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

okay after professionally transcribing podcasts for like five years at this point, i have gotten very good at searching for and figuring out words or phrases that i can’t spell based on context, but i was having SUCH a hard time with this one yiddish word just now. search engines had no idea what i was talking about and i felt like i was going crazy, like, certainly this exists on the internet somewhere???? so i referenced the book the person was talking about and skimmed through it for a long time lmao and finally found the word. it’s opshprekherin. i feel better about not knowing how to spell it fdjkals (although i guessed “opshprekarin” while searching so i still blame google for not knowing.)

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

FORGOTTEN TRADITIONAL WOMEN HEALERS

In an unusual acknowledgment of women healers’ varied experiences, The Shtetl Book—published forty years after the Second World War and contemporary with the achievements of the Women’s Movement—begrudgingly gives readers a keyhole peep into yet another type of women healer in the Pale. A short section entitled “Women at Work” mentions a few healing practitioners who stand out against a random list of feminine occupations: the “herb vendor,” a syrup maker, a “medic who healed with leeches and other folk remedies” (whom we can now safely identify as a feldsher, and possibly also a midwife), and an “opshprekherin,” a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye, an affliction cited in the Talmud that had to be cured before it caused further illness. Such a spare litany of occupations would seem to suggest that “Women at Work” did nothing worth elaborating; but with a little extra digging, we discover something much more intriguing.

In addition to their previously noted revelations, the An-Sky expeditions confirmed that the opshprekherin had survived into the twentieth century. The practice of the opshprekherin was rooted in the ancient belief in the evil eye. Mostly women, these healers were present in almost every town in the Pale and were sought for their expertise in times of crisis, during pregnancy, for toothache, a bad foot, an abscess, a “rose” (… skin infection…), the bite of a mad dog, epilepsy, or any other maladies believed to be caused by this curse. The opshprekherin never referred to written sources for her cures; hers was an oral tradition deeply shrouded in secrecy:

Pregnant women—especially when carrying their first child—often asked these older women for protection [for their baby from the evil eye]. People believed not only that the opshprekherin had the power to predict an unborn baby’s gender but that they could in fact influence whether it would be a boy or a girl. Those old ladies had a supply of “proven” charms and spells for each occasion. They performed magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.

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

The old women [opshprekherin: a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye] were very careful not to divulge their secret spells and remedies to others; they even refused to tell members of their own family. They seem to have felt that if they revealed a spell or secret remedy to anybody else they would be giving up part of their powers and so would inevitably become weaker. Moreover, being guilty of a sort of treachery, they would themselves suffer some form of retribution if they ever used those spells or medicines again.

Folk healers from adjacent Easter European cultures also expressed similar reluctance when asked about their remedies. We will see later that this is another parallel Ashkenazi healers had with their neighboring equivalents.

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

Unlike the ba’alei shem or the male feldshers, women healers such as the opshprekherins [a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye] never consulted the remedy books. Neither are they believed to have set down their secret cures in writing. Their ancient traditions, passed orally from one generation to the next, down through the centuries, disappeared along with the healers themselves. Could it be possible that a literary tradition exists for these women, and that male scholars have chosen, deliberately or not, to leave these stories unexplored from their original sources?

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

Opshprekherins in the Pale interviewed by the An-Sky teams were recorded reciting their charms, which they uttered in Yiddish or in the tongue of a neighboring culture. At times the charms could incorporate Christian words or beliefs. One medicine woman, Hinde di Tikern or Tukern (“woman administering ablutions to women”), who was recorded by Rechtman during the first An-Sky expedition, spoke to her interviewers in Ukrainian. Her whispered recitation was transliterated from the spoken Ukrainian to the Hebrew alphabet then later translated into and published in Yiddish. This is her charm, rendered here in English:

Evil eye, I exorcise you (cast you out), out of the neck, out of the forehead, out of the chest, out of the shoulders, out of the spine, out of the ankles, out of the fingers, out of the stomach, out of the back, out of the feet, out of the elbows, out of the knees, out of the whole body. Are you an evil eye, are you a pest, are you an annoyance, have you come by sight or by thought. Do you happen once, twice, or thrice? Did you come from far away, or from another time? Are you of the morning, are you of the evening? I cast you out . . . Did you come from the eye of a Prussian, of a [Rroma], of an Englishman, of a Jew? Or from a woman, or from a man. Or from a girl. Or from a boy. Or from a calf. I cast you out from bones, from blood, and from the whole body. You shall find no happiness there, you shall find no refuge there. You shall not feed on the white body. You shall not drink the red blood. You shall not break the yellow bones. I cast you out . . . send you far away, into the marshes, out onto the blue sea, into the stone fortress. There you shall find happiness, there you shall take refuge, there you shall feed on dust, and stones. Blessed be that desolation in the face of the lord, and of all the saints

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

In yet another account of an opshprekherin [a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye] at work, a poorly translated description regarding the wax ritual has misled readers for decades. The story can be found in “The Healer from Bilgoray,” part of the classic collection From a Ruined Garden: “In cases where someone became paralyzed, Sore Mordkhe-Yoysef was sent for, she would pour wax over the person’s head and point out reasons why he had become frightened.” This passage, though badly garbled, describes an opshprekherin performing a kind of exorcism. However, the translator omitted the most salient portions of the act and misinterpreted the meaning of several words, leaving the reader with the impression that a woman named Sore Mordkhe-Yoysef poured hot wax over someone’s head and then told that person that this was the reason they had become frightened. The passage actually states that when the client was paralyzed or “gekhapt” (“caught”), Sore Mordke-Yoysef poured wax above their head to determine the signs (“simunim”) indicating the cause.

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

More popular than the ba’alai shem, the female opshprekherin [a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye] also played a crucial role over a longer time period. These practitioners had already been well established as reliable folk healers at least as early as the 1700s and can be glimpsed within Marcuse’s tirades of the eighteenth century: “I have already warned you in my book against ignorant ba’alei shem, Tatars (i.e., soothsayers), wax-pourers, exorcisers of the evil eye.”

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