Now to revert to our original question: Who was the Jewish magician? According to ancient Jewish tradition, which was heartily seconded in the Middle Ages, women are inordinately prone to the pursuit of the magical arts. Yet, however true this dictum may once have been, their activity in magic proper was now narrowly restricted by virtue of the esoteric and learned base of that magic.

Man asserted his supremacy by relegating it to himself, along with all the other prized pursuits of this life, the big-game of magic. Knowledge of the names, through which Jewish magic worked, was inaccessible to women, for it required not only a thorough training on Hebrew and Aramaic, which most of them lacked, but also a deep immersion in mystical lore, from which they were barred.

Evidently what the authorities had in mind was that women were the spearpoint of the forces of superstition, that it was they who propagated the bizarre notions upon which the popular imagination fed, that they were the fountainhead of all those household recipes and remedies and whispered charms with which medieval Jewry was plagued—or saved. In this respect they were undoubtedly correct, for learned rabbis did not hesitate to sit at the feet of ancient crones when a pain in the eyes or head gave them no rest, and many of the prescriptions retailed by popular literature make a bow of acknowledgment to womankind. We must regard women, then, as the folk-magicians, healers of wounds, prescribers of love-potions, but in no sense “witches.”

Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion; The Truth Behind the Legend: Jewish Magic

In the Pale when someone became “paralyzed” with fear, or had fear paralysis, they sought out help from those who specialized in removing such maladies. The opshprekherin [a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye], who frequently interacted with women healers from neighboring cultures, borrowed remedies from these women and in turn shared her recipes and charms with them.

Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, Ashkenazi Herbalism; Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews