Published: 7 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The Torah forbids it, but the occult has always been an integral part of Judaism — and continues to be today.
JTA — If you take the Torah’s word for it — not to mention generations of rabbinical literature — astrology, witchcraft, ghost-busting and the like are expressly forbidden in Judaism, and have no place in Jewish practice or culture.
And yet, as the current exhibition at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York highlights, the occult has always been an integral part of Judaism — and continues to be today.
“In every civilization there’s evidence of belief in superstition, mystical characters that can both protect and harm or rituals that can ward off evil,” Jeanie Rosensaft, the museum’s director, told The New York Jewish Week. “It’s just a fascinating thing, and we wanted to investigate.”
For the exhibition Magical Thinking: Superstitions and Other Persistent Notions, Rosensaft and her curatorial team put out an open call to hundreds of contemporary Jewish artists for artwork exploring Jewish superstitions. The result showcases the work of more than 50 artists in a range of mediums — including oils, watercolours, acrylics, collage, paper cuts, multimedia and photographs.
From hamsas to “the menstrual slap,” the artworks grapple intimately with Jewish practices that have been both painstakingly preserved across the generations and, at the same time, discounted as “old wives’ tales”.
Taken as a whole, however, the aesthetic diversity of the pieces reflects the complicated reality of Jewish tradition: encompassing many varying and sometimes opposing perspectives that nonetheless remain in conversation.
Inspired by the exhibit, which is runs until January 2023, The New York Jewish Week chatted with Rosensaft, participating artists and other scholars in the field of Jewish material culture and demonology about the place of the occult in Jewish culture, both past and present. They helped us debunk five critical misconceptions.
