Geniza Magical Documents

The Cairo Geniza has proved to be a fascinating trove of information about all aspects of Jewish life in the medieval and early modern period, magic being one of them. Hundreds of manuscripts, in different states of conservation, testify to the interest of Jews in composing and copying magical manuals as well as producing amulets and curses and otherwise attempting to harness the supernatural in order to achieve earthly aims. This essay introduces the reader to Geniza magical texts and provides some guidelines for reading these documents.

1 A definition of the term magic and its problematic relationship with religion is beyond the scope of this essay. On this topic, see, e.g., Peter Schäfer, "Magic and Religion in Ancient Judaism," in Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, ed. Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg (Leiden, 1997), 19-43; and Yuval Harari, "What Is a Magical Text? Methodological Reflections Aimed at Redefining Early Jewish Magic," in Officina magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity, ed. Shaul Shaked (Leiden, 2005), 91-124, and Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah (Detroit, 2017), 15-203. The best introduction to magic in the Cairo Geniza is Gideon Bohak, "Towards a Catalogue of the Magical, Astrological, Divinatory and Alchemical Fragments from the Cambridge Genizah Collections," in "From a Sacred Source": Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif, ed. Ben Outhwaite and Siam Bhayro (Leiden, 2011), 53-79. 2 For the reluctance of great Geniza scholars to deal with documents related to magic, see essay provides a concise introduction to Geniza magical texts and suggests some guidelines for reading such documents. 3 The information on practical magic contained in the Geniza can be divided into two main categories. The first consists of recipes with instructions on how to achieve specific ends (e.g., obtaining protection from the evil eye, succeeding in a court of law, or causing the downfall of an enemy). The second involves finished products such as amulets or imprecations that were manufactured on the basis of these instructions. 4 Accordingly, one can discern between two groups of people who employed magic. The first group consists of practitioners (or magicians), who used magical recipes in order to cater to the demands of the second group, their clients, for whom they produced amulets, potions, and other magical items. One should bear in mind, however, that this distinction is not always applicable, as sometimes individuals could employ magical recipes on their own, without resorting to a professional practitioner. The recipes were occasionally collected in booklets, some carefully arranged according to topics or even containing numbered recipes and a "table of contents." 5 However, most of them were inscribed on loose leaves of paper or parchment or sometimes scribbled on the margins of other, nonmagical documents.
The magical documents uncovered in the Geniza range in date from its earliest strata, around the tenth century, to the latest, with fragments dating from the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. It should be noted, however, that most of these documents can be dated only through paleographic analysis and that only a small percentage have thus far been considered. Consequently, the majority of magical documents remain undated.
Linguistically, these documents resemble other documentary Geniza sources, meaning that they are written primarily in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, with occasional fragments or portions in Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Persian, Yiddish, etc. Roughly half the documents contain at least a few words in Judeo-Arabic or Hebrew, and a much smaller portion employ Aramaic or words in the Arabic alphabet. A broad survey of magical recipes uncovered in the Geniza shows that, when a recipe includes more than one language, we find Judeo-Arabic or, less commonly, Arabic in the recipe's instructions or title while the actual magical formulas are in Hebrew and Aramaic. Many of these bi-or trilingual recipes date back to late antiquity and were originally written entirely in Aramaic or Hebrew. As they were repeatedly copied in the medieval period, some copyists decided to translate the titles and instructions into a more familiar language, that is, Judeo-Arabic. However, they refrained from translating magical formulas, perhaps fearing that this might cause a loss of efficacy. 6 Given its nature, the Geniza preserves only written finished products, but a magical product could also be oral (e.g., an incantation to be recited) or nontextual (e.g., an ointment to be applied to one's body). Data related to this latter type of product are often preserved among the magical recipes. In some rare cases, we are lucky to retrieve both a finished product and the recipe on which it was based, as will be exemplified by the sample text below.
Geniza magical texts were intended to achieve a wide range of goals: apotropaic, curative, divinatory, erotic, aggressive, etc. Recipes often bear a title explicitly stating their goal: for example, "For he who has a headache" ‫ראשיה(‬ ‫דחשש‬ ‫,)למן‬ 7 "If you wish to know what will happen in the world" ‫אם(‬ ‫בעולם‬ ‫יהיה‬ ‫מה‬ ‫לתדע‬ ‫,)בקשתה‬ 8 "For every evil need: to kill and to send fire and also for hate and to separate" ‫וגם(‬ ‫לשנאה‬ ‫וגם‬ ‫אש‬ ‫ולשלוח‬ ‫להרוג‬ ‫לביש‬ ‫צורך‬ ‫לכל‬ ‫,)להפריד‬ 9 and the pervasive "For love" or "For hate" ‫לשנאה(‬ ‫.)לאהבה/‬ 10 In the case of amulets or other finished products, the goal may be easily inferred from their content. For instance, an amulet could appeal to God or various 6 A reverse situation can be observed in some Jewish magical manuscripts from Europe. When recipes originate in non-Jewish sources, their instructions are written in Hebrew while the magical formulas are in Latin or some European vernacular but inscribed in the Hebrew alphabet. On the division of languages in magical and related types of Geniza documents, see supernatural forces requesting, "Send healing and have mercy on Bunayna daughter of Yaman" ‫ימן(‬ ‫בנת‬ ‫לבנינה‬ ‫ותרחם‬ ‫רפואה‬ ‫,)שלח‬ or adjure the evil spirits, "Go out and depart and go far away and do not approach Bunayna" ‫תצאו(‬ ‫לבנינה‬ ‫תגעו‬ ‫ולא‬ ‫ותתרחקו‬ ‫.)ותלכו‬ 11 In addition to their actual wording, magical texts can also be recognized through some external features. These are particularly useful when looking at poorly preserved fragments of which only a few words survive. These features consist of the following: 1. Overlined, overdotted, and boxed words. All these means of highlighting are used to denote mainly names of supernatural entities (angels, demons, the names of God) but also magical words or vowel permutations (e.g., kwyk bkwyk or y » w yh hwh). 12 2. Magical signs. These small enigmatic scribbles resemble letters or geometric forms and often include small circles at their tips. They are sometimes referred to as characters ‫,)כרקטיריא(‬ an Aramicized term based on the Greek χαρακτήρες. 13 The two following recipes show the typical form and content of a Geniza magical document from the classical period. They are part of a magical handbook written on paper of which eight leaves (two bifolia) survive, each measuring approximately 14.3 × 20 centimeters. The fragment contains thirteen recipes.

Discussion
The recipes are written in a mixture of Judeo-Arabic and Aramaic or Hebrew and Aramaic that is very common in Geniza magic. Each begins with a title stating its purpose: releasing a "bound" (probably impotent) person in the first recipe and silencing one's enemies (lit. "shutting the mouth") in the second. As can be seen in fig. 1, the recipes are separated from each other by a dividing line, and their titles are also set off from the rest of the text. Such formal means made it easier for people employing magical handbooks to find the recipe they needed, although not all the scribes of Geniza magical texts were as neat as the present one.
The first recipe instructs the magician or the interested party to inscribe a series of magical signs and vowel permutations on a leaf and then rinse the writing in wine. The vowel permutations are overdotted, setting them apart from regular words, and indicating their special function in the text. So are the letters »» s, representing the abbreviated ending of typical Jewish prayers. The wine should eventually be drunk by the bound person, whose "big sinew" (meaning perhaps the sex organ) will then be able to function properly. The signs and vowels are addressed directly and referred to as "holy symbols" and "knots" (see n. 13 above). Obviously, we have little way of knowing whether and how such a recipe was put to use since its end product would have been merely a potion.
The second recipe begins with an adjuration containing several synonym verbs, intended to cover many possible instances of silencing. The person whom the adjuration is intended to benefit is listed as pel(oni) ben pel(onit), that is, "N son of N." This generic term is very common in magical recipes as well as in nonmagical documents such as legal texts. It was supposed to be replaced by a real name, designating the person who employed the recipe in practice. Next, the text refers to the supernatural entity in whose name the magical action was to be performed. This is Lahaki » el, the "great angel" who is said to be appointed over love. Several other magical names are listed, all of them boxed, followed by a full alphabetical sequence. What makes this recipe particularly interesting is the fact that the Geniza preserves proof of its actual use by a medieval magician. T-S K1.167, published in the same volume as the magical handbook presented above, is a lengthy amulet written on behalf of a woman named Sitthum. 17 The scribe who prepared the amulet employed the recipe presented above (or, rather, a slightly different version thereof) as part of the amulet text. Replacing the generic pel(oni) ben pel(onit) with the name Sitthum bat Sitt al-Ahl, and modifying the grammatical gender in lines 12-13 from masculine to feminine, the scribe transformed a magical recipe into a finished product. That the parchment amulet shows signs of having been folded and carried on the body reveals an unhappy family life, as Sitthum wished to silence and be protected from none other than her husband, Moussi.
Despite S. D. Goitein's determination to ignore the presence of magical items in the Geniza, the thousands of such documents preserved therein demonstrate that many Jews were producers and users of magic. The practices attested in the Geniza bear all the hallmarks of Jewish magic. They include citations from the Hebrew Bible or liturgy, distinctive Hebrew names of angels, adjurations employing the Tetragrammaton, and a remarkable adherence to the Jewish religious tradition. The latter is manifested, for example, by the fact that almost no recipe requests to perform magical practices on Sabbath. Likewise, recipes rarely call for an unorthodox use of nonkosher substances. 18 Naturally, one can find many points of contact between Jewish and non-Jewish magic among the Geniza documents, yet, for the most part, these texts are typical products of the Jewish magical tradition. Moreover, their very presence in the Ben Ezra synagogue suggests they were regarded as an ordinary part of community life. 19 Documents such as the magical handbook and the personalized amulet presented above provide us with an additional window into the daily, private life of the Geniza society.
Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.