“A DYBBUK HAS ENTERED THE BODY OF THE BRIDE”

Abstract

This paper is a field guide to the haunted shtetl. I analyse S. Ansky’s stage play The Dybbuk and the religio-social phenomenon of spirit possession in early modern Judaism through the lens of Creepy Studies, with a particular focus on abjection, pollution, and dark play. A dybbuk is a type of restless spirit from Kabbalistic cosmology, first identified in sixteenth-century Palestine: a dead man whose sins in life placed him outside of judgement in the World-to-Come and who possesses a living person for vengeance or survival. Alongside the golem, the dybbuk is one of the more distinctive Jewish phenomena to enjoy breakout appeal amongst non-Jewish and Jewish audiences alike. First staged in 1920, The Dybbuk details a case of spirit possession in a small town in Jewish Eastern Europe, around the turn of the last century. The play’s premise of a Romeo and Juliet story with added exorcisms provides fertile enough ground for a creep-oriented analysis; it is made even creepier through the story’s ethnographic links to very real historic belief in demon and spirit possession throughout Hasidic communities. I use affect theory to interrogate dybbuk possession as both a literary and social phenomenon. Section 2 of the paper, “What’s a Dybbuk?,” traces the development of Jewish beliefs around malevolent spirits and the transmigration of souls from sixteenth-century Safed to twentieth-century Poland. I detail how this bricolage of Kabbalism, religious renewal movements, and folk culture culminated in Ansky’s theatrical masterpiece, which has in turn shaped contemporary audiences’ understandings of the demon-riddled past. In section 3 of the paper, “What’s Creepy About A Dybbuk?,” I delineate multiple subcategories of what comprises creepiness – metatextual; gendered; supernatural; ironic – to identify the multiple moving parts that make The Dybbuk, and dybbukim as a category, such enduring sources of creepy fascination.