BMCR 2009.07.15: Frankfurter on Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History

Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History.  Cambridge, UK/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.  Pp. ix, 483.  ISBN 9780521874571.
$135.00.

Reviewed by David Frankfurter, University of New Hampshire
([email protected] )
Word count:  2445 words
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This learned and thoughtful book, building on the spate of publications
of Jewish magical texts over the past thirty years (as well as the
refinement of the study of magic in the ancient Mediterranean world),
aims first of all to replace Ludwig Blau's 1914 Das Altjuedische
Zauberwesen as the essential resource on ancient Jewish magic.  But
Bohak, who readers might know best for his superb on-line collection of
University of Michigan magical texts
(http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/exhibits/magic/)  is also a very engaging
writer. In many ways, Ancient Jewish Magic reads more like an extended
essay on the place of magic in developing Jewish religion than a
systematic tour of sources.  With amusing metaphors and asides about
contemporary Israeli politics, and at the same time little jargon, the
book deserves (and rewards) a leisurely read as much as reference
consultation.  (Indeed, the publishers seem to have opted against
reference consultation. The Table of Contents is so woefully
inadequate, lacking all Bohak's critical  sub-sections, that the volume
can be difficult to consult for particular topics).

The overall goal of the book is to describe the development of Jewish
magical practices from the Second Temple through late rabbinic eras.
This development reflected an increasingly confident sense of what is
foreign to Judaism, the increasing hegemony of rabbinic sages, and an
increasingly textual sense of magic itself. Magic, in Bohak's
perspective, was neither peripheral nor entirely central to formative
Judaism.

Ancient Jewish Magic also seeks self-consciously to strike a balance
between the rigorous attention to historical sources (specifically,
those that actually pertain to a particular period rather than
inventing a past from centuries later) and a theoretically-informed
distinction between the evidence of magical practice (like amulets) and
the sometimes fantastic descriptions of such practices by outsiders and
detractors.  In maintaining such a distinction, Bohak's approach marks
a real step forward from recent works like Dickie's Magic and Magicians
and Luck's Arcana Mundi, which notoriously relied on opponents'
caricatures to reconstruct real magical practices.[[1]] On the other
hand, Bohak has taken a calculated risk in this book in allowing a
loose, "common-sense" definition of magic that floats, not always
comfortably, between documentable forms of ritual healing or verbal
cursing, a kind of sorcery imputed to others, and a translation of
outsiders' terms like Hebrew khesheph. In anthropological terms,
"magic" alternates between emic and etic functions depending on the
context to which Bohak puts it.

Chapter One, "Jewish Magic: A Contradiction in Terms?", addresses a
tendency in the field of Jewish Studies to dismiss magical practices as
irrational, foreign, or "folk" customs. Whereas much of the scholarship
on Greco-Roman, early Christian, and medieval European magic has
labored under similar prejudices stemming from Protestant anti-Catholic
discourse, such attitudes in Jewish Studies stem from Maimonides. Bohak
divides the chapter into five methodological areas. "Biblical
Prohibitions and Biblical Paradigms" deals with the particular
Deuteronomic prohibitions against certain kinds of foreign ritual
procedures (Dt 18:9-15) that have led some scholars to imagine Judaism
and magic as antithetical, as well as the numerous biblical scenes
(Moses before Pharaoh, Elijah and Elisha) that in fact provided
thaumaturgical paradigms and hopes for many centuries of Jewish clients
and experts.  "Magic and Rationality" offers a brief history of the
discussion in anthropology and Jewish Studies about the fraudulence or
efficacy of magical acts, concluding quite appropriately that, given
the extensive documentation of Jewish magic, the least interesting
question is "did it work?"  "Magic and Monotheism" asserts that ancient
Jews were often quite comfortable with coercive rituals despite
declarations of the transcendent will of the supreme deity. "There Is
No Such Thing as Magic . . ."  tackles the current scholarly argument
that "magic" exists only as an outsider's caricature and must be
eliminated as a category if one is to describe actual ritual practices.
Bohak asserts that, however slippery the term, it does allow a common
focus of discussion. Finally, "'Religion' and 'Magic' in Jewish
Culture" takes on another modern (secular) perspective, that Judaism as
a religion is shot through to its core with magic so that the two can't
be distinguished. Bohak responds that the study of Jewish magic must
depend strategically on some distinctions between Judaism and magic,
both of which were evolving, not static phenomena.

Chapter Two, "Jewish Magic in the Second Temple Period," begins with a
quite important caveat -- especially useful for those involved in the
perennial discussion of "Jesus the Magician": there is, in fact,
exceedingly little documentation for Jewish Magical practices before
late antiquity.  Moroever, given the profound changes that Judaism
underwent over the Roman period, it is historically inappropriate to
extrapolate backwards from late antique sources to Second Temple
realia. To negotiate the dearth of evidence Bohak turns first to "The
Jewish Discourse of 'Magic' in the Second Temple Period," demonstrating
that the various constructions of improper or foreign ritual practices
in Philo, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Qumran, and Josephus hardly amount to a
coherent definition of "magic" as either a legal or a social concept.
More importantly, these "outsider" voices do not suggest that sorcery
was ever used as an accusation--as mageia and pharmakeia were commonly
invoked in the Roman world. The second part of Chapter Two examines the
sporadic evidence for "Jewish Magical Technology in the Second Temple
Period": exorcistic traditions (a particularly useful discussion), a
few amulets, and some references to erotic and aggressive magic. The
evidence shows primarily oral spell-traditions, maintained by priests
and regional holy men, rather than textual formularies or spells that
depended on the magic of writing, such as we find in the Greek Magical
Papyri.

Chapter Three, "Jewish Magic in Late Antiquity: 'Insider' Evidence,"
examines the ever-growing corpus of Jewish magical formularies and
amulets, many from the Cairo Geniza and still being edited. These
materials all testify to an increasingly literary conceptualization of
magic -- ritual, spell, transmission -- during the rise of rabbinic
Judaism. Bohak discusses each corpus of evidence in turn.  "Jewish
Magical Texts in Aramaic and Hebrew" covers the growing corpus of
apotropaic metal amulets, the small corpus of aggressive/erotic spells
on lead and pottery, the complex evidence for Jewish production of
magical gems, the new Aramaic fragments of spell collections,
"literary" magic books like Sepher Ha-Razim and The Sword of Moses, and
the enormous corpus of "incantation bowls" from Babylon (which notably
reveal a quite different magical culture from the Egyptian and
Palestinian materials).  "Jewish Magical Texts from Late Antiquity in
Greek" discusses the long-overstated evidence for Jewish elements in
the Greek Magical Papyri, much of which is actually composed by
non-Jews, while a small number of spells (e.g., PGM XXXVI) do seem to
reflect authentically Jewish origins. Finally, he discusses the
potential use of medieval Jewish magical texts as witnesses to late
antique practices. Overall, what emerges most importantly from these
late antique materials besides their great variety is their enmeshment
in everyday culture -- that none reflect covert or illegitimate
circumstances. (One could, of course, say the same of the late antique
Christian texts in Meyer and Smith's Ancient Christian Magic.[[2]]
Perhaps magic was never as covertly performed as official edicts and
pronouncements have led historians to believe).

Chapter Four, "Non-Jewish Elements in Late-Antique Jewish Magic," is
devoted to the issue of whether Jewish magic is basically just a "pagan
import," another traditional perspective in Jewish Studies  This is
perhaps the most problematic part of the book, for the simple reason
that gauging "influence" when religious boundaries themselves are
idiosyncratic, sporadically policed, and regional can be a
self-defeating enterprise. (In this same vein, most scholars have given
up the question of "pagan" influence on Christianity). To his credit,
Bohak outlines a methodology for distinguishing outright ritual
appropriations from other religious traditions from vaguer imitations
or mere cultural sharing. He then discusses, in impressive detail:
"Bilingual and Trilingual (Aramaeic/Greek/Hebrew) Magical Texts";
"Aramaic and Hebrew Recipes Translated from Greek Originals"; "Greek
Words and Phrases in Jewish Magical Texts"; "Foreign Deities and
Demons" (Abrasax, Helios, et al.) in Jewish magical texts; "Magic Words
and Vowel Permutations and Word-Shapes" (including charakte^res);
"Structure, Layout, and Technical Vocabulary and the Scribalization of
the Jewish Magical Tradition"; and "The Magical Praxis: Aims,
Techniques, and Materia Magica." All these important areas of
spell-composition and -editing, ritual performance, and clients'
expectations for efficacy clearly involved varying degrees of
interaction with a broader culture of magic--sometimes oral, sometimes
scribal, sometimes exotic, sometimes familiar; and Bohak's apt focus on
such minute areas certainly advances the discussion of the concrete
results of cultural interaction. But without a clearer sense of what
religious or ritual boundaries Judaism itself could have involved or
enforced in the early rabbinic period, especially in such intimate,
practical areas of life as demon-protection and healing, the question
of "influence" seems ill-conceived.

Chapter Five, "How Jewish was Jewish Magic?", continues the book's
broader apologia to the field of Jewish Studies but also contributes to
an important topic in the history of religions: the intrinsic magic of
scripture, writing, and even institutional ceremony in a scriptural
religion, characteristic not only of Judaism but also Egyptian
religion, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. After a short summary of
the increasingly textual concept of magic in Judaism over the course of
the Roman period, Bohak turns to traditions of using divine and angelic
names for magical purposes.  The next section, on uses of the Hebrew
Bible, addresses the modification of biblical verses as amulets and
also historiolae, short mythic narratives invoked as precedents to
resolve crises, characteristic of magical speech world-wide but in this
case based in biblical legend. For Jewish ritual experts the "Bible was
not a closed book, . . . [but one] to be mined for more and more useful
verses, and when all the obvious candidates became too well known and
well used, new verses were added, . . . [which] now acquired some very
specific magical uses" (p.311-12).

Magical practices also revolved around the synagogue space, as readers
familiar with Jesus traditions know well, and Bohak supplements
outsiders' testimony by, e.g., John Chrysostom, with some important
archaeological discoveries: binding spells and amulet troves found in
synagogue remains.  Uses of erotic/aggressive magic in and around the
synagogue indicate a view of the building as a social gathering place,
where intended victims would tend to congregate. A section on the
magical aspects of Jewish mystical texts like Shiur Qomah and the
Hekhalot corpus--a burgeoning field in Jewish Studies ever since
Gershom Scholem-- prompts Bohak (somewhat tendentiously) to distinguish
self-oriented "mystics" and client-oriented "magicians." A more
flexible sense of religious expertise and the ritual applications to
which individuals could put that expertise might have offered a more
promising overview of the different spheres of Jewish magic. In the
final section of this chapter, "Philters and Filters: The Limits of
Cultural Receptivity," Bohak argues that certain boundary-making
strategies on the part of ritual experts, excluding most Christian,
polytheistic, and iconographic elements, allowed a self-consciously
Jewish magic to develop.  And yet, he points out this magic was not
understood as some special, covert type of ritual but rather as a vague
area of "actions" or "deeds."

If Jewish magic did not exist in the eyes of its practitioners but
simply involved a great range of popular, scribal, and verbal ritual
practices thoroughly woven into Jewish religious culture, then what
position had the rabbis, either as ritual experts themselves or as
policers of the margins of ritual?  The final chapter, "Magic and
Magicians in Rabbinic Literature," shows that rabbis maintained a very
inconsistent sense of kesheph, sorcery or illegitimate magic, even
while showing considerable knowledge of popular spell traditions as
well as thaumaturgical powers they themselves ought to wield. A section
on "Magic in Rabbinic Halakhah" analyzes rabbinic witnesses to
practices both sanctioned (amuletic, apotropaic, even creative) and
illegitimate (misuses of sacred objects and angels' names). As Bohak
describes it, the rabbis' flexibility on a great range of practices is
quite astounding.  A new term that emerged in the literature to label
illegitimate practices, "the ways of the Amorites," paradoxically
allowed quite foreign ritual techniques into rabbinic lore, for--
unlike the death sentence decreed for the mekhasheph or sorcerer--the
practitioner of "the ways of the Amorites" was consigned merely to
God's justice. Rabbis thus came to be strategically familiar with
magical procedures deemed foreign.

The following sections of this important chapter address: the rabbinic
construction of the wizard-, sorcerer-, or witch-figure (incarnate
predominantly in women and minim, religious deviants); the legendary
thaumaturge-rabbis like Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer, as
well as the magical powers of more central rabbis like Simeon bar
Yohai; and magical spells, especially for healing, credited to rabbis,
which (Bohak incisively observes) neither implied familiarity with
spell collections nor seem to have had much basis in actual practices.

An Epilogue assembles the book's primary historical-theoretical
arguments: A) that Jewish magic is rooted in biblical tradition; B)
that magic served, as elsewhere in antiquity, as a means of social
control, resolving crises, tensions, and boundary maintenance; and yet
C)  in no case can we see "magic"--whether kesheph or "ways of the
Amorites"--functioning in the service of sorcery accusation; D) that
Jewish magic does show an ideological selectivity in its relationship
to other magical traditions in the ancient world, like the
Greco-Egyptian tradition depicted in the Greek Magical Papyri; E) that
"magic" actually breaks down into a range of different, often discrete
magical traditions in Jewish culture; and F) that Jewish magic was not
static but changing, both in its range of techniques and its
relationship to writing. Ancient Jewish Magic then provides an
excellent bibliography, followed by a quite poor index.

In all, this is a lively, exhaustively researched, theoretically
mature, and always informative book. It should certainly be required
reading of anyone delving into the question of magic in earliest
Christianity or the status of the rabbi, and in its resolute refusal to
consign "magic" to some cultural de/mi-monde peripheral to religion it
should help move the field from the study of ancient exotica to a
fuller appreciation of ancient religious cultures. As for the slippery
use of "magic" and "magician," sometimes to signify real ritual
practices, sometimes to translate kesheph or mekhasheph, and sometimes
to cover a vague sphere of odd or illegitimate "deeds" as imagined by
authors and rabbis, Bohak defends this inconsistency as justified in
order to maintain "magic" as the subject of discussion (pp.61-63). And
yet one might reasonably query, at the end of this rich and fascinating
book, whether such an ambiguous term as "magic"really ought to be the
focus at all, rather than ritual, or religious roles, or constuctions
of supernatural danger and sorcery, or the relationship of ritual
expertise to scribality. Bohak's materials and analysis may in the end
have fractured his governing category.


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Notes:


1.   Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World
(London: Routledge, 2001) , on which see BMCR 2002.02.26, and Georg
Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds
(2nd ed.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

2.   Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic
Texts of Ritual Power (San Francisco: Harper, 1994).