Along with celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage, May is also Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM). The designation was made official by President Bush in 2006, to honor and recognize the accomplishments of Jewish Americans.
To celebrate JAHM, HCPL is hosting three special performances by Firelight Shadow Theater, opens a new window! These performances will introduce families to beloved Jewish folktales using shadow puppets.
“Spin Me a Shadow, Tell Me a Jewish Tale, opens a new window” will be held at the following locations and times:
West University Branch: May 22 @ 4pm | Directions, opens a new window
Spring Branch Memorial Branch: May 23 @ 4pm | Directions, opens a new window
Barbara Bush Branch: May 24 @ 3pm | Directions, opens a new window
After learning about our partnership with the Firelight Shadow Theater, I immediately started wondering what folktales would be presented.
Would shadow puppets tell the story of the Golem of Prague? Dybbuks? The Corpse Bride?
(Yes, you did read that last one right. And yes, you should be thinking of the Tim Burton movie. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.)
I realized almost immediately that some of my guesses were, in fact, monsters of Jewish folklore. They probably won’t be introduced to children via shadow puppets, but I can definitely introduce them to you via this blog.
So, without further ado, here’s a brief introduction to some of Judaism’s most famous creatures, monsters, and spirits.
Monsters and Creatures
Golems
Perhaps the most famous of Jewish folk creatures, the golem has made a name for itself in mainstream media like video games and anime. The original story of the golem, however, is not one of a monster but of a protector.
In the late 1500s in Prague’s Jewish ghetto, Rabbi Judda Loew (pronounced like “low”) listened to his congregants recount moments of antisemitism and danger they had faced. Like any good rabbi, Loew worried. What could he do for his community to make them feel safe, to protect them and their children?
He thought, eventually, of the story of Adam, and how he was molded from clay. Was it not possible to make another creature from clay, this one meant to protect?
Rabbi Loew gave it a shot, making a man-shaped creature from dust and clay, inscribing a shem (a letter from the alephbet) on a piece of paper, and placing it in the golem’s mouth. During the day, the golem helped with simple chores around the ghetto. At night, it patrolled the streets to protect the Jews who slept.
Accounts of its demise differ, but the most accepted is that the golem became violent. Rabbi Loew had to remove the shem from its mouth and store the shaped clay in the synagogue’s attic, where he forbade anyone from reviving it. Personally, I like thinking the golem just grew weary and wanted to rest for a while.
While the golem began its life as a protector and helper, its consistently violent ends have cemented it as a monster in most non-Jewish narratives. It often features in horror movies and shows as the antagonist or the antagonist’s puppet.
For most Jews, however, the golem remains a symbol of protection and a cautionary tale of what might happen when life is not treated seriously.
Dybbuks
Generally, a dybbuk is formed when someone has died but is unwilling to pass on. Either they aren’t ready to leave the living world behind, they have not been buried on time or properly, or they’ve wronged someone and have yet to perform teshuvah. Teshuvah is, basically, the ritual and process of atoning for wrongdoings; it’s a long, meaningful way of apologizing for your actions and proving you’ve grown since them.
Sometimes, deals can be made with dybbuks, and they fulfill their end of the bargain through the centuries, if that’s needed. One book of quintessential Queer-Jewish fiction, The Dyke and the Dybbuk, follows this plot exactly. A dybbuk makes a deal to haunt every female descendant of the woman who scorned a lover in the 1700s, the most recent of whom happens to be a woman (the eponymous dyke) the dybbuk falls in love with. The woman falls in love with one of the scorned lover’s descendants, and the dybbuk goes back to its life of hauntings.
It’s a good book; I highly recommend it, and you can borrow it using ILL.
A common misconception is that dybbuks can be stored or captured in boxes. There is no Rabbinical acknowledgement of this fact. Dybbuks cannot survive in boxes because an essential part of their lore is that they must be connected to a human host. They cling to humans to survive; they would fade away otherwise.
Authors tend to take liberties with dybbuks, focusing more on the idea of them as clinging spirits than spirits with unfinished business. They're used most often in horror stories for this reason, but like most creatures from Jewish folklore, they can be reasoned with and are open to dialogue.
The original story about the Dybbuk Box (from an e-bay listing back in 2003) was eventually exposed by the original poster as false. He’d made it up to create an interactive horror story, and the Dybbuk Box took on a life of its own from there.
Shedim (singular: sheyd)
Honestly, this is more of a catch-all word than anything else. All dybbuks are technically shedim, but not all shedim are dybbuks. Some defy specific classification, and it’s those we will focus on in this section, referring to them colloquially as shedim.
These are, basically, Jewish demons. They aren’t the demons you might be familiar with, though. For the most part, they’re easy to clock because they have bird feet. Always. The bird feet do not go away even when they wear shoes. It’s why shedim will hide their feet when they interact with humans. Most of them also lack shadows.
Additionally, they’re closer to tricksters than malicious spirits. The tiny nuisances that create annoyances or minor setbacks are often credited to shedim. Accidentally knock over your water? It was probably a sheyd messing with you. Overall, they aren’t exactly evil; shedim are more like lost souls that have wandered but don’t really mind where they ended up.
They have a frenemy relationship with angels; they’re just as likely to study Torah together (yes, the shedim can touch and study the holy books) as they are to fight. Sometimes, they make small wagers with each other because they’re bored.
My rabbi’s favorite story to tell children in the lead-up to High Holy Days is about an angel and sheyd who wander and come across a small house. The children inside are playing, leaving their toys a mess, and the parents are clearly exhausted as they cleanse the home to prepare for Yom Kippur. The angel and sheyd bet on whether the sheyd can convince the children to abandon the mess or the angel can convince them to help their parents by cleaning it.
In the end, the angel wins, and the sheyd promises to study Torah together as they walk away from the house.
When the Angels Left the Old Country
Estries
These are a lesser-known monster from Jewish folklore, even to fellow Jews.
Estries are female vampires (they can only be women) that feed only on the blood of Jewish men and can fly when they let their hair down. The method of flight is unclear; either letting their hair down allows them to become owls, or they simply begin to fly. It might depend on which they prefer at the time.
When an estrie is hurt, she can heal herself by consuming bread and salt. The most reliable way to kill one is to bury her and shove a stake through her mouth, pinning her to the coffin/dirt (though, I’d love to know who wouldn’t die after being buried alive with a stake through the mouth, but still).
And that’s all we really know about estries. I’m sure there used to be more, but that is lost to us now. It seems to have disappeared somewhere between persecution, assimilation, and the pursuit of survival.
This lack of lore, however, means that creative liberties can be taken when writing about estries, making them a fun playground for authors.
The Corpse Bride
If you didn’t know The Corpse Bride was based on a Jewish folk tale, don’t worry, neither did I until three years ago. I was rewatching the movie and wondered why it felt oddly familiar; I could have sworn I’d heard something similar.
After some research (I plugged “corpse bride origins” into Google and went from there), I figured it out.
In the 16th-century book of folk tales based on the stories of a rabbi in Northern Israel (then still called Palestine) and republished in the 90s book Lilith’s Cave, is a tale called The Finger.
A man, on the night before his wedding, is walking with friends. They come (unknowingly) across the shallow grave of an improperly buried woman in her wedding dress. Her finger is poking through the dirt, the men believe it to be a stick, and they cajole the soon-to-be groom into practicing his wedding vows.
He recites the vow three times as per tradition and places the ring on the finger poking through the ground. Upon being married (the one thing she was denied in life), the bride claws her way out of the ground and recognizes her husband (with ghostly wails and shrieking, to be fair).
The men run away and try to put the corpse out of their minds. When the groom gets married the next day, the corpse bride interrupts the ceremony, claiming the man as her husband after everyone but the groom and rabbi has run away.
The rabbi calls a council to order, like a court of law, and the council listens to both sides of the situation. It eventually decides that the groom's betrothal to the living woman, which had been in place for a few years, takes precedence over his accidental marriage to the corpse. Additionally, because he did not know it was the corpse's finger, he could not have intentionally said the marriage vows, which negates them.
Upon being denied her marriage by official representatives of Jewish law, the corpse bride loses her life and falls to the ground, once more dead. She is given a proper burial deep in the ground to ensure such a tragedy never occurs again.
All of that sounds familiar, right? Really similar to The Corpse Bride, even?
Well, even though there has been no official confirmation from Tim Burton or the movie’s other creators, the similarities are too many to be coincidence. Granted, it was made a little more kid-friendly (the original tale gives more description to the whole "rotting" aspect of being a corpse) for the movie.
The folk tale would make a fun, scary story, though.
Further Reading
Can’t get enough of Jewish monsters and folk tales? Want to read a story inspired by Jewish folklore and/or mysticism? Just curious about more Jewish fairy tales?
Great!
In addition to attending one of our “Spin Me a Shadow; Tell Me a Jewish Tale” programs with your family, you can browse these books or go searching for articles about Jewish folk tales in the HCPL databases (all you need is your library card!)
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism
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