Dybbuk | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Dybbuk

DYBBUK is a term used in Jewish sources for a dead soul possessing the body of a living person. The term first appears in seventeenth-century Ashkenazi (European) Jewish sources. Earlier Jewish sources and Sephardic (Middle Eastern) Jewry even after the seventeenth century refer to a possessed person as "adhered to by an evil spirit" (davuk mi-ruah raʾah). Ashkenazi usage borrowed the root of the verb "to adhere" and made it into a noun signifying "the adherer" (Scholem, 1934). While cases of spirit possession are found in Jewish sources dating back to antiquity, the scattered references in ancient rabbinic literature were followed by a millennium of silence, which was finally broken by a dozen or so sixteenth-century narrative accounts. These first tales served as models for subsequent cases and their narration. Approximately eighty similar accounts were recorded from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries (Nigal, 1994).

Etiology

Although the early modern etiology of spirit possession most commonly regarded the possessing agent as a dead soul, earlier Jewish sources refer to the possessing agents as shedim or mazzikim, these being malevolent demons. The increasing tendency to identify the intruder as a dead soul is an indication of the growing prominence of the doctrine of reincarnation in sixteenth-century Judaism (Scholem, 1991).

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