knowledge, but without the rabbinic theology and without the rabbinic control.
SPEAKER_00And how come it seems that this belief in magic and demons and it seems to have persisted in in Judaism up until present day, even, but it didn't last for these other cultures?
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, no, that's not true. It persisted all over the world and it still persists. And if you go to the Jewish world today, you will see, I mean, this is a whole different lecture and a whole different talk, but one of the characteristics of modernity and of the enlightenment that went with it is the war against demons. You know, if you want to be modern and enlightened, the first thing you should deny is the existence of demons. And even if you're religious, so yes, God is there and Jesus is there, but demons know. Demons are superstition. You know, you label it as superstition, and you, you know, only primitive quote-unquote people believe in that stuff. But of course, this is nonsense. I mean, if you look, first of all, the postmodern world is again full of demons. And second, if you look at Jewish history, Jewish cultural history in the modern period, you will see, you know, my ancestors, I'm half, you know, half Yeke, what we call in Israel, half German Jewish. So my Berlin grandparents certainly did not believe in demons because they lived in a fully enlightened, what we would call today fully Western world, already in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s, you know, before they had to flee. But my grandparents on the other side came from Galicia, came from Lvov, from Lviv, Lemberg, and came from a Hasidic background, and there it was full of demons. And you read, you know, Isaac Bashev's Inger, and it's full of demons, and he sees the gradual death of demons in Eastern Europe because already in big towns like Warsaw, you know, the demons are already gone because you know all the Jews became enlightened. But you go to the small shtetl and it's still full of demons. You go to the Jews of Morocco or Yemen and it's full of demons. You go to Israel today and you ask people whether they believe in demons or not, and you get very different answers if you go to Tel Aviv University and ask my students, and I sometimes do that, and almost all of them say no, demons don't exist. But if you go to other parts of the country and to other and to, let's say, ultra-orthodox Hasidic communities, there you will get completely different answers. And I would say that the same is true of the Christian world, and I would say the same is true of the Muslim world. You know, the Muslim world is full of demons still. And the Christian world too. I mean, you go to Greece to various places, you you start digging, you start asking people, and they will say, yes, of course, you know, the this spring is haunted, this house is haunted, you know, all kinds of things like this.
SPEAKER_00So, what lies ahead for the future of this field of research? What still needs to be done?
SPEAKER_01Oh, tons of things. This is a relatively young field of research, because, and this ties to my answer to the previous question, because the Enlightenment, one of its hallmarks is the war on demons. Jewish studies, which certainly is a fruit of the Enlightenment, I would say it has a war on demons, but most Jewish study scholars today, even today, when you talk to them about Jewish demons, about the demonological pages of the Babylonian Talmud, you will see that they start shifting. They're not really comfortable with that material. You know, Jews shouldn't believe in all that stuff. Jews should follow memonadists and say that, you know, all this stuff is nonsense. You know, only silly women and superstitious people believe in such stuff. You know, we don't believe in these things. And therefore, we Jewish studies people, we should focus on serious stuff. You know, we should study philosophy, we should study, you know, serious theology, we shouldn't be dealing with this stuff. So it was only 30 or 40 years ago that Jewish studies scholars started taking this material seriously. They realized that this material is all over the place. It wasn't studied not because we don't have the evidence, but because scholars ignored the evidence. And one of my own projects is in the Kairogeniza, looking for all the magical text in the Kairo Geniza. And if you look at current summaries of what is there in the Geniza, they will always, almost never mention the magical text. But I can tell you that there are thousands of fragments of magical texts in the Kairo Geniza because I've spent 20 years collecting them. And again, you ask, you know, other scholars have gone over the entire Geniza. Splomod of Goitan, you know, the great scholar, he went over the entire Geniza. He wrote six volumes, you know, a Mediterranean Society, a huge book on the Geniza and its world and the beliefs of the people who are, you know, represented by it. And if you look for magic there, you will hardly ever find it. You look for astrology, for divination, it's almost not there. And I tell you that it's full of stuff. And all this stuff isn't published. So if you ask me what remains to be done, first of all, there are tons of sources. There are 1,500 bowls waiting to be published. There are hundreds and maybe even thousands of Geniza fragments. Some of them are small and ugly, but there are hundreds of very nice fragments of magical text and amulets from the Cairo Geniza that have never been published. Medieval manuscripts, I can give you a list of you know hundreds of medieval manuscripts, some of them hundreds of pages long. I produced one critical edition of one manuscript from the 15th century. It's a manuscript with 260 pages of Kabbalistic text and magical text. But this is just one manuscript. You know, if I had 20 lifetimes, I would produce 50 more such editions. And now, for example, I'm working on a similar manuscript, even larger, that's half written in Yiddish from the Ukraine in the 18th century. So we even have that. We have manuscripts like that from the 19th century, from the 20th century. No one ever looked at that stuff. So just it's a field in its infancy. And of course, what I do in the first stage, let's say, is the philological analysis. Let's identify texts, let's publish texts, let's edit them, let's translate them, let's annotate them. Once we take magic and demonology and divination and all these related fields much more seriously than previous generations have done. So there's tons of work waiting to be done, and I believe that it's important work because it can really reshape our understanding of what Jewish culture is. It's something that, you know, many enlightened Jews will find less appealing. And in a way, I'm sorry. No, I'm an enlightened Jew myself. I'm completely secular. I don't believe in any of this stuff, I don't come to this stuff from any new age perspective or, you know, with a wide-eyed belief in the demons of old or something. I have none of that. But still, what I want to be, I want to be an honest historian. And to be an honest historian of Judaism, you have to take all aspects of Judaism into account. And you have to ask, not what do we like or not like about what our forefathers did, but what is represented by the evidence we happen to have. And if we have tons of magical texts, then we should also study these magical texts.
SPEAKER_00Well, this is a really fascinating topic, and I think that's a a great place to wrap up. So just want to thank you again for coming on and wish you the best of luck. And I know you guys are coming out of your second shutdown, so Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_00I hope this one goes a little smoother than the last one.
SPEAKER_01That's uh that's our hope.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, we'll take care. Yeah, thank you.