“Demons in Warsaw!” Possession and the Yiddish Press
Samuel Glauber’s session examines a public spectacle that occurred in Warsaw in early 1914 surrounding a reported case of demonic possession. For close to two months, Warsaw’s Jewish residents were spellbound by demons, dybbuks, and mediums. A careful reading of newspaper coverage of the events reveals how the city’s Jews considered possession a real, albeit contested, possibility. Particular attention is given to divergent models of possession: traditional notions of spirit possession and demonology, modern occult currents—namely psychical research and spiritualism—and the transformation that these underwent over the course of the affair; Tsiporah Kuzka, a 10-year-old Jewish girl whose short-lived fame as a medium gained her entry into the aristocratic salons of Warsaw; and the criticism raised by the city’s Jewish intellectuals in response to the spectacle.
Speaker Bio: Samuel Glauber is the Miriam Barr Librarian for Jewish & Near Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities, he is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is writing a dissertation exploring Jewish engagement with modern occult currents in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe. His research develops an interdisciplinary approach to processes of religious and social change with a focus on the religious landscape of Eastern Europe; particular research interests include Jewish occultism, modern religious thought, and Yiddish press culture.
