It is now a bit over a hundred years since Ludwig Blau’s survey of ancient Jewish magic, Das Altjüdische Zauberwesen, appeared. Though it has long been recognized that Blau’s survey has been made outdated by later discoveries of materials related to Jewish magic in the Second Temple Period and Late Antiquity, no new survey of ancient Jewish magic has appeared until now. Fortunately, it was worth the wait, as Gideon Bohak’s Ancient Jewish Magic is an excellent survey of the world of ancient Jewish magic of the Second Temple Period and Late Antiquity.
Bohak opens his book with a chapter called “Jewish Magic: A Contradiction in Terms,” that examines the problems of studying ancient Jewish magic. He proposes that there is a need to distinguish between Jewish magic—that is to say, magic that originates in Jewish sources and culture—and magic used by Jews, such as Greek or Egyptian magic that has been Judaized but that originates outside of Jewish traditions. Bohak’s primary concern in this book is with the former, though he does not neglect non-Jewish traditions either. As he says, “In speaking of ‘Jewish magic,’ we shall be looking for magic as practiced by Jews, for Jewish and non-Jewish clients, and as borrowed from them by non-Jews” (2). But he immediately qualifies this: “one must always recall that when we look at a specific magical document, especially one written in a universal language as Greek was in late antiquity, it sometimes becomes quite difficult to decide whether the person who composed it was a Jew or not.” Though he does propose ways of making the distinction at various points in the book, this question remains an important one, as we know that non-Jews wrote magical texts in imitation of Jewish magic, and that Jews wrote magical texts in imitation of non-Jewish magic texts, in particular, of Egyptian and Greek magical texts. Though the evidence can be very tricky to handle, Bohak is a good guide through the complexities of the Jewish traditions and their interactions with other magical traditions.
Another important point about the study of Jewish magic that Bohak makes, and one that is applicable to other traditions as well, is that we must be careful when using later materials to study earlier periods. Using materials this way is common in studies of magic and other supernatural beliefs, and while it is often a very useful way to reconstruct earlier belief systems, it can lead to problems: for instance, it can obscure important changes that have occurred in the traditions. Bohak shows the importance of this by using the example of the changes in magical traditions between Second Temple Judaism and early Rabbinic Judaism. One especially striking example of these changes in Jewish magical tradition is that in the Second Temple Period Jews do not seem to have used amulets—the textual and archeological evidence is virtually nil for their use—even though in later Judaic magic amulets are extremely important. To carelessly reason backwards from later Jewish traditions would thus hide an important change that happened in Jewish magic.
There is one overriding problem with the book, however¬—and a surprising one given Bohak’s important methodological statements—and that is Bohak’s own use of later materials, and especially those from the Cairo Geniza, to study “ancient” Jewish magic. The oldest of the Geniza documents is from the tenth century, but the periods Bohak is surveying end about 500 to 600 years earlier. Bohak insists that this later material is derived from ancient materials—and given the conservatism of magical traditions he may be correct—but we are still left with the fact that most of Bohak’s evidence is medieval, and that there is clear evidence that the texts he uses for reconstructing ancient Jewish magic were widely used in the medieval period. His book thus quite often has the feel of a survey of medieval Jewish magic rather than of ancient Jewish magic.
There can, however, be no doubt that Ancient Jewish Magic is an important achievement in the study of Jewish magic. Even if the reader disagrees with Bohak’s interpretation of many the materials as ancient, it is still an excellent survey of the available magical texts and the ways that these texts have been interpreted by scholars.
--------
[Review length: 707 words • Review posted on September 29, 2010]