Dybbuk

A possessing spirit of the Jewish folk tradition, recorded across the Yiddish-speaking lands of Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century forward. The Hebrew *dibbuk* derives from the verb *davak*, to cling. The figure was held to be the soul of one who had died with sin unatoned, attaching itself to a living body as a means of completing what could not be completed in life. S. Ansky's ethnographic play *The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds* (1914), drawn directly from the field-collection expedition of 1912 to 1914 across the Pale of Settlement, recorded the household and synagogue rite of exorcism by the *Baal Shem*, in which the spirit was addressed by name, the cause of its clinging established, and the body released by formal pronouncement.

The figure spoke through the body it inhabited, in the voice of the deceased, and was held to know what the host could not know. The exorcism rite was not theatrical. It was performed in the synagogue, by the rabbi or Baal Shem, in the presence of ten witnesses, and it was the spirit, not the host, that was addressed throughout. The Lurianic Kabbalah of sixteenth-century Safed treated the figure within the doctrine of gilgul, the cycle of soul-return.