The Dybbuk

Jewish tradition has long spoken of spirits. The Talmud and the midrash mention harmful spirits and demons that can trouble people, and late antique incantation bowls from Mesopotamia show Jews, like their neighbours, seeking protection from them. What these older sources do not describe is the soul of a dead person entering a living body and speaking through it. That idea, the heart of the dybbuk, takes clear shape only in the sixteenth century.

Its home was Safed in Galilee, then part of the Ottoman Empire, where a circle of kabbalists gathered around Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah taught gilgul, the transmigration of souls: a soul that had not completed its task might return in a new body to repair what it had damaged. From this teaching grew the darker possibility of a soul that, barred from rest by grave sins, wandered between worlds and took refuge in someone alive. Accounts from Safed in the 1570s describe kabbalists questioning such spirits, learning their names and sins, and expelling them. Hayyim Vital, Luria’s leading disciple, recorded several such cases.

The word followed later. Early accounts speak of an “evil spirit” or a “cleaving” of one, and in seventeenth-century Yiddish the short form dibbuk, from the Hebrew root “to cling”, became the usual name. Reports spread through Italy, Central Europe and above all the Jewish towns of Poland and Lithuania, often in printed pamphlets that described a dramatic exorcism and drew a moral lesson from it.

In the folklore, a dybbuk is not a demon but a human soul in distress. It is usually the soul of someone who died with a heavy sin unatoned for, or who died before their time, and whose punishment is to wander. Pursued by destroying angels, it seeks a body to hide in. Stories most often name a young woman as the victim, but men and children appear as well, and the person possessed was usually seen as having left an opening through sin, despair or neglect of religious duties.

The signs, as witnesses described them, were dramatic: convulsions, a voice not the victim’s own, speech in the manner of the dead person or in languages the victim did not know, and sometimes the revelation of secret sins of people in the room. Possession narratives thus became public events. The spirit was questioned before the community, and its confession of its own misdeeds, and of other people’s, turned the story into a sermon on repentance.

Why the dead should seek out the living was explained in moral terms. The soul might have committed a sin for which no repentance had been made, been denied proper burial, or left a vow unfulfilled, and its wandering was both punishment and a plea for help.

Folklore also knew a gentle counterpart. In an ibbur, “impregnation”, the soul of a righteous person was believed to join a living one for a time to strengthen them or help them fulfil a commandment. The contrast shows how the dybbuk belongs to a larger picture in which the living and the dead remain bound to one another.

Freeing a person from a dybbuk was the task of a learned rabbi or a ba’al shem, a “master of the name” known for amulets and healing. The accounts describe the exorcist gathering a quorum of ten men, reciting psalms and divine names, sounding the shofar and commanding the spirit, sometimes with threats of excommunication, to leave. Many accounts stress that the aim was also to help the dead: the soul was asked what it needed, prayers were said for it, and the rite sought its tikkun, its repair, so that it could move on. A common folk detail held that the spirit left through the smallest toe, leaving a tiny wound.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hasidic storytelling took up the theme. Tales collected in praise of the Baal Shem Tov and later rebbes show them freeing people from spirits as a sign of their holiness. At the same time, many rabbis and, later, Jewish thinkers of the Enlightenment regarded such cases with scepticism, and some early modern observers already suspected illness, deception or family pressure behind them.

Modern historians, among them J. H. Chajes and the contributors to Matt Goldish’s collection, read the records with care. Possession gave some women a voice in public settings otherwise closed to them; it also brought conflicts over marriage, inheritance and sin into the open. Scholars stress that these readings do not replace what participants themselves believed: for them, a soul in torment was truly present.

The dybbuk reached the wider world through S. An-sky, the pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport. Between 1912 and 1914 he led an ethnographic expedition through the Jewish towns of Volhynia and Podolia, collecting songs, tales and objects. From this material he wrote a play, Between Two Worlds, known as The Dybbuk. Khonen, a poor yeshiva student, and Leah, a rich man’s daughter, are destined for each other, but her father betroths her to another. Khonen dies after turning to dangerous kabbalistic practices, and his soul enters Leah at her wedding. A tsaddik drives him out, but Leah dies to be united with him.

An-sky died in November 1920, and the Vilna Troupe premiered the play in Yiddish in Warsaw the following month. In 1922 the Hebrew theatre Habima staged it in Moscow, in a translation by Hayim Nahman Bialik directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and performed it for decades. A Yiddish film followed in Poland in 1937, made shortly before the world it portrayed was destroyed in the Holocaust. Later versions include a ballet by Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein (1974) and many stage adaptations.

Today the dybbuk lives on in literature, theatre and cinema, from the Yiddish prologue of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009) to horror films. Some of these draw on an internet legend of a haunted “dybbuk box” that has no basis in Jewish tradition. Within parts of the Orthodox world, belief in possession and occasional exorcisms continue, and they have sometimes drawn press attention in Israel, while many other Jews regard the dybbuk as cherished folklore and a powerful image of memory, loss and unfinished lives.