Theoretical and Empirical

Investigations of Divination
and Magic
Manipulating the Divine

Edited by

Jesper Frøkjær Sørensen

Anders Klostergaard Petersen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Clay model of a sheep’s liver, Babylonian Temple School. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sørensen, Jesper, 1968– editor. | Petersen, Anders Klostergaard,

 editor.
Title: Theoretical and empirical investigations of divination and magic :
 manipulating the divine / edited by Jesper Sørensen, Anders Klostergaard
 Petersen.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Numen book series,
 0169-8834 ; volume 171 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021007383 (print) | LCCN 2021007384 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004447578 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004447585 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Divination. | Magic.
Classification: LCC BF1773 .T44 2021 (print) | LCC BF1773 (ebook) | DDC
 133.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007383
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007384

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISSN 0169-8834
ISBN 978-90-04-44757-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-44758-5 (e-book)

Copyright 2021 by Jesper Frøkjær Sørensen and Anders Klostergaard Petersen. Published by Koninklijke
Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

1 Manipulating the Divine – an Introduction 1

Jesper Frøkjær Sørensen and Anders Klostergaard Petersen

part 1
Divination

2 Divination in the Pseudo-Platonic Epinomis 23

Corby Kelly

3 The Rhetoric of Divination: A Comparative Approach 41

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen

4 The Naturalness of Rhapsodomantics 74

Anders Klostergaard Petersen

5 Evil Eyes and Baking Pies: Aspects of Greek Divination 105

Dimitris Xygalatas

6 Cognitive Underpinnings of Divinatory Practices 124

Jesper Frøkjær Sørensen

part 2
Magic

7 The Relationship of Magic and Shamanism in Neuro-Cognitive

Perspective 153
Edward Bever

8 A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic in Medieval Jewish
Society 178
Gideon Bohak

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vi Contents

9 Demystifying Wittgenstein’s Concept of Magic 205

Lars Albinus and Lars Madsen

10 Controlling the Incontrollable 228

Jörg Rüpke

11 Force and Categorization: Reflections on Marcel Mauss and Henri

Hubert’s Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie 246
Jesper Frøkjær Sørensen

Index 275

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 chapter 8

A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic

in Medieval Jewish Society

Gideon Bohak

I have finally found a way to live

Just like I never could before.
I know that I don’t have much to give,
But I can open any door.
Eric Clapton, “Presence of the Lord”

∵
For many years, Jewish magic was a neglected aspect of Jewish social and cul-
tural history.1 Only over the last generation have scholars begun to see some
Jewish magical texts as worthy of critical editions and serious study, but the
number of unpublished and even unnoticed Jewish magical texts still far
exceeds that of the published ones. Moreover, whereas the study of ancient
Jewish magic witnessed a major advance with the publication of two major
surveys, students of medieval Jewish magic must still rely on Trachtenberg’s
dated survey of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish magic, and students of modern
Jewish magic have almost nothing to rely upon.2
In the current chapter, I focus on a single text, stemming from the Cairo
Genizah (the used paper storage room of a medieval synagogue, in use from
the eleventh to the late-nineteenth centuries, see Bohak 2010). The choice of
this specific text is due to it being complete, well preserved, and quite unique.
It therefore raises some interesting questions about the nature of Jewish magic
and its social location. I could have chosen a more sensational text – with

1 The research for the present chapter was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grants
no. 635/08 and 986/14). I am grateful to Yuval Harari and Gal Sofer for their comments on an
earlier version of this chapter.
2 For ancient Jewish magic, see Bohak (2008); Harari (2017a). For medieval Jewish magic, see
Trachtenberg (1939 / 2004); Bohak (2015). For modern Jewish magic, see Bohak (2019). For
broader surveys of the Jewish magical tradition, see Bohak (2009) and Harari (2011).

© GIDEON BOHAK, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004447585_009

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 179

slaughtered roosters, frightful demons, or the use of human blood – but

decided to focus on a relatively bland text, since it provides a calmer and there-
fore more reliable point of entry into the field of medieval Jewish magic. In
what follows, I shall try (a) to present the text in question and offer an English
translation and some explanatory notes; (b) to ask whether this indeed is a
magical text and what may be gained from classifying it as such; and (c) to see
whether we have any evidence that such a text ever was in use among Jews in
the Middle Ages, and who may have been using it.

1 The Text

The text in question may be pieced together from two different Genizah
fragments – Taylor-Schechter New Series 256.39 (9.8 × 15.7 cm) and New
Series 324.78 (8.1 × 15.9 cm).3 Originally these were two separate pieces of
paper, which the copyist of our text glued together one below the other, in the
form of a rotulus, in order to create a sheet of paper large enough to contain
his rather long text.4 After gluing the two pieces together, he copied the text
on the recto of the joined sheet, and continued on the top of the verso, leaving
the rest of the verso blank. He then folded the joined sheet both vertically and
horizontally, thus creating a small, and quite thick, rectangle. Eventually, the
joined sheet was discarded in the Cairo Genizah, and its two pieces became
separated. Both of them ended up in the Taylor-Schechter New Series, but in
different folders, and only the similarity of their style and contents made me
realize that they belong together.5
But for a few small lacunae (marked below by square brackets), the text
is very well preserved, and quite easy to read. It is written in Aramaic, with
some Hebrew phrases appearing in the allusions to biblical verses and post-
biblical liturgical formulae and in one long citation of Isaiah 45:1–2. The hand,
as Dr. Edna Engel kindly informed me, may be dated to the twelfth century.
This, however, only applies to the present copy of our text, since the text itself

3 Images of both fragments are available on the Friedberg Genizah Project website, and their
numbers are C388374–5 and C408038–9, respectively.
4 For the rotuli found in the Cairo Genizah, see Bohak (2011); Olszowy-Schlanger (2016). For
other paper rotuli, see T-S NS 246.14 + T-S AS 142.15, published by Schäfer and Shaked (1999),
No. 66, and JTSL ENA 2575.7–8 (unpublished).
5 The physical join between the two fragments is confirmed by the fact that the bottom of the
final nun of the word kerimmon, “like a pomegranate” in line 12 of the recto of T-S NS 256.39
may be seen on the top of the recto of T-S NS 324.78, right above the first line of text (our
line 13).

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180 Bohak

clearly was composed long before, at a time when Aramaic was still the main
vehicle of expression among Jews. The text’s Aramaic has been analyzed by
Prof. Matthew Morgenstern, who suggested to me that the instructions at the
beginning and the end of the text display some features of Babylonian Jewish
Aramaic, but the long incantation is written in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic.
Thus, we may tentatively suggest that our text was composed sometimes in
Late Antiquity, and that while it may have been composed in Palestine, it
probably was in use in Babylonia as well. This is an issue to which we shall
return below.
The text contains a single recipe, intended to open all locks and doors; its
modus operandi consists of taking some dust, reciting upon it a powerful incan-
tation, and then using the dust and the incantation to make every lock and bolt
melt before the recipe’s user(s). Unlike many other Genizah fragments, which
contain clusters of magical recipes, or parts of much larger booklets of such
recipes, with each recipe usually preceded by a title which explains its aim
(“For love”, “To kill an enemy”, “For a woman having trouble in childbirth”, etc.),
this fragment contains only a single recipe, and carries no title. This clearly is
not due to some technical exigencies, since the large blank space at the bot-
tom of the verso shows that there certainly was more room for other recipes,
had the copyist chosen to add them. Apparently, he was specifically interested
in this recipe, and copied it as a stand-alone textual unit; he then folded the
joint sheet of paper, perhaps taking it with him or handing it over to a client
who had to open a door without access to its key. And since the sheet con-
tained only one recipe, whose aim was well known to whoever was using it,
there was no need to add a title before the recipe itself. However, it must be
stressed that our text is not unique in this respect, and there are other Genizah
fragments which contain only a single recipe.6 As we shall note below, what is
unique about this recipe is the length, complexity, and theological daring of
its incantation.
Like many Genizah magical texts, this one too is anonymous, and says
nothing about the identity of the recipe’s real or imagined author or about
its latest copyist and user(s).7 But the language and contents prove the Jewish
origin of this text, and the fact that it ended its life in the Genizah of a syna-
gogue in Cairo already tells us that it was used by Jews, and that it was not
deemed too heretical to be deposited there. As we shall see below, the use by

6 See Bohak (2010: 72), under “Single recipes”.

7 For a fuller survey of this issue, see Bohak and Saar (2015).

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 181

some respectable Jews of spells to open locks is well attested in other sources
as well.
Without going into a detailed philological analysis of the text, which would
be out of place here, I present here a basic English translation of the entire
recipe (for the text itself, see the Appendix). Since it is written in a mixture
of Aramaic and Hebrew, I printed all the sections which were translated from
Aramaic in regular typeface, and italicized all the Hebrew parts. I also added
line numbers, and inserted into the text bracketed Roman numerals to mark
the beginnings of new textual units.

T-S NS 256.39r
1 (I) Take dust from the gate of the town, having purified [yourself / your
body]
2 and taken dust from under the door socket of the town that open[s ]
3 and whispered [up]on it while standing before the gate, and said (II)
“These are the Na[mes]
4 of the living God, which He engraved in His image;8 every lock and every
bo[lt]
5 or door, and every iron instrument that is in you shall melt and fall like
[ ].
6 (III) I adjured and I adjure you, gate, by God whose head is crowned
7 in gold, for He gives dew and rain,9 that you shall be opened and melt
and fall.
8 (IV) I adjured and I adjure you, gate, by God whose eyes dance like doves
upon
9 water streams10 for with them He traverses all the ends of the earth11 that
you shall be opened
10 and melt and fall before me; every lock and every iron instrument that is
in you, that is closed
11 and bound, shall be opened before me at this time. (V) I adjured and
I adju[re]
12 you, gate, by God whose mouth is like a sweet pomegranate, for with it []12

8 The translation of the last phrase is uncertain.

9 This expression is unattested in the Hebrew Bible, but is common in the Jewish
prayerbook.
10 Cf. Song 5:12.
11 Cf. Zech 4:10; 2 Chr 16:9; for the “magical” use of this simile, see already the famous mosaic
inscription from the En-Gedi synagogue, where it appears as a part of a curse formula.
12 Perhaps, “for with it [he shall kiss]”, with an allusion to Song 1:2.

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182 Bohak

T-S NS 324.78r
13 the lily of the valleys,13 that14 you shall be opened and melt and fall
before me;
14 every lock and every bolt and every iron instrument that is in you shall be
opened before me
15 in this hour. (VI) I adjured and I adjure you, gate, by God whose heart
16 is like the heart of the lower ones and the upper ones, for with it He shall
have mercy upon those who have been carried since birth15 that you shall be
opened and melt
17 and fall before me; every lock and every bolt and every iron instrument
that is in you, that is bound
18 and closed, shall be opened before me in this hour. (VII) I adjured and I
adjure you, gate,
19 by God whose thighs are like pillars of marble16 for they shall stand on the
Mountain of Olives17
20 that you shall open and melt and fall before me, and every part(?)18 and
bolt and lock and every
21 iron instrument that is in you that you shall open before me in this hour.
(VIII) I adjured
22 and I adjure you, gate, by the living God19 that you shall open and melt and
fall
23 before me and every part(?) and every iron instrument that is in you shall
melt and fall and be opened
24 before me and every iron instrument or bolt or lock and every instrument
that is shut up in you shall be opened
25 before me in this hour, and the gate shall be opened before me just as (the
gates) were opened for

13 Cf. Song 2:1. In ancient Jewish exegesis, the lily of the valleys is often identified with the
Jewish people.
14 I omit the word , which probably is a dittography.
15 Cf. Isa 46:3, which refers to the house of Jacob, and the remnant of the house of Israel.
16 Cf. Song 5:15 (“His thighs are pillars of marble”), cited here in Aramaic rather than in
Hebrew.
17 Cf. Zech 14:4.
18 I am puzzled by the word which appears here and in line 23, and usually refers to a
grave-mark, but the context makes it clear that it refers to a lock, or a part thereof.
19 The next word has been effaced, or deliberately erased.

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 183

T-S NS 256.39v
1 [Cy]rus, as it is written, Thus said - -20 to Cyrus, His anointed one [whose]
2 right hand [I have] held, treading down nations before him, and u[ngirding]
the loins of kings,
3 whose21 right hand I have held, and ungirding the loins of kings, [openin]g
doors before
4 him, and letting no gate stay shut. I will march before you, and level the hills
[that loom up], I will shatter doors of
5 bronze, and cut down iron bars.22 A(men) A(men) S(elah)”. (IX) And be
careful with [this]
6 dust, and each time you wish to open a gate throw some of this dust
7 into the lock, and stand in front of it and whisper over it this secret
7 times and you shall open it.

As may be seen even from a cursory reading of this long text, it is marred by
some textual corruptions (including, for example, the strange dittography in
the long citation of Isaiah 45:1–2 in lines 1–3 of the verso), which are undoubt-
edly due to the carelessness of one or more of its copyists, but it is also charac-
terized by a coherent structure: It begins with the instructions to be followed
by whoever wishes to use this recipe (I), then provides the incantation to be
recited over the dust (II–VIII), and ends with some more instructions as to
how to use the dust (IX). And the incantation – which occupies most of the
text – is extremely well structured, consisting of an opening statement (II),
which is followed by five textual units that begin with “I adjured and I adjure
you, gate, by God”, and then list one of God’s body parts and describe its fea-
tures (III–VII).23 This is followed by one more textual unit, which begins with
“I adjured and I adjure you, gate, by the living God”, and ends with a long quo-
tation from Isaiah, which makes explicit references to the opening of doors
and of the iron bars that keep them locked (VIII). Even the five textual units
which list God’s body parts are neatly arranged from top to bottom, beginning

20 Instead of spelling out the Tetragrammaton, the scribe replaced it with two horizontal
strokes. For this practice, which is paralleled in earlier Jewish magical texts, see, for exam-
ple, Kotansky, Naveh and Shaked (1992: 9, lines 22–23). For other forms of writing the
Tetragrammaton, see Tov (2004: 238–246), and Weiss (2015: 147–175).
21 The following words should be deleted, and are due to a scribal dittography.
22 Isa 45:1–2.
23 This series of adjurations bears some resemblance to a series of adjurations in a Jewish
recipe embedded in PGM IV.3007–3086, but whereas here the references are to God’s
limbs, there the references are to God’s actions in biblical times.

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184 Bohak

with His crown, and moving to His eyes, mouth, heart, and thighs, all of which
shows that whoever composed this recipe had spent some time thinking out
its structure.24 He also made use both of a full citation of two biblical verses
and of a set of playful allusions to other biblical verses, and to some formulae
from post-biblical Jewish liturgy. In other words, this is not a piece of popu-
lar magic, but the work of a learned expert with a deep knowledge of Jewish
literature.25 But I am jumping ahead of my own argument here, since we have
yet to decide whether this is a magical text at all, and this is the question to
which we now turn.

2 Is It Magic?

One question which may be asked of this door-opening recipe is whether we

are justified in classifying it as a magical text, and what may be gained from
such a classification. As is well known, there has been much debate on the
issue of magic vs. religion and magic vs. science, with much of the debate
focusing on the polytheistic cultures of Antiquity, on the Christian world from
the New Testament to the Renaissance, and on the non-Western cultures of
the Modern Era.26 These many debates have yielded no consensus, and some
powerful voices even insist that “magic” is not really a useful scholarly category,
because it often is only a derogatory label affixed to the religious practices of
one’s opponents, or because it is a modern, Western, concept, which should
not be imposed on non-Western societies.27 From these debates, there emerge
two different distinctions that we should keep in mind when thinking about
our text and its relation to magic. First, the distinction between the emic and
the etic perspectives, that is, between the terms and concepts used by medieval

24 For this structure, cf. Japhet (2011). The text also displays some affinities with Shiur Qomah
(an ancient Hebrew text that lists God’s limbs, their sizes, and their secret names), and
with Jewish eschatological speculations associated with God’s future theophany on the
Mt. of Olives, but both issues are of lesser relevance for the present study, and will have to
be dealt with elsewhere.
25 For similar phenomena in many Genizah amulets, see Swartz (1990).
26 For some important points of entry into this vast debate, see Cunningham (1999); Styers
(2004); Stratton (2007); Otto (2011, 2013); Otto and Stausberg (2013); Harari (2017a:
15–203). See also the introduction to the present volume.
27 For instance, Gager argues that “… it is our conviction that magic, as a definable and con-
sistent category of human experience, simply does not exist … the beliefs and practices of
“the other” will always be dubbed as “magic”, “superstition” and the like” (1992: 24–25). Cf.
Smith (1995: 16): “I see little merit in continuing the use of the substantive term “magic” in
second-order, theoretical, academic discourse”.

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 185

Jews and those used by us as modern scholars. And second, the distinction
between the use of magic as a term of self-reference, that is, its use by people
who describe themselves as “magicians” or describe their actions as “magic”,
and its use as a negative label by some members of a social group to denigrate
or de-legitimize other members as “magicians” or as involved with “magic”.
Focusing solely on our specific example, we may begin with the search for
an emic perspective on such a text. As is well known, the Hebrew Bible has a
wide range of terms that refer to magic and divination, the most important
of which are based on the root kšp, and it vehemently insists that all such
practitioners, and all such practices, are forbidden (Ex 22:17; Lev 19:26, 31;
Lev 20:6; Deut 18:10–11). This trend continues into rabbinic literature, which
enjoins, in line with the biblical legislation, that a mkšp should be stoned to
death. Thus, in theory at least, anyone identified by the Jewish community or
its leaders as practicing magic could be executed, or at the very least expelled
from the Jewish community. In practice, however, this almost never happened,
and apart from one famous story of how a Jewish rabbi hung eighty female
witches in Ashkelon sometimes in the late-second or early-first century BCE,
there is very little evidence of Jews being persecuted by other Jews for practic-
ing magic.28 But I also know of almost no Jewish texts that refer to their own
contents as “magic”, and know of very few cases where Jewish texts use any
of the terms listed in the Pentateuch as forbidden practices to describe the
practices that they enjoin.29 Thus, we may stress that unlike the Greek magical
papyri, for example, which sometimes refer to their contents as “magic” (e.g.,
PGM IV.2449) and even “divine magic” (PGM IV.2445) and “holy magic” (PGM
I.127), Jewish magical texts almost never refer to themselves as having anything
to do with “magic”.30 This does not mean, however, that they excised magic-
related words from their vocabulary, since their recipes do include practices
and incantations intended to ward off magic and magicians, annul their words
and deeds, fix the damage caused by magic or deflect it back upon the heads
of its perpetrators. “Magic”, in other words, is something that the Jewish practi-
tioners attributed to other, unnamed and unidentified people; they themselves

28 For Simeon ben Shetah and the eighty witches, see Bohak (2008: 84, 394–395). Of course,
in the Hebrew Bible, King Saul outlaws all the diviners (1 Sam 28:3), and then consults
one (ibid., verses 7–12), but the ethnic or religious identity of these diviners is never
mentioned.
29 One interesting example, of a practitioner who adjures angels with an elaborate incanta-
tion, but at the same time apologizes to God for transgressing the words of Deut 18, was
recently published by Harari (2017b: 218–222). However, such examples are so interesting
precisely because of their great rarity.
30 For such references in the Greek magical papyri, see Betz (1982) and Otto (2013: 332–338).

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186 Bohak

were not practicing “magic”, and in some cases they were only trying to help
their clients who had been harmed by evil magicians, or were afraid of their
harmful actions (e.g. Levene 2013).
Our Genizah text is a case in point. It never describes itself as a “magical”
text, and does not use any magic-related terminology; even in the last line,
when the instructions refer to the elaborate set of adjurations which are to be
recited, they are only described as a “secret” (raza), a word which can be used
in magical texts (and is paralleled by the use of mystêrion in Greek magical
texts), but is also used in many other contexts and carries no specifically magi-
cal connotations.31 The instruction to whisper the “secret” (which is found in
line 3 of the recto and line 7 of the verso) is slightly more telling, since the verb
which is used here (lḥš) does appear in the Hebrew Bible in the sense of “to
whisper an incantation” (e.g., Jer 8:17) but this verb does not appear in the list
of forbidden practitioners and practices of Deut 18, and it does appear else-
where in the Hebrew Bible in non-magical contexts.32 Moreover, in rabbinic
literature too the verb is used in non-magical contexts (e.g., bt Ber 22a), and
even the practice of “whispering over a wound” is presented as acceptable, at
least under certain conditions (bt San 101a; bt Taan 8a). Thus, the use of this
specific verb certainly would not have sufficed to place our text in the realm
of “magic” from the perspective of its medieval Jewish users. The same is true
of the recurrent expression “I adjured and I adjure you”, which to a modern
scholar might be a sign of the text’s magical features, as we shall note below.
To an ancient or a medieval Jew, the use of the root šbʿ in the hifʿil form would
be reminiscent of biblical verses such as Song 2:7, 3:5, 5:8 and 8:4, or of the
adjuration of witnesses in a court (see Leicht 2006), and would certainly not
recall the list of forbidden practices of Deut 18, where this verb is never men-
tioned. Moreover, unlike some Genizah recipes, which enjoin ritual practices
which many Jews might deem problematic, such as the use of human blood,
the worship of angels, or the offering of incense to demons, the few and simple
ritual actions enjoined by our recipe would definitely not suffice to make its

31 Most notably in Sepher ha-Razim, or “The Book of Secrets”, the most famous Jewish magi-
cal text of Late Antiquity. This book too never identifies its own contents as “magic”, but in
one recipe (ShR I/160 and 176, pp. 75–76 Margalioth 1966 = §90 and 98 Rebiger and Schäfer
2009) it says “if you wish to perform necromancy”, using the term ’ov, which is included in
the list of forbidden practices in Deut 18:11, Lev 19:31 and Lev 20:6, and whose prohibition
is equally manifest in 1 Sam 28. Elsewhere, Sepher ha-Razim only refers to healing people
who were harmed by magic (ShR II/95, p. 86 Margalioth = §148 Rebiger and Schäfer), and
to making race-horses immune against any magic (ShR III/42, p. 94 Margalioth = §194
Rebiger and Schäfer). For the use of mystêrion in the PGM, see Betz (1982: 164).
32 See Isa 26:16, and note that Isa 3:3 lists “a man wise in lḥš”, among the leaders of Judaea.
Note also the PN “šlwm son of hlwḥš” in Neh 3:12.

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users think of it as having to do with “magic”.33 After all, even canonical rab-
binic literature recommends more sensational ritual practices, including the
manipulation of hapless ants (bt Shab 66b) and roosters (bt AZ 4a–b and par-
allels), public nudity and sexual relations (bt Shab 110a), the slaughtering of
black hens (bt Gitt 67b) and hoopoes (bt Gitt 68b), daily visits to the cemetery
(bt MoK 17a–b), and so on.34 Our recipe, in other words, is as mild as they get,
at least when it comes to the ritual actions.
In light of these considerations, it is clear that we have no way of knowing
how the composer, copyists or potential users of this recipe would have clas-
sified it, but we have no reason to think that they thought of what they were
doing as forbidden or inherently evil, or as belonging in the realm of magic.
Whether other Jews considered such texts and practices illegitimate is a more
complicated question, since it is quite clear that some of them did and some
of them did not. Among those who did we may include the Karaites, who
repeatedly attacked the Rabbanites for dabbling in magic, and whose views of
magic may be gleaned from Al-Qirqisani’s (tenth century) famous definition
of magic, written in Judaeo-Arabic, that is, in Arabic written in Hebrew letters:

The type of magic (siḥr) which is forbidden to be practiced is the one

about which the performers thereof claim that it works miracles, trans-
forms nature, sways (human) hearts towards love or hatred, generates
illnesses in, or removes them from, (human) bodies without using such
means as comestibles, potions, blows, or similar things, or that it coun-
teracts all these by means of spoken, written, or otherwise expressed
(incantations).
Yaʿqūb al-QirqisĀnī, Kitāb al-anwār wal-marāqib VI.9.1 (Nemoy 1941: 575)35

From Al-Qirqisani’s perspective, there would have been no doubt that ours is a
magical text, since it seeks to work a miracle, and/or transform nature, by open-
ing a locked door, and it seeks to do so without any blows or some other physi-
cal pressure applied upon the lock, and with the help of spoken words which
are uttered over a handful of dust and then uttered seven times in front of the
locked door. He certainly was not alone in classifying such rituals as magic,
since a twelfth-century Karaite, Judah Hadassi, makes this identification even

33 For some specific examples of more “problematic” recipes, see Bohak (2011).
34 For a fuller coverage of rabbinic magic, see Blau (1898 / 1914); Harari (2006a); Geller
(2006); Bohak (2008: 406–422).
35 See also Nemoy (1986: 337), whose translation of this passage I have used and slightly
modified.

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clearer when he refers to “magicians (mkšpym) … and whisperers of incanta-

tions, who extract serpents from their holes with an incantation, and close36
the locks of a bolt with an incantation”.37 For Hadassi, the manipulation of
locks and bolts by means of incantations was just one of many actions which
were practiced by magicians, and which were forbidden by the Torah. Had
he known of our Genizah fragment, copied by one of his contemporaries, he
would surely have classified it as magic, and would have seen it as yet another
example of the Rabbanite Jews’ deep involvement with this forbidden sphere
of action, in direct contravention of the biblical legislation.38
So much for the Karaites. However, we may be sure that not only the
Karaites saw texts such as ours as magical texts, and thus forbidden to Jews,
since some of the leading Rabbanite Jews shared very similar views. First and
foremost among them, we may count Maimonides (d. 1204), who lived in Cairo
at the time when our text was copied, who vehemently opposed all kinds of
magic, and who certainly would have seen a text such as ours – and especially
the invocation of the Supreme God for such trivialities as opening a locked
door – as sheer blasphemy.39 Note, for example, his vehement attack against
Jews who were adding angelic and divine names, as well as special “seals” to
their mezuzoth, in order to enhance their apotropaic efficacy, and his equally
vehement attack against the text known as Shiur Qomah, which lists the sizes
of God’s limbs.40
We may thus conclude that some medieval Jews, especially the Karaites but
also some Rabbanite Jews, would have seen our text as contravening the bibli-
cal legislation. This, however, is only half the picture. For when we record the
objections to such practices by the Karaites or by Maimonides, we must also
note the recurrent attempts, from Late Antiquity onwards, of Jewish leaders
and lay-persons alike to show that such texts and practices were in no way for-
bidden to Jews – either they were not “magic” at all, or they were “licit magic”.
There are several such discussions throughout the Babylonian Talmud, and
more discussions in Hai Gaon’s (939–1038) detailed responsum on the legiti-
macy of the use of powerful divine names, and in the Rashba’s (Rabbi Shlomo

36 I suspect that this is an error for “open”, and a parallel to our recipe, but even if not, it
parallels Jesus’s action in the Toledot Yeshu, for which see below.
37 Judah Hadassi, Eshkol ha-Kopher #376/39 (Eupatoria 1836: 152b). The new edition of the
first part of this work, by Lasker, Niehoff-Panagiotidis and Sklare (2019), unfortunately
does not reach this section.
38 And see Harari (2007), with further bibliography.
39 This topic has often been studied, see Harari (2007) and Ravitzky (2010).
40 For the former, see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Mezuzah 5.4; for the latter, see his
responsum no. 117 (Blau 1958: 201).

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ben Abraham ibn Adret, 1235–1310) long responsum on the objections to astral-
medical magic and the refutations of these objections.41 In each of these cases,
the exact boundaries between what Jews may do and what they may not do –
or, if you will, between “religion” and “magic” – are differently marked, and in
each case they are very fuzzy, and leave much room for the continued recourse
to practices which the Karaites, and Maimonides, would have deemed utterly
unacceptable. And as we shall see below, the same is true of medieval Jewish
texts which proudly described the use of this technique both by the ancient
opponents of Jesus and by a tenth-century rabbi.
In addition to what we find in the discussions of magic by late-antique and
medieval rabbis, we must also note that in numerous other cases Jews used
and disseminated such practices without apparently worrying whether these
practices were magical or not. In theory, magic was punishable by death, in
line with both the biblical and the rabbinic laws on this issue; in practice, how-
ever, no Jew was ever executed by his fellow Jews for the practice of magic,
and so the question whether a certain practice was to be considered “magic”
or not was of no real urgency to most of its practitioners. It was important for
the intellectual debates with the Karaites and with the rational philosophers,
but – unlike its status in the Greco-Roman or the Christian world – it was not
a matter of life and death. This also helps explain why so many magical texts,
including the one discussed here, ended up in the Cairo Genizah, rather than
being burnt at the stake or buried in some clandestine hideout. They were
consigned to the Genizah because they contained sacred names and biblical
verses, which had to be treated with great respect, and they were deemed no
more problematic than any of the other types of texts that ended up in the
Genizah, be these old biblical scrolls, talmudic texts, business contracts or pri-
vate letters.
In light of these observations, it seems clear that an emic perspective on
this text will not get us very far, since we have no medieval Jewish discussions
of this specific text, and when we look at the medieval discussions of similar
texts, we find some Jews classifying them as “magic”, others seeing them as
“licit magic”, and yet others seeing them as not “magic” at all; we also find many
Jews who were not even bothered by this question. Moreover, it is not clear
whether those Jews who were bothered by the permissibility of such practices
affixed a different label to those practices they wished to go on practicing.
The rabbis of Kairouan, in their letter to Hai Gaon which gave rise to his long
responsum (written ca. 1000 CE), refer to such practitioners as “masters of the

41 For the talmudic discussions, see Bohak (2008: 356–386). For the last two sources, see
Bohak (2015: 271–272, 276–277), with further bibliography.

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Name” (Emanuel 1995: 124), but do not assign any specific label to the actions
they perform or the techniques they use, and even this designation does not
seem to have been widely used at the time. In later periods, some Jews certainly
affixed a special label to the practices which they wished to practice, when
they classified them as belonging in the realm of “practical Kabbalah”, and in
so doing avoided the dirty word, “magic” (Scholem 1974: 182–189; Harari 2019;
Chajes 2019). And yet, in the Genizah magical texts, this process of replacing
the tainted term with a more acceptable one seems to be entirely absent. Like
Macbeth’s witches, their art remains “a deed without a name”.
Turning to an etic perspective, we seem to be on firmer ground, and I think
that regardless of which definition of “magic” we choose to adopt, our text
would fall squarely under that definition. As a case in point, I note how in a
recent study Yuval Harari set out to survey the knotty debates about magic vs.
religion and to offer a sounder definition of Jewish magical texts (Harari 2005).
To do so, he adopted Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” and tried
first to look for Jewish texts which could intuitively be classified as “magical”,
and then to isolate the features common to all of them. At the end of this quest,
he concluded that the most characteristic feature of Jewish magical texts is
their use of adjurations, i.e., of phrases like “I adjure you” and related formula-
tions, and that other characteristic features include the adjuration by God’s
attributes or great deeds, the appeal to supernatural powers, and so on. If we
adopt such criteria, our text certainly would be classified as “magic”, since the
adjurations are the key-words around which the entire text is structured, and
the references to God’s great powers lie at the heart of each of the adjurations.
In a similar vein, if we adopt Moshe Idel’s definition of magic as “a system of
practices and beliefs that presupposes the possibility to achieve material gains
by means of techniques that cannot be explained experimentally” (Idel 1997:
195), we would again conclude that our text belongs in the realm of magic.
In my own work, I tend to follow a somewhat different approach. I would
gladly accept a minimalist definition of magic as any attempt to achieve
material gains through supernatural means, or through means that can-
not be explained experimentally, but as many of the practices of normative
Judaism would fit this definition, I wish to highlight the distinction between
Jewish magical texts and practices which were fully-naturalized within the
Jewish religious tradition, and those which never became part and parcel of
mainstream Judaism. The former I would classify as “religion”, and the latter
as “magic” (Bohak 2009/10, 2021). And here too, our text would certainly fall
under the rubric of “magic”, since its door-opening ritual never was codified
into the Jewish religious system. Some Jews probably saw it as forbidden, oth-
ers thought it lawful, or barely-acceptable, or acceptable when carried out for

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noble goals, but none saw it as part of God’s commandments to the Jewish
people, to be practiced regularly by every Jew. Whoever composed, copied, and
utilized this text clearly did not think of it as a part of the normative Judaism
that all Jews must practice, but as an ad hoc solution to one specific problem,
to be utilized only by the few Jews who happen to know this “secret” and how
to use it. But from an emic perspective, the fact that this text is not a part of
“religion” does not mean that it belongs in the realm of “magic”, for it can sim-
ply remain “a deed without a name”.
What, then, do we gain from our decision to classify this as a magical text?
On the one hand, the search for this classification helps elucidate the peculiar
place of magic in medieval Jewish culture, as a vibrant branch of Jewish cul-
tural activity. This branch often was marginalized, sometimes even denigrated,
but never was seriously persecuted, and this in marked contrast with what
went on in the Greco-Roman world, and much more so in the Christian world.
It also is a type of action that was never called “magic” by its practitioners – not
because they lacked such a vocabulary, but because they deliberately avoided
the self-referential use of such tainted terms. These practitioners some-
times referred to themselves, or were referred to by others, as “masters of the
Name(s)”, but how they referred to what they did is not really clear. Apparently,
they had no specific rubric under which to group all those activities that we
would label “magic”. On the other hand, the ubiquity of this kind of texts in the
Cairo Genizah and in many other collections of Jewish manuscripts forces us
to admit how wide-spread Jewish magic really was, and how it was in no way
limited to the margins of society, to the illiterate sections of the Jewish com-
munity, or to women. They too may have practiced magic, but the Jewish magi-
cal texts that reached us were mostly written by male practitioners, and often
by professional scribes and by members of the rabbinic and intellectual elites
of medieval Jewish society. In our case, this is borne out by the sophisticated
structure of our incantation, by its learned allusions to biblical and liturgical
passages, and even by the continuous copying of a text in Aramaic at a time
when the Jewish vernacular was Arabic and the main language of writing was
Judaeo-Arabic. Thus, the marginalization of magic in Jewish society was not
based on the marginalization of its practitioners, but on these practitioners’
implicit distinctions between the kinds of rituals they conducted in line with
God’s commandments as spelled out in His written and oral Torah, and the
kinds of rituals they conducted on an individual basis, and in their spare time.42

42 This distinction is further highlighted by the many booklists from the Cairo Genizah (see
Allony 2006), which almost never mention magical texts, even when the Genizah frag-
ments themselves attest to their ubiquity in many private libraries.

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Often, the latter rituals were intended to answer needs for which there was
no answer within the established religious system – including the occasional
need to open a locked door to whose key you had no access.

3 Was This Text Ever in Use?

Having concluded that this text may be classified as a magical recipe, we may
now turn to another intriguing question: was it ever in use, and by whom? As
noted above, the recipe tells us nothing about the identity of its composer,
copyist(s) and potential users. Moreover, it does not call for the production of
any “finished product”, such as a “voodoo doll” or an elaborate talisman, only for
the collection of some dust and the recitation of an oral incantation. Thus, we
cannot expect to find any archeological evidence of its actual use (see Bohak
2017). What we can look for, however, are other copies of this recipe (and thus
far, I have found none), and other examples of magical recipes to open locks,
as well as references in non-magical texts to the actual use of such practices.
On the former front, our quest is facilitated by the presence of several
Jewish magical spells to open locks and doors, none of which is as intrigu-
ing or detailed as the current example.43 Moving in a chronological order we
may first note a recipe found in the Sword of Moses, which suggests that if one
wishes to open a door one should take the root of a certain reed, place it under
one’s tongue, and pronounce before the door a set of magic words.44 This com-
bination of materia magica and verba magica, or of dromena and legomena,
is typical of many Jewish magical recipes, and recurs in other recipes to open
locks, but with different ingredients and different incantations.45

43 Needless to add, this practice is attested in non-Jewish magical texts as well, includ-
ing, for example, the Greek magical papyri; see PGM I.100–101; PGM XII.160–178; PGM
XII.279–280; PGM XIII.327–334; 1064–1075; PGM XXXVI.312–320. For references to open-
ing doors by means of magic, see also Pliny, NH 26.9; Lucian, Navig. 42; Origen, C.Cels.
2.34; Arnobius, Adv. nat. 1.43, and the detailed discussion in Weinreich (1929: 342–362).
However, for the purpose of the present discussion, we may focus only on the Jewish
examples.
44 HdM, no. 81; for an English translation, see Harari (2012: 91).
45 See the two recipes from MS Bern Stadtbibliothek 200 (#2304 in the Institute of
Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts), cited by Perles (1887: 29), and partly translated by
Trachtenberg (1939 / 2004: 130). In the autograph manuscript of Hayyim Vital (1543–1620),
recently printed as Sefer ha-Peʾulot, anonymous publisher, 2010 (in Hebrew), on p. 208,
recipe 214, two versions of a similar recipe are given, and then crossed out, with a note,
“I tried them and they did not work”. For this manuscript, see also Bos (1994).

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From this rather simple example, we may turn to a more complex recipe,
whose different versions have yet to be studied in detail. The first of these is
found in a Genizah fragment which is a part of a much larger magical booklet,
and which contains magical recipes to quell a storm at sea, to make a barren
woman conceive, to open locks, for protection against scorpions, and – after a
few more gynecological recipes – a recipe to improve one’s memory and learn-
ing abilities.46 The lock-opening recipe is written in Aramaic, and begins with
an invocation of twelve angels (some of whom have names such as Patḥiel,
from the root ptḥ “to open”), who are asked to grant the practitioner their assis-
tance in opening the gate. This is followed by an invocation in the name of
more angels, who are described as appointed over the different heavens (which
are listed in the wrong order, apparently because of copying errors), and who
are asked to open the gate. The practitioner is then told to kick the lock with
his foot and to recite Hosea 9:6. This is followed by an obscure section which
seems to be textually corrupt, and by the instruction to recite the incanta-
tion up to seven times. The same recipe, but in a very garbled state, is found
in a non-Genizah manuscript, embedded between several Hekhalot (Jewish
mystical) compositions (Schäfer 1981: §826–827). And a third, and apparently
more accurate version, may be found in a fourteenth-century Ashkenazi com-
pendium of Kabbalistic and magical texts.47 And in later Jewish magical texts,
more door-opening spells may be found, including some that are clearly bor-
rowed from Christian sources.48
To sum up this part of the discussion, we may note that recipes to open locks
and doors were not the most popular type of Jewish magical recipes – their
number is dwarfed by the hundreds of erotic or aggressive magical recipes, or
those for protection and healing – but that they were not entirely unknown
either. Our recipe may be the most elaborate door-opening recipe of which
I am currently aware, but it certainly is not the only one. And yet, the existence
of more such recipes does not necessarily tell us much about their actual use,
and the only evidence they provide of actual use is found in Hayyim Vital’s note
to himself that he tried the recipe he had, and it did not work (above, n. 45). To
find further documentation of their use we must turn to the non-magical lit-
erature in search of relevant information, and to date, I have found only three
specific examples.49 The first, and probably the earliest, is found in the Toledot

46 See Naveh and Shaked (1993), G11 (= T-S K 1.19), p. 1, l. 17–p. 2, l. 18.
47 See MS London, British Library 752 (= Add. 15299), (IMHM #4935), fol. 97b.
48 And see Gaster (1900: 345, 350); Benayahu (1972: 260, no. 1615); Sofer (2015): 147, 156.
49 I have excluded Acts 16:26 from my survey, since the miraculous opening of the prison’s
door resulted from Paul and Silas’s prayers and hymns, whose contents are not described.
And cf. also Acts 12:5–10. I also excluded the words of Judah Hadassi, which were cited

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Yeshu, the Jewish counter-Gospel, whose earliest version, as preserved in

Aramaic fragments from the Cairo Genizah, may be dated anywhere between
the third and the sixth centuries CE.50 In this text, we find Jesus, about to be
crucified, practicing his magic to fly up in the air and hide in a cave; he then
uses his magic once again, in order to shut up the cave’s mouth and remain
hidden inside. Judah the Gardener then recites God’s secret Name and flies
after him. Reaching the closed cave he opens it, but how he does so is a matter
on which our earliest textual witnesses diverge. In some of the texts, he merely
recites God’s secret Name once again, but in others he says “Opening, open-
ing, open up, for I am the messenger of the Great God”. In either case, the cave
opens up, and Judah captures Jesus and brings him to the place where he will
be crucified.51 Reading this story, we may note its basic assumption, namely,
that an opening can be locked up, but also opened, by means of magic and
incantations. We may also note that the incantation cited here is very short
and simple, which might be a sign of its antiquity, but that like our Genizah
text, it involves the direct adjuration of the opening, and in the name of God.
Another example of the use of lock-opening spells is found in a medieval
Jewish historical text known as The Story of Rabbi Nathan the Babylonian. This is
a description of some events connected with the yeshivot (Torah study houses)
of Babylonia in the early Muslim period, and it was written in Judeo-Arabic
in the first half of the tenth century. Only fragments of the Judeo-Arabic text
of this document are currently extant, but it is also known through a Hebrew
translation which is relatively well preserved.52 The passage which interests
us here deals with the disputes between Cohen-Zedek ben Joseph, the head
of the Pumbeditha yeshiva, and David ben Zakai, who was appointed by con-
sent of the yeshiva of Sura as the head of the entire Jewish community (resh
galuta). For three years, Cohen-Zedek refused to accept the authority of David
Ben Zakai, and to give him his dues, with Nissi al-Nahrawani, the blind scholar
and poet, serving as a mediator between them. One time, this Nissi came to
Cohen-Zedek by night,

above, since he was not explicitly referring to Jewish magicians who use such incanta-
tions. For non-Jewish examples, cf. Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame”, or Shakespeare’s “Open,
locks, Whoever knocks!” (Macbeth IV.1.46–47).
50 For the debate concerning the date and provenance of Toledot Yeshu, see Smelik (2009)
and Sokoloff (2011).
51 For a fuller analysis of this episode, see Bohak (2020).
52 For a detailed discussion of this text, and an edition of the Judeo-Arabic fragments,
see Ben-Sasson (1989), which supersedes the earlier edition by Friedlaender (1905); the
Hebrew version was printed by Neubauer (1895: 78–88).

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and he would open every lock with his word, and on that night he opened
fourteen locks which were locked on gates, including some on the gates
of (the dwelling of) Cohen-Zedek, until he reached him, and found him
studying in the middle of the night. And Cohen-Zedek was afraid of him,
and impressed by his (unexpected) arrival, and by the reason of his com-
ing to him. And he (Nissi) said to him, “Oh, head of the yeshiva, I opened
fourteen locks before I reached you”.53

Leaving aside the rest of the conversation between these two grandees, we may
simply note the matter of fact way in which a tenth-century Jewish narrator
relates how a major figure in the world of the Babylonian yeshivot had some
secret words up his sleeve with which to open all locks.54 Unfortunately, no
further details are provided, and so we cannot tell whether he used our spell
(which, as we noted above, displays some Babylonian Aramaic features), one
of the other spells to which we already pointed, a totally different spell, or per-
haps even just a simple prayer, or the mere recitation of one of God’s potent
Names. Being blind, he certainly had no use for a written recipe such as ours,
and probably remembered his own favorite formulae by heart. But be this as
it may, the story does show that many medieval Jews took it for granted that
one can open locked doors by means of words alone, and that such means for
opening locks were in demand and use even at the highest strata of Jewish
society. In this sense, the casual report of a complete “outsider” who had no
special interest in Jewish magic helps us illuminate and contextualize what we
find in the magicians’ own texts.55

53 The Judeo-Arabic text is in Ben-Sasson (1989: 188), the Hebrew in Neubauer (1895: 79).
The statement “and he would open every lock with his word (
[ ] )”, is translated in the Hebrew version as “he could open all the locks of Babylonia
with the Name ( )”. This might be due to the translator’s
misreading as ( ) , or some similar confusion, or to the assumption
that using God’s Name is better than using an unspecified spell; this offers an interesting
parallel to the differences between the different versions of Toledot Yeshu, as noted above.
54 For the yeshivot and their magical activities, note Hai Gaon’s explanation (Emanuel 1995:
130) of how his yeshiva (in Pumbeditha) is free of such activities, but “in the yeshiva at
Sura these things were widespread, since they are close to the city of Babylon and to the
house of Nebuchadnezzar”. See further Bohak (2015: 271–274).
55 In another case – the re-established sotah ritual (for detecting whether a woman had
committed adultery) – we may be quite sure that the ritual attributed to a ninth century
rabbi in the eleventh century Scroll of Ahimaaz is the same magical ritual for which a
recipe was found in the Cairo Genizah; for a detailed analysis of this example, see Harari
(2006b).

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A third piece of information is of a very different nature, but is at least as

interesting. It was mentioned by Louis Ginzberg in his detailed discussion of
the Story of R. Nathan Ha-Babli, and is found in a late midrashic compilation
on the book of Esther (Ginzberg 1909: 28). There, the midrash comments on
the story of Mordechai’s discovery of the plot to murder King Ahasureus and
how he reported this to Esther (Est 2:21–22), a story which raises the interesting
question of how Mordechai could have reached Esther, who presumably was
locked up in the royal palace, and how he could avoid being caught by the plot-
ters, who were two of the King’s gate-keepers. Thus, the midrash says,

some say that he entered at night, and the guards did not know this, nor
did the Chaldaeans(?),56 and no man harmed him, as it says, “I will march
before you, and level the hills that loom up, I will shatter doors of bronze”
etc. (Isa 45:2).
Midrash Panim Aherim, version B, 98 (Buber 1886: 65)

Once again, we are missing some of the most important details, including the
explicit claim that Mordechai used some special spell or magical practice to
break through the palace doors. But the claim that he could enter through
these doors without being noticed, and the citation of the same verse which
ends our door-opening adjuration, leave one wondering if the author of this
Midrash knew some recipe not very different from ours. At the very least, we
may suggest that the connection between the miraculous opening of locked
doors and the first two verses of Isaiah 45 was known to quite a few people in
the Jewish world of the early Middle Ages. And it is quite likely that elsewhere
in the non-magical Jewish literature of the Middle Ages there lie more refer-
ences to the use of magical spells and rituals to open locked doors, references
which have yet to be identified and studied.

4 Conclusion

To sum up what we have seen in the present chapter, we may note how an
anonymous, and probably quite ancient, Aramaic recipe for opening locked
doors by means of a complex set of adjurations was still being copied in the
twelfth century, and ended up in the Cairo Genizah. How exactly it would have

56 The printed text reads , which must be an error; I assume the correct reading is ha-
Kaldim. Börner Klein and Hollender (2000: 103) take this as hikhlim, and translate “und er
beschämte nicht”, but this makes little sense.

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 197

been classified by its composer, copyists, or users we cannot really say, but it
is clear that they did not classify it as “magic” (which is forbidden to Jews, and
punishable by death), and probably not even as “licit magic”. From their per-
spective, it was not “magic” at all, even if they would readily admit that it was
not a part of their established “religion”. But the Karaites, and some extreme
rationalists like Maimonides and his followers, certainly could have seen such
recipes as “magic”. For the former, it would have been just one more confir-
mation that Rabbanite society was full of magic; for the latter, it would have
proven how badly needed was his proposed reform of Judaism, as codified in
his Mishneh Torah and explained in his Guide of the Perplexed.57 And yet, we
also saw that the use of such practices to open locked doors is mentioned in
ancient and medieval Jewish sources, and that quite a few Jews believed that
in the presence of the Lord, they too could open any door – and saw nothing
wrong with doing so.
All this applies to medieval Jews. But for the modern scholar, the issue is
quite different, since he or she aims neither to attack medieval Rabbanite cul-
ture nor to reform it. For the scholar, the sole aim is to study medieval Jewish
society and culture and understand its complexities. Within this effort, texts
such as the one studied here require our attention, if only because their ubiq-
uity forces us to admit their importance within the society that produced
them. Fully aware of the problematic history of the term “magic”, and of its
use and misuse in the past, we may choose not to classify them as such, but
in so doing we shall be missing two important opportunities.58 First, we shall
be missing the opportunity to gather together many similar Jewish texts, that
seek to change reality by manipulating objects and words whose relation to
the desired outcome is at best symbolic, and by adjuring demons, angels, and
inanimate objects. This would be a shame, since these texts share several addi-
tional qualities, including a non-canonical status (or, in other words, not being
a part of the Jewish “religion”), an extremely wide diffusion, and their actual
use even by members of the highest strata of medieval Jewish society. Second,
by refusing to label such texts as “magic” and to study them as a group, we
would also be missing an important opportunity to compare them with similar

57 For Maimonides’ (failed) attempt to reform Judaism and ween it of its magical practices,
see esp. Kellner (2006).
58 In what follows, I ignore another common scholarly solution, that which replaces a
problematic term like “magic” by supposedly harmless equivalents, such as “ritual acts
to gain power”. In most cases, such solutions amount to no more than a politically correct
word-game, usually accompanied by a nod or a wink which imply that “we know that
you know that we are in fact talking about magic, even if we are using some “kosher”
circumlocution”.

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198 Bohak

texts in non-Jewish societies, such as the Greek magical papyri or the Christian
grimoires. This is a path that we did not try to follow in the present chapter, but
which definitely could and should be followed.59 And when it is, we will surely
see that the fact that the Greek magical papyri sometimes refer to their recipes
as “magic” while the Jewish magical texts almost never do is far less significant
than the fact that when the actual recipes are compared, they often turn out to
be quite similar. With all its problematic history, I would argue that the label
“magic” still helps us open many locks, and that at least in the Jewish case, it
also helps us enter some locked rooms of Jewish culture, the keys to whose
doors were deliberately lost by some earlier generations of scholars.

Appendix: The Aramaic Text

Sigla – [] a lacuna in the text; ⟨ ⟩ addition between the lines; () doubtful reading

T-S NS 256.39r
[ ] 1
[ ? ] [] 2
[? ] () [] [ ] 3
[ ] 4
60[ ] () 5
6
7
8
9
( ) [ ] 10
[ ] 11
[] 12

T-S NS 324.78r
( ) 61 13
( ) 62 14
15
16

59 For pertinent examples, see Bohak (2006); Mesler (2013); and Saar (2014).
60 A fold in the paper prevents the reading of a few letters here.
61 Probably a dittography.
62 Lege: .

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A Spell to Open All Locks and the Place of Magic 199

⟨⟩ 17
18
( ) 19
20
( ) ( ) 21
() ( ) 22
() 23
24
[ ]( ) ( ) () 25

T-S NS 256.39v
[ ]( ) 63- - [ ] 1
[ ] [] [ ] 2
[ ] ( ) 64 3
[ ] [ ] 4
[] [] 5
( ) 6
65 7

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