Journal of Jewish Identities

In the late 1960s, the Israeli anthropologist Issachar Ben-Ami recorded a story about demons from a Moroccan Jewish immigrant named Esther Cohen. A rabbi's son in Casablanca once went travelling with a group of children, she began: "The children sat down [in a field] but the boy said to them, 'I can't stay without a synagogue.' They said to him, 'Go, wherever you find a synagogue, pray there.' He said to them, 'Look, I see a faint light far away there, I am going to it.' He walked and walked until he got there. He entered the synagogue and he found a whole crowd praying. He thought that these were people like him, but they were demons."¹ The story continues: the boy is captured by the sultan of the demons and taken to the demon world, where he discovers that the sultan is married to the boy's sister who had disappeared some years before on the eve of her wedding. The sultan reveals to the boy the secrets of the demon world, including how to protect himself against demonic attack, and his own future destiny. The sultan then returns the boy to the human world, with the invitation to call upon his demonic relations by marriage whenever he needed their assistance.²

This portrait of an invisible demonic world that mirrors our own, in which demons are potentially both harmful and helpful, and surprisingly rabbinic in their behavior, is not unique to Moroccan Jewish folklore, but is actually heir to a web of traditions going back to the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud. Sara Ronis' book, simultaneously erudite and engaging, offers a thorough guide to the discourse in rabbinic literature—especially, but not limited to, the Babylonian Talmud—around demons, whom she defines as "neutral intermediary beings who are capricious, powerful, dangerous, and quick to become defensive" (27). Through careful readings of rabbinic texts and their context among other traditions in late antique Babylonia and beyond, Ronis shows how—and why—the rabbis strove to portray demons as subject to their authority, interested in their intellectual project, and included not only in the rabbinic world but in the rabbinic community itself.

The introduction explores why the study of demons and demonology has historically been marginalized, both within medieval and early modern rabbinic writing and within the academic study of Judaism from the Wissenschaft des Judenthums onward. Ronis insists that, rather than import anachronistic assumptions (especially those shaped by Western Christianity) about the nature of demons in ancient rabbinic culture, we must instead attempt to understand rabbinic demonology on its own terms. Drawing on scholarly literature in Jewish history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and ethnopsychiatry, Ronis prepares the reader to "enter into the world of demon-belief inhabited by the rabbis" (17–18).

The first two chapters demonstrate both the antecedents for Babylonian rabbinic demonic discourse and the ways in which it represents an innovative and synthetic tradition. Examining rabbinic demonology in the light of [End Page 104] biblical and Second Temple Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and early Christian literature, Ronis argues that the rabbis' selective interpretation of previous traditions creates a taxonomy in which "some demons are neutral and others [are] perhaps even good" (55). In fact, demons "constitute their own unique part of a created world," existing as a class with moral neutrality, with the potential for harm but not inherently evil, more like their human neighbors than we might want to admit (86). Ronis concludes this section by observing that the rabbinic attempts to comprehend and categorize demons are not only about demons, but about the rabbis themselves—it was a way of asserting control over knowledge of the universe, part of the rabbinic self-fashioning as a "scholastic elite" (a term Ronis uses, drawing on Adam Becker, to highlight the rabbinic community as scholars with a shared intellectual project drawing on both written/literary and oral traditions), and a tool "for the rabbis to use to interrogate the nature of humanity, the structure of the cosmos, and their own position in the world" (91).

The next two chapters dive into the demonic details of how the rabbis "named, located, and worked to avoid demonic dangers" (92), presenting a close reading of a single extended passage (sugya) of the Babylonian Talmud, b Pes 109b-112a (helpfully divided by Ronis into labelled sections). This passage, through Ronis' elucidation, illustrates how acting to avoid demonic dangers stems from the larger project to build rabbinic identity through intentional shared practices and bodily behaviors, constructing the ideal rabbinic person as a "careful self, conditioned to move through space and time in particular and particularly careful ways [… part of] a group who moved together, through time, space, and the rigors of everyday life" (126–127). The demonic relationship to the rabbinic legal system, in particular, bolstered rabbinic authority (or more accurately, as Ronis points out, rabbinic self-authorization). Demons are integrated as halakhic subjects, agents, witnesses, defendants, followers and teachers of the rabbis, and even—in the case of a certain Joseph the Demon—perhaps even rabbis themselves! As members of the rabbinic community, demons were safely subordinated to the authority of the rabbis, while their power enhanced the rabbinic claims to mastery over the physical and intellectual worlds.

The final two chapters give two exceptional examples of the extreme lengths to which the rabbis attempted to neutralize demonic danger: the first, presenting a demon as a literal domesticated servant of a rabbinic household—an image, Ronis argues, which seems to draw on much older traditions from ancient Sumer and Akkad—and the second, presenting a narrative of demonic possession in which a rabbi defeats a malevolent demon that has possessed the House of Study. Contrasting this account to other traditions contemporary to the Talmudic account, especially Christian exorcistic practices and Babylonian incantation bowls, the rabbis are revealed to be uniquely uninterested in "true" demonic possession and exorcism. In both cases, Ronis shows that the Talmudic narratives acknowledge the demonic capacity for harm but insist that it can be controlled by (human and demonic) participation in the rabbinic project. The rabbinic self, she concludes, [End Page 105] is "a preventative self, conditioned in ways that prevent demonic attack[…] a powerful self, with power over demons, gentiles, and even the Roman imperial family" (222).

Despite the narrowness of the title's promised focus on "rabbinic culture in late antique Babylonia," Ronis actually ranges much more widely. She spends a significant portion of the book explicating parallels and contrasts to rabbinic discourse, including in ancient Mesopotamian texts, the New Testament and other early Christian writers, Pahlavi Zoroastrian and Syriac Christian religious literature, and Greco-Roman philosophy. One area that is only briefly explored, but which still seems ripe for further research, is a diachronic study of Jewish demonic discourse, connecting the Talmudic trends that Ronis identifies with the practices and narratives of later Jewish communities, as demonstrated in the Moroccan folktale with which we began.

Throughout this book, Ronis makes connections to the continued relevance of demonology and demonic discourse to our contemporary world, from the 2016 US presidential elections to films like The Exorcist and The Babadook, showing that we still think with demons today, although perhaps in less organized ways than the Babylonian rabbis. Ronis concludes that attention to demonic discourse is a way to notice central features of how the rabbis understood their world, defined its boundaries, and justified its superiority: "to be non-rabbinic was to be constantly in demonic danger; to be a rabbi was to be in productive community with rabbinic demons" (224). The encounter with demons is first and foremost an encounter with an Other. Ronis' guide to how the rabbis structured their relationship with their demonic neighbors (and colleagues) is thus a welcome contribution to a larger ethics of neighborliness, as pressing now as it was millennia ago.