The Dybbuk of Nikolsburg
Moravia (Nikolsburg, today Mikulov, Czech Republic) · Early modern, the year 1696
The woman had not been a person of standing. The Hebrew pamphlet printed at Fürth in the year following names her only by the patronymic of her late father. She had been thirty-one years of age. The younger of her two children had died at the breast the year before. She had attended the women’s gallery of the synagogue on the morning of the seventh of Shevat, the winter of 1696, as she had on every Sabbath of her married life.
She opened her mouth at the reading of the portion.
The voice that came out was not her voice. It was a man’s voice, hoarse, of a register lower than any in the women’s gallery, and it knew, as it spoke, the name of the rabbi’s father. It addressed the rabbi by his patronymic. It spoke a Yiddish of the Polish lands, not of the Moravian, in the cadence of the trade-roads. The women of the gallery moved away from the woman. The men of the floor below stopped the reading. The synagogue was, for some minutes, silent except for the voice.
On what the voice said
The voice gave its account.
It said it had been a peddler. Its name was known by trade to two elder merchants of Nikolsburg, who, when the rabbi questioned them at the close of the morning, confirmed that such a man had passed through two summers before with a load of pewter. The voice said it had died on the road outside Lublin, in a ditch beyond the third milestone of the south road, of a wound given by a stranger over a debt of three gulden. The body had been found by a passing carter. Burial had been refused at Lublin on the ground that the body could not be identified. The body had been buried beyond the wall of the cemetery, in the ground reserved for the unclaimed.
It could not rest in that ground. It had wandered the road back from Lublin for the better part of two years. It had entered the woman in the gallery because the door of her grief, the door of her dead infant, had been the first door it had found standing open in the synagogue.
The rabbi heard the account through. The rabbi did not interrupt. The pamphlet records that the rabbi, at the close of the account, asked the voice three questions: the name of the stranger who had given the wound, the name of the carter who had carried the body, and the name of the parish that had refused the burial. The voice answered the second and the third. The voice would not answer the first.
On the seven nights
The rite the rabbi called for was the rite the community had ready.
A minyan of ten was constituted from the elders of the community. They met on the seven nights of the rite in the bet midrash of the synagogue, the woman seated on a low stool at the centre, the elders standing in a circle about her and the three readers at the eastern wall. White candles of beeswax burned at the four corners. The shofar of the eldest was brought from the ark and laid upon the reader’s desk.
The first night was given to Psalm 91 in the full. The second to the chapter from the Sefer ha-Kavvanot the rabbi had studied in his youth in Prague. The third, fourth, and fifth nights were given to the negotiation: the rabbi spoke to the voice, the voice spoke through the woman, and the conditions of the departure were settled in the manner of a contract. The voice required the recitation of the Kaddish for its name, at Nikolsburg and at Lublin, for eleven months. It required three gulden paid into the burial society of Lublin for the moving of the body within the cemetery wall. It required a written undertaking, in the rabbi’s hand, that the elder son of the woman of Nikolsburg would not bear the peddler’s name.
The conditions were agreed. The sixth night was given to the writing of the contract. The seventh night was the departure.
On the departure
The shofar was sounded at the four corners of the room.
The rabbi commanded the voice, in the names of the seven elders of the minyan and of the four archangels of the night, to depart through the smallest toe of the woman’s left foot. Not through the mouth, not through the crown, not through the seven openings of the head: the smaller the exit, the less of the woman the departing voice could carry. The shofar was sounded a second time. The woman cried out, in her own voice, for the first time in seven nights. Those nearest her saw the small toe of her left foot, bare to the ankle by the rite, darken in the moment of the sounding to the colour of an old bruise, the skin parting at the joint with a small sound, a thin trace of blood running onto the floor of the bet midrash.
The voice did not speak again.
The woman was carried to her bed. The toe was bound, by the wife of the rabbi, in white linen. It healed within the month, leaving a small dark mark at the joint that she carried for the remaining twenty-eight years of her life. The contract was kept. The elder son of the household did not bear the peddler’s name.
The archive holds no position on whether a peddler died in a ditch beyond the third milestone of the south road from Lublin in the summer of 1694. The archive observes only that two elder merchants of Nikolsburg confirmed the man had passed through with pewter, that the woman of the gallery opened her mouth at the reading of the portion, that the voice knew the rabbi’s father by name, that the rite was performed on seven consecutive nights, and that the small toe of her left foot carried, until her death, the dark mark of the place by which the voice had left her.
- Prager, Moses ben Menahem. *Zera' Kodesh*. Fürth, 1696. The contemporary Hebrew pamphlet recording the Nikolsburg congregational exorcism, attested by the seven witnesses of the minyan that conducted the rite. Listed in Bodleian Opp. 8° 1138.
- An-sky, S. (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport). Field notebooks of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912-1914. Vilnius and Saint Petersburg manuscript holdings. The expedition recorded an oral version of the Nikolsburg case in Mikulov in the summer of 1913.
- Chajes, J. H. *Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. The standard academic treatment of the *dybbuk* corpus in early modern Ashkenazi communities, with the Moravian cases at chapter 3.