The Dybbuk Century

A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.

Relates the untold story of a traveling Yiddish theater company and traces their far- reaching influence

While a frequently used term, Jewish Theatre has become a contested concept that defies precise definition. Is it theatre by Jews? For Jews? About Jews? Though there are no easy answers for these questions, "Jewish Theatre: A Global View," contributes greatly to the conversation by offering an impressive collection of original essays written by an international cadre of noted scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel. The essays discuss historical and current texts and performance practices, covering a wide gamut of genres and traditions.

How and why a person comes to be possessed by a dybbuk—the possession of a living body by the soul of a deceased person—and what consequences ensue from such possession, form the subject of this book. Though possession by a dybbuk has traditionally been understood as punishment for a terrible sin, it can also be seen as a mechanism used by desperate individuals—often women—who had no other means of escape from the demands and expectations of an all-encompassing patriarchal social order. Dybbuks and Jewish Women examines these and other aspects of dybbuk possession from historical and phenomenological perspectives, with particular attention to the gender significance of the subject.

The Dybbuk is the first comprehensive study of the historical and kabbalistic sources of the dybbuk phenomenon, from the first recorded case of dybbuk possession in Safed in 1571 onward. Dybbuk possession differs from possession by demons or Satan. Its origin is in the Kabbalistic concept of gilgul (transmigration) for sins that are so grievous that Gehenna is not sufficient punishment, and the soul must therefore wander until expiation is found. The dybbuk can temporarily find refuge in animals or people and can only be exorcised by a Baal Shem, a great kabbalist or expert in Jewish magic. In addition to describing the history and evolution of this concept, The Dybbuk includes English translations of all dybbuk stories discussed in the book, many translated for the first time.

After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating 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 its 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.

For abandoning her lover, a lesbian is cursed by an evil spirit--her descendants will bear only daughters--but a sage outwits the spirit by trapping it in a tree. Two hundred years later lightning releases the spirit and it goes after the woman's 20th Century descendant, Rainbow Rosenbloom, a taxi driver and film critic.

A long ago "accident." An isolated girl named Aviva. A community that wants to help, but doesn't know how. And a ghostly dybbuk, that no one but Aviva can see, causing mayhem and mischief that everyone blames on her. That is the setting for this suspenseful novel of a girl who seems to have lost everything, including her best friend Kayla, and a mother who was once vibrant and popular, but who now can’t always get out of bed in the morning. As tensions escalate in the Jewish community of Beacon with incidents of vandalism and a swastika carved into new concrete poured near the synagogue...so does the tension grow between Aviva and Kayla and the girls at their school, and so do the actions of the dybbuk grow worse. Could real harm be coming Aviva's way? And is it somehow related to the "accident" that took her father years ago? Aviva vs. the Dybbuk is a compelling, tender story about friendship and community, grief and healing, and one indomitable girl who somehow manages to connect them all.

Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, 'A dybbuk' recounts the tale of a wealthy man's daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved.

THE DYBBUK (BETWEEN TWO WORLDS) YIDDISH-ENGLISH EDITION x, 192 pp. Yiddish and English on facing pages. The Dybbuk, by S. An-sky (1863-1920) is the crown jewel of the Jewish theatre, the most renowned, most beloved, most translated, and most performed of all Jewish plays. It was first performed in Yiddish by the Vilna Troupe in Warsaw in 1920, and by the Habima Theatre in Moscow in 1922. It has subsequently been performed thousands of times all over the world in a score of languages. It is still being performed well into the 21st Century. As an agnostic Socialist, An-sky enigmatically wrote this play which favorably depicts a late 19th Century Hasidic community. A young maiden in love with one youth being forced to marry another is the kernel of the play around which the rest is developed: the dybbuk himself. A dybbuk is usually defined as a malevolent spirit that inhabits the body of a living person. An-sky's dybbuk is unique in that the spirit of the unsuccessful lover inhabits the body of the hapless bride. That is, the two love each other. This is the nature of the tragedy. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR Fernando Peñalosa, born in 1925 in Berkeley, California, is Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, California State University, Long Beach. He has carried out research in California, Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel, and Macedonia, and has written and published books in a number of fields. A convert to Judaism in 1965, Peñalosa is selftaught in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish studies. He has published translations from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Akatek Mayan, and from and to Spanish. A more remote connection to Judaism is documented by the frequent occurrence of the surname Peñalosa in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition. His family is descended from a Converso who came to Mexico with Hernán Cortés and the other Spanish invaders in 1520.