7 texts
Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews bore a reputation as the most powerful sorcerers in Europe. As scholar Joshua Trachtenberg documented in his 1939 study, this belief was so widespr...
Medieval Jewish belief held that the dead do not simply vanish. As Joshua Trachtenberg documented, the spirits of the deceased remained active, aware, and dangerously close—capable...
Medieval Jewish magic was not freestyle improvisation. It was governed by strict rules, precise ingredients, and exact timing—a technology of the supernatural with its own internal...
Medieval Jewish folk belief wove a dense web of connections between the natural world and the supernatural. Certain plants healed. Certain foods enhanced memory or destroyed it. Th...
The boundary between medicine and magic barely existed in medieval Jewish life. Physicians recited psalms over patients. Rabbis prescribed amulets alongside herbal remedies. And th...
Dreams occupied a unique space in Jewish tradition—neither fully trusted nor fully dismissed, they hovered between divine communication and meaningless noise. The Talmud devotes ex...
The rabbis spoke often of two invisible forces that shape every human encounter: the good eye and the evil eye. The Maase Buch (No. 196) preserves a tale that illustrates the diffe...
