May be of interest to some.

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Subject: [JFRR] Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Bohak, Gideon)

Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. By Gideon Bohak. 2008. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 496 pages. ISBN: 978-0521874571 (hard
cover). 

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Indiana University ([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 707 words]

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it has long been recognized that Blau's survey has been made outdated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.

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Read this review on-line at:

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=819

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