Йоханан Петровський-Штерн. Острозький екзорцизм 1733 року і поза ним: практична кабала, єврейська громада і релігійне пограниччя [додаток: переклад фрагменту рукопису Гілеля Баал Шема «Сефер га-Хешек»]

The 1733 Ostroh Exorcism and beyond: Practical Kabbalah, Jewish Community, and a Religious Borderland [ADDENDUM: The Translation from the Kabbalistic Manuscript “Sefer ha-heshek”]

By Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

(Northwestern University)

Source: Judaica Ukrainica 4 (2015): 122-136

Publication date: December 1, 2015

Publication type: source publication

Language: Ukrainian

Full text:

 

Abstract

This publication includes a preface to an excerpt from a kabbalistic manuscript, “Sefer ha-heshek” (1740), that illustrates a 1733 Ostroh case of possession and exorcism, followed by the translation of the excerpt. The author of the manuscript, an itinerant Jewish healer, exorcist and Kabbalist Hillel Ba’al Shem tells a story of the Ostroh exorcism, in which he acts as a key figure, the exorcist, and also as a narrator. Using a new methodology called “cultural archaeology,” Petrovsky-Shtern suggests a reading of the excerpt from the manuscript as both a literary and a historical document. This methodology allows him to reconstruct the socio-cultural reality, gender relations, Jewish-Christian contacts, magical beliefs and borderland situations in the early modern Jewish community. Petrovsky-Shtern analyses the inconsistencies and euphemisms in the kabbalistic manuscript, shedding new light on the inter-religious relations between 18th-century Jews and Christians and proving that a practical Kabbalist from early 18th-century eastern Poland used such magical practice as exorcism to camouflage the act of the excommunication with which the itinerant Kabbalist and the author of the manuscript threatened a marginal communal figure.

Keywords: Sefer ha-heshek, practical Kabbalah, Hillel Ba’al Shem, the Ostroh exorcism, Jewish-Christian contacts

 

References

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DOI 10.14653/ju.2015.08