ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,255
- Location
- Eblana
Preserving the olg Follore and using the beliefs in fiction.
Protecting Ashkenazi Jewish Magic: Preservation Through Storytelling and History
Gavriel Savit
Tue Mar 2, 2021 12:00pm
... I, however, am more concerned with the things that didn’t make the crossing.
There were many—all the secret recipes, all the art and artifacts. An entire architectural style was lost: the wooden synagogue, often highly figured and beautifully adorned. Perhaps a handful of examples remain in the world, and most of them are replicas.
If it was Jewish and it could burn, then they burned it.
I mourn the loss of the synagogues, of course, of the artifacts and recipes, but in the end, I am not an architect, or a chef. I’m a writer of fantasies.
What keeps me up at night is the loss of Jewish magic. And I mean this literally.
It’s sometimes hard to communicate to non-Jews the degree to which Jewishness is not just a religious identity. Founded as a nation roughly three thousand years ago, before the concepts of ethnicity, worship, and nationality were tidily separable, we are a people—a civilization more than anything else. The most traditionally observant Jews will persist in identifying people born to Jewish mothers as Jews even as they practice other religions and renounce the Jewish God. There are even Jewish atheists—a lot of them.
Our religion is submerged, then, in a thick broth of associate culture, and that’s why, despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible clearly prohibits the practice, we can still discuss Jewish magic just as easily as we can discuss Jewish atheism: it’s very clearly there.
From the ancient Near Eastern making of incantation bowls to the still-ongoing practice of leaving petitionary notes at the graves of sages, Jews have been practicing magic as long as we’ve been around. In some times and places, Jewish magic has been codified, elevated into theology and philosophy. Traces of this tendency exist in the Talmud, and notably in the various phases of Kabbalistic development throughout our diasporic history.
But these are the kinds of Jewish magic that haven’t been lost; anyone with a library card or an internet connection can find out about them. What I mourn is the loss of folk magic—the stuff too quotidian, too obscure, perhaps even too heterodox to have been recorded. We know it was there. We see traces of it in rabbinic responsa as well as secular literature: the way our grandmothers used to tie red thread to our bassinets in order to keep the thieving demons away; the way our grandfathers used to appeal to the local scribe for a protective amulet of angels’ names scratched out on a spare roll of parchment. ...
https://www.tor.com/2021/03/02/preservation-through-storytelling-and-history/
Protecting Ashkenazi Jewish Magic: Preservation Through Storytelling and History
Gavriel Savit
Tue Mar 2, 2021 12:00pm
... I, however, am more concerned with the things that didn’t make the crossing.
There were many—all the secret recipes, all the art and artifacts. An entire architectural style was lost: the wooden synagogue, often highly figured and beautifully adorned. Perhaps a handful of examples remain in the world, and most of them are replicas.
If it was Jewish and it could burn, then they burned it.
I mourn the loss of the synagogues, of course, of the artifacts and recipes, but in the end, I am not an architect, or a chef. I’m a writer of fantasies.
What keeps me up at night is the loss of Jewish magic. And I mean this literally.
It’s sometimes hard to communicate to non-Jews the degree to which Jewishness is not just a religious identity. Founded as a nation roughly three thousand years ago, before the concepts of ethnicity, worship, and nationality were tidily separable, we are a people—a civilization more than anything else. The most traditionally observant Jews will persist in identifying people born to Jewish mothers as Jews even as they practice other religions and renounce the Jewish God. There are even Jewish atheists—a lot of them.
Our religion is submerged, then, in a thick broth of associate culture, and that’s why, despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible clearly prohibits the practice, we can still discuss Jewish magic just as easily as we can discuss Jewish atheism: it’s very clearly there.
From the ancient Near Eastern making of incantation bowls to the still-ongoing practice of leaving petitionary notes at the graves of sages, Jews have been practicing magic as long as we’ve been around. In some times and places, Jewish magic has been codified, elevated into theology and philosophy. Traces of this tendency exist in the Talmud, and notably in the various phases of Kabbalistic development throughout our diasporic history.
But these are the kinds of Jewish magic that haven’t been lost; anyone with a library card or an internet connection can find out about them. What I mourn is the loss of folk magic—the stuff too quotidian, too obscure, perhaps even too heterodox to have been recorded. We know it was there. We see traces of it in rabbinic responsa as well as secular literature: the way our grandmothers used to tie red thread to our bassinets in order to keep the thieving demons away; the way our grandfathers used to appeal to the local scribe for a protective amulet of angels’ names scratched out on a spare roll of parchment. ...
https://www.tor.com/2021/03/02/preservation-through-storytelling-and-history/
