The Dybbuk is the most famous and dreaded of the possessing spirits of Jewish folklore — the restless, dislocated soul of a dead person that clings to and enters the body of a living human being, taking possession of it and speaking through its mouth. A spirit unable to find its rest, driven to inhabit the living until it can be exorcised or released, the Dybbuk is the central figure of the Jewish folklore of possession, made famous across the world by S. An-sky’s great play The Dybbuk.
The Soul That Cleaves
The name Dybbuk (Yiddish dibek, from the Hebrew davak, “to cling, to cleave, to adhere”) names precisely what the spirit does: it cleaves to a living person, clinging to and entering the body. The Dybbuk is the soul of one who has died but cannot pass on — often the soul of a sinner, of one who died unquiet or by violence, of one barred from entering the afterlife or fleeing the tormenting demons that pursue the wicked dead. Unable to find rest, the dislocated soul seeks refuge and a hiding-place in the body of a living human, into which it forces its way and which it then possesses. The belief took shape above all in the mystical milieu of later Kabbalah and the folk-religion of the Ashkenazi communities of eastern Europe, and is bound up with the doctrine of gilgul, the transmigration of souls.
Possession and Exorcism
When a Dybbuk takes possession, the afflicted person’s behaviour changes utterly: the spirit speaks through the victim’s mouth, often in a voice and manner not their own, revealing knowledge the victim could not possess, convulsing and tormenting the body it inhabits. The classic remedy is exorcism — a solemn rite performed by a rabbi or a master of the holy names (a ba’al shem), who, with the aid of a quorum of ten men, the blowing of the ram’s horn (the shofar), holy names, candles, and adjurations, commands the clinging spirit to depart. The exorcist seeks to learn the spirit’s identity and the cause of its unrest, to compel it to leave the body (often by a specified route, such as the little toe, leaving a small mark), and to release it — ideally to its rest, that the tormented soul may at last find peace. The drama of possession and exorcism makes the Dybbuk a figure of pathos as much as of dread: a lost soul seeking refuge, and the community’s effort to heal both the living victim and the restless dead.
The Restless Dead of the Shtetl
The Dybbuk became one of the most powerful images of Ashkenazi Jewish folklore — the spirit that binds the living and the dead, the lost soul and the haunted body. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk; or, Between Two Worlds (early twentieth century), in which the spirit of a dead young man possesses his beloved on the eve of her marriage to another, carried the figure into world literature and theatre, and the Dybbuk has since become a byword for spiritual possession far beyond its origins. Yet at its heart it remains a being of the Jewish mystical tradition: the soul that cannot rest, the cleaving spirit, the dead that will not let go of the living — and the holy words that alone can set both free.
Legacy
The Dybbuk endures as the great possessing spirit of Jewish folklore — the restless soul of the dead that cleaves to and possesses the living, speaking through their mouth until the holy rite of exorcism can release it. In it the Ashkenazi communities gave form to the unquiet dead, the transmigration of souls, and the perilous nearness of the world of spirits to the world of the living. Carried by literature and theatre into the wider world, the Dybbuk remains among the most haunting and famous beings of the Jewish imagination — the spirit caught between two worlds.