About
"Jewish Magic, Gender, and the Body in Premodern East-Central Europe"
As a Summer Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, I aim to complete my book project, 'Chaining Lilith, Healing Eve: Amuletic and Medical Technologies of Birth in the Early Modern Shtetl.' The book seeks, for the first time, to reconstruct the a group of charismatic Jewish healers (called in Hebrew baʿalei shem, masters of the Name) and their distinctive attitudes toward the natural and supernatural worlds, as well as their integrative approach to healing, which extended beyond the treatment of the body alone. Their therapeutic strategies were cosmic in scope, grounded in the conviction that the female body constituted the foundation of Jewish life and communal continuity. In contrast to a rabbinic culture oriented toward abstract, rationalised debates centred on Jewish law (halakhah), the baʿalei shem cultivated experiential forms of knowledge and advanced a holistic, rather than a hierarchical, vision of knowledge and Jewish existence. This ecology rested on the careful alignment of three interrelated domains of human life: first, the religious sphere, shaped by prayer and ethical conduct; second, artisanal knowledge of the natural world, including the specific properties of herbs, plants, and animal substances; and third, the mastery of supernatural forces and processes, achieved through control over angels, demons, forces of impurity, and astrological influences. The acquisition of this distinctive expertise, as documented in magical recipe books, endowed its practitioners with extraordinary authority and charismatic power within their communities.
Andrea Gondos is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies.
