The Many Faces of the Dybbuk

There’s still a few days left to put the spook in Spooktober. My latest Golden City column is up now and in this one, I look at just a few of the many incarnations of the dybbuk. 

 

Of course, there’s the 1938 Polish produced, Yiddish-language film adaptation of Sh. Ansky's play, der dybbuk. But there’s also a 1960 made for TV, English-language adaptation directed by Sidney Lumet! I had a vague understanding that Lumet came from a Yiddish theater background, but it’s much juicier than that. Sidney was a child actor in the Yiddish theater in New York. He got his start there thanks to his dad, one-time Vilne Troupe member and then New York Yiddish actor, Baruch Lumet. You can read all about that over at the Digital Yiddish Theater Project.

 

There have been many, many productions and adaptations of Ansky’s dybbuk play, the two I just mentioned are the tip of the dybbuk iceberg. Traditional dybbuk lore has also done its own share of “inspiring” stories. I don’t know how I missed Psi Factor when it was airing in the late 90s, but this bit of forgotten Dan Ackroyd paranormal silliness will appeal to anyone who loves spotting Toronto locations. And in the first season of the show, the Psi Factor cops took on a dybbuk.

 

 

 

Dybbuks aren't just for grown ups! On this episode of Rugrats, the Yiddish-accented grandfather tells a scary story about a dybbuk, which he says is a kind of monster.

 

 

Thank God I wasn’t born a dybbuk

One of my absolute favorite YouTubers is Justin Sledge, the man behind the Esoterica channel. Sledge is an academic specializing in Western Occultism and Esotericism. It's really fascinating material presented in a down to earth, accessible format. This week he focused on, what else? the origin of the dybbuk in Jewish philosophy. 

 

 

 

As Sledge explains, the concept of a dybbuk, a dead human spirit possessing the body of a living person, only came about relatively late, within 16^thcentury Spanish kabbalah. It took a number of philosophical developments to finally get there. 

 

Before that, Judaism, Islam and Christianity had beliefs around possession by malevolent spirits, though not the spirits of formerly living people. Jews in the ancient world were well known for their association with spirit exorcisms. Many of the miracles of Jesus, as Sledge reminds us, were exorcisms! However, after the rise of Christianity and its “embrace” of possession and exorcism, the rabbis lost interest in possession and exorcism. It would take a thousand years, and the rise of kabbalah, for spirit possession to come back to an influential place in Jewish philosophy and theology.

 

Finally, as I discussed in my column, there has been a bit of a dybbuk renaissance in cinema in the last ten years or so. Unfortunately, the catalyst for most of that “dybbuk revival” is down to what I would call an urban legend, the dybbuk box. (I go a bit more in depth on this “haunted wine box” in the column.) The important thing here is that the dybbuk box urban legend is not a Jewish story, but another take on the modern craze for haunted objects, wherein "Jewish culture" (or an approximation of such) lends a slightly different form to the elements of the genre.  But the story is not actually Jewish.

In addition to the movies I covered in the column, the “dybbuk box” pops up elsewhere, as in this 2019 short film, about two couples camping in the desert. One of them accidentally open a “dybbuk box,” unleashing a murderous spirit. If you thought violent possession couldn’t be dull, you haven’t been looking in the right places. 

 

 

It irritates me when artists (loosely defined) extract Jewish culture and distort it for their own uses. I’m tempted to say that those people are getting dybbuks “wrong.” But if you’re a modern, scientifically minded person who doesn’t believe in a literal reality of spirit possession -  and I am -  it seems sort of… silly to say that they’re getting the facts about a ghost story wrong. 

 

To go back to Justin Sledge, we can see that the concept of the dybbuk is in fact a historical, contingent phenomenon. If the Jewish world can go from being full of spirit possession experts to a thousand years of No Possession, Please and then on to a kabalistic explosion of possession and dybukim, we understand better that these kinds of supernatural stories change with the times, reflecting the concerns and conditions of the people who tell them. Who am I to say that modern “dybbuk boxes” are stupid, offensive and just plain wrong?

 

So I won’t say that. But I will say that the “dybbuk box” conceit is one that allows anyone to profit off a fresh angle on a supernatural story (something rare in Hollywood) while marginalizing the Jews who would have otherwise been central to such a story. And at the risk of opening a box full of angry dybbuks, I will indeed call bullshit on any story which exorcises the Jews out of their own myths.