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Key words: folklore, demonology, medicine, Jewish-Slavic relations
Abstract:
The article deals with the subject of popular demonology as a space of symbolic contact between Jewish culture and the largely Slavic surrounding culture(s) in the Eastern Europe. It brings together two main themes - the presence of Christian beliefs about witchcraft, and demonic representations of diseases (e.g. kolten, hartsvorem, etc.) - as seen and evaluated within the Ashkenazi milieu at the turn of the 20th century. Based on print and handwritten sources of various origins, the article presents examples of extensive intercultural contact, emphasizing their scope and meaning, as well as their limitations, in historical/cultural context.
The problem of Jewish-Slavic cultural contacts attracted much attention in the final decades of the last century, and inspired a visible turn in scholarship beginning with the "polysystem theory" created originally for literature studies, and ending with recent concepts of "cultural frontier."2 In Chone Shmeruk's case study of the Esterke story, a pioneering work at the time of its publication in the 1980s, the author discusses two neighboring traditions, focusing mainly on their literary dimensions. As Shmeruk points out, contact between Jewish and Christian populations was almost entirely limited to the economic sphere, with an otherwise virtual cultural wall existing between Polish Jews and non-Jews, preventing open cultural exchange in other domains. But folklore could mutually affect both groups due to its oral transmission. Yet Shmeruk saw such influences as having limited culture-building impact, and therefore did not occupy himself with it in his own analysis.3 Ever since Adam Teller expanded the conception of the shtetl from the insular, exclusively Jewish space it had long been treated as, viewing it instead as an integral part of social landscape of the Polish-Lithuanian state,4 the need for an intercultural approach to Jewish history in the Eastern Europe became clear. Mary Louise Pratt's notion of a contact zone is useful here, as it offers a framework for understanding intercultural encounter in social as well as symbolic terms.5 Even if Jewish-Slavic meetings centered around economic activities, their substance was generally much broader and involved also other spheres of culture. This article focuses on intercultural contacts and exchange with regard to popular demonology, using representations of demons and witches as expressed by the traditional...