Author Description

"Between Worlds provides descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders." "Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into is ideational framework - chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation - while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to - and even dominated by - women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead."--BOOK JACKET.