Sin death and beyond

SIN, DEATH AND BEYOND: M.M.NINAN
of the seventeenth century. This superstition is still widely spread, especially in Ḥasidic circles.
Curtiss relates ("Primitive Semitic Religions of To-Day," p. 152) that a few years ago a woman
was exorcised in Palestine, and that the spirit when questioned replied that it was the soul of a
Jew who had been murdered in Nablus twelve years before. The migrant soul was generally
believed to belong to a wicked or murdered person; but it may happen that that of a righteous
man is condemned, for a slight offense committed by it, to wander for a while in this world.
Such a soul is, however, free from demoniacal influences, and it enters the body of a living
person not to avoid evil spirits (who have no power over it), but to atone for the fault it has
committed. As soon as this has been accomplished it leaves the body of its own free will.
Ḥayyim Vital records that while sojourning at Damascus in 1699 he was called upon to
entertain himself with the soul of a pious man which had entered the body of the daughter of
Raphael Anaw. The soul informed him that it was exiled from heaven for having slighted the
virtue of repentance. For a time it dwelt in a fish, but this fish was caught and sold to Raphael
for the Sabbath meal; the soul then entered the body of the daughter of the house. In
proclaiming before Vital the great importance of repentance it became free to return to its
heavenly abode ("Shibḥe Ḥayyim Wiṭal," ed. Lemberg, p. 11). Narratives of this sort abound in
the cabalistic writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of them are
reproduced in the "Nishmat Ḥayyim" of Manasseh ben Israel, who showed himself a firm
believer in all kinds of gilgulim and dibbuḳim. He even went so far as to endeavor to
demonstrate that references to them are to be found in the Bible. It is noteworthy that most of
the cases of exorcism occurred at Safed or in its neighborhood; that is, in localities where
mysticism was flourishing. A curious case is cited by Moses Prager in his "Zera' Ḳodesh": it is
interesting from the fact that David Oppenheim, the collector of Hebrew books and
manuscripts, who was the rabbi of Nikolsburg, Moravia, was one of the signatories of the
narrative. See Dibbuḳim
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