Rothschild’s End

The Vienna Rothschild went one day into his strong room, but he forgot to take his keys. The minute he walked in, the door slammed shut so he could not open it. Since the room had no window, there was no way he could get out. He shouted and shouted, but nobody heard him. A few days later when people began to wonder where he was, they organized a search. Eventually his servants opened the strong room and found the Baron Rothschild lying dead on the floor. He had starved to death.

Reb Ayzik, a forest overseer, loved to carve in his spare time. And while he carved ritual spice boxes with little towers and doors, and tobacco boxes and toys for us children, he would tell us tales of little elves, of shretelekh.

—Memoir from Kolomey, Poland, the early part of
this century

And in kheyder when the melamed was away in shul for afternoon and evening prayers, we would sit in darkness, huddle near the oven for warmth, and tell scary stories about the spirits who throng the shul after midnight, and the tricks they play on anyone who has to sleep there—so that a beggar would rather sleep on the floor of the humblest house than enjoy the honor of a bench in shul. We would tell stories about sheydim, dibbuks, Lilith.

—Memoir from interbellum Eastern Europe

Medieval fears and superstitious beliefs survived well into twentieth-century Europe, particularly among tradition-bound villagers and small-town dwellers. Demons, dibbuks, and golems were as vivid a part of village life as the miracles and wonders that were an integral part of received religion. For examples of how these rogue traditions affected Yiddish folklore, we turn now to East European mesoyres, local legends—called “memorats” by folklorists.

The memorat is an account of an extraordinary event purported to have actually occurred in a specific place at a specific time. The Yiddish memorat may tell of an encounter with supernatural creatures—with a malignant shed, demon, or with a mischievous but kind shretele, an elflike household familiar. It may also explain local lore: how a synagogue came to be built in a certain location, or how it was miraculously saved during a fire; the history of a curious grave marker, and the mystery within a cave.

The range of supernatural creatures includes the shretele, the lantekh, and the kapelyushnikl. The kindly shretele may well have been brought along by Jews from Alsace and southern Germany, where an elf with the same name has been popular among non-Jews for centuries, and may also bear some relation to the skrzat, the house elf, which made its appearance in Polish folklore around 1500. The naughty bridge hobgoblin, lantekh, appears to be none other than the French lutin, who was brought to Eastern Europe by Jews in the course of their migration. The teasing kapelyushnikl, who likes to pester horses, on the other hand, is apparently native to Slavic soil and may be an original East European Jewish creation. In Polish, kapelyushnikl means “hat maker,” and indeed the little creatures wear hats.

Lilith, the Assyrian lilitu, was a more formidable adversary. Originally a wind spirit, in Talmudic times Lilith became an evil and erotic night spirit, while in medieval and modern Jewish folklore she was seen as a demoness who attacked newborn children and their mothers.

Other supernatural interventions described in memorats challenge the very limits of the human condition. They may signal a soul returning after death, or one entering the body of a living person. In some of the tales the transmigrated soul is called a gilgl—though a gilgl can also be an animal’s soul. The term dibbuk seems to be restricted to the restless spirit of a deceased person. Supernatural tales may also involve a golem, a man-made creature of enormous physical strength, like the one said to have been created in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community of Prague. It was believed that a holy man, possessed of the power of the Holy Name, could exorcise a transmigrated soul, could cast a demon out into uninhabitable places, could create a golem and turn it back into dust again. Even Satan could be foiled by absolute devotion and intense prayer.

Memorats are nearly always simple in structure, usually containing a single narrative motif. They are often told as eyewitness accounts or contain a personal testimonial: “I heard this myself from an old man who lived there.” Some of them plunge right in: “One night a sick man was walking near the synagogue.” Occasionally the teller will say, “This happened in the old days,” with the implication that such things no longer happen.

Needless to say, there were many who sneered at these spooky local legends. After all, they were beyond proof, and founded on medieval superstitions. In “A Balshem Drives Out a Dibbuk” a rationalist has a good laugh with a pseudo-holy man. The powerful final story in this section, “The Last Dibbuk,” recreates a dramatic and decisive confrontation between those who believed in spirits and those who did not.

* * *

* * *