Paper short abstract:

Jewish healers in Yemen practiced several kinds of communication with spiritual entities in their healing methods. By analyzing oral sources, this lecture will ask how folk religion of a Jewish minority in a Muslim land reacts to immigration, in a new cultural context which questions its legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Traditional Jewish healers in 19th-20th century Yemen practiced several kinds of communication with other-than-human entities in their healing methods. Notably, these healers would address non human, spiritual beings for various purposes, such as creating amulets, divination, curing sickness, or evoking love or hate to the request of young Jews or Muslims. Past ethnographic writings of these practices often depicted them in contrast to modernity, through orientalist and colonialist prisms. This trend accelerated in the 1950's, after the majority of the Yemeni-Jewish population immigrated to Israel, encountering traditional Yemeni practices and concepts of 'the occult' with the western and modern image Zionism sought to cultivate.

By analyzing oral sources collected by ethnographers in the past century, with additional field work with Yemeni-Jewish immigrants in current-day Israel, this lecture will ask how folk religion of a Jewish minority in a Muslim land reacts to immigration, in a new cultural context which questions its legitimacy. By discussing practices such as talking to Jewish angels in Arabic, or marrying a demon, the lecture will examine how Yemeni Jewish folk religion displays blurred borders between religions and genders, and how it challenges strict categories such as 'Good Angels' or 'Evil Demons'