Early Medieval Magic and Divination

Did Medieval Jews Practice Magic?

Far from belonging to a fringe belief system, magical practices and divination appear often in the corpus of materials preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Overt objection to magic was confined to a few individuals, such as Moses Maimonides and some of his colleagues, and many rationalist, scientifically minded Jewish intellectuals in the Islamic world were comfortable with the various forms of divination: horoscopes, dream interpretation, geomancy, physiognomic interpretation, and more. Despite opposition from certain rabbinic elites, medieval Jews at all social levels accepted the existence of otherworldly beings, both good and evil, and thought that magical practices could change one’s fate. 

The sources include evidence for ritual practices such as the use of amulets, horoscopes, magic spells, and divination, providing a useful corrective to modern assumptions about what constituted proper religious behavior. 

From the levels of scribal competence found in amulets and handbooks, and from other social data, it would appear that both magicians and their clients could be very well educated. Similarly, many leading rabbis engaged in magical rituals and prayers. Some of the magical practices described in the texts correspond to the Hekhalot (palaces) corpus, mystical literature that likely emerged in late talmudic and early geonic Babylonia.

These texts come in many cases from the Cairo Geniza and represent otherwise ephemeral traces of actual magical practices rather than being treatises on magical theory or theoretical discussions of the validity of magic. They often use symbols and letter formations such as crosses, lines, and circular marks, as well as nonsensical words; the translations attempt to maintain as much of the original format as possible.