In a latest speech on vitamin, the nation’s high well being official provided a maybe stunning rationalization for what’s ailing Individuals.
“We’re engaged proper now in religious warfare and … the malevolent forces wish to drive us aside and finish our connection to one another,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned on March 5.
It’s not clear if Kennedy was talking metaphorically, having regularly talked about his personal religious crises over time. However he was utilizing language many thought was focused at those that imagine that fashionable science isn’t any match for the unseen “malevolent forces” assailing Individuals’ bodily and psychological well-being.
In line with latest polling, 54% of Republicans and 37% of Democrats imagine within the literal existence of demons. A Marist Ballot discovered that the variety of Individuals who claimed to have actively been within the presence of a ghost or spirit doubled between the Nineties and the 2020s from roughly 24% to 30%.
TikTok is awash in tarot readers, crystal healers, astrology influencers and wellness gurus promising entry to unseen forces. Influencers peddle different COVID cures and supernatural explanations for present occasions. Essayists and social sciences are attributing the recognition of the occult, the supernatural and conspiracy-minded pondering to a rejection of institutional authority. In a interval of profound financial and political instability, they recommend, folks search metaphysical solutions when the official explanations really feel inadequate.
But when this all feels very 2026, a brand new exhibit at YIVO Institute for Jewish Analysis suggests we’ve been right here earlier than.
“Jews Are Magic,” opening this month at YIVO’s Manhattan headquarters, explores the Jewish fascination with mysticism, fortune telling, amulets, psychics and occult practices. Whereas the exhibit reaches again to the biblical and Talmudic intervals, its major focus is on the mid-Nineteenth century to the early Twentieth century. Within the face of accelerating urbanization, oppression in Russia and the pull of assimilation, Jews in Japanese Europe and New York’s Decrease East, at least their non-Jewish neighbors, discovered solace within the occult.
YIVO’s Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit “Jews Are Magic,” with a copy of a Excessive Vacation card that includes a Jewish palm reader, Warsaw c. 1910. (JTA)
“On this time interval, when folks generally suppose that type of magic is getting left on the wayside and persons are changing into extra fashionable, they’re simply as engaged with these unseen realities as they had been beforehand,” mentioned Samuel Glauber, a specialist on the Jewish occult and adviser to the exhibit.
And it wasn’t simply the huddled lots. Writers, intellectuals and scientists had been fascinated by the supernatural, including a sheen of respectability to fortune-telling, seances and what Sigmund Freud known as the “uncanny.”
The exhibit contains palm-reading manuals, amulets towards the evil eye, fortune-telling guides and ads for Jewish psychics drawn from YIVO’s archives. They promise to assist readers and purchasers discover romance, settle lawsuits and remedy sickness. One show contains closely used Yiddish divination books whose margins nonetheless comprise penciled calculations from long-ago readers attempting to conjure their futures.
A minimum of in principle, Jewish custom forbids such practices. The exhibit opens with an admonition in Deuteronomy towards consulting with an “enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with acquainted spirits.” However, folks faith flouted these prohibitions, and plenty of rabbis went alongside.
“Formally these sorts of supplies are, at some degree, thought-about unacceptable,” Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s senior tutorial advisor and director of exhibitions, mentioned on a tour of the exhibit Wednesday. “But a number of rabbis take part on this.”
Among the exhibit’s most poignant artifacts are drawn from a cache of roughly 5,000 kvitlekh, or handwritten petitions, despatched to Rabbi Eliyahu Guttmacher, a Nineteenth-century Polish rabbi and mystic generally known as the “Tzaddik of Grodzisk.” The letters had been found in an attic in 1932 by YIVO collectors and supply an intimate archive of Jewish nervousness on the sting of modernity.
After Guttmacher reportedly cured a toddler believed to be possessed by a demon, Jews from throughout partitioned Poland started writing to him searching for assist with sickness, infertility, poverty, unhealthy luck and psychological torment. The letters blur the road between faith, folks therapeutic and occult apply. Guttmacher’s responses haven’t survived, however a close-by show case contains numerous spells written by different rabbis, meant to thrust back the evil eye and sometimes invoking kabbalah, the Jewish mystical apply that provided rabbis an appropriate foothold within the esoteric.
The celebrities of “Jews Are Magic,” although, are the flamboyant hustlers, healers and self-invented mystics who turned Jewish occultism into efficiency artwork and entrepreneurial spectacle.
Artifacts that includes three early Twentieth-century Jewish psychics — from left, Terfren Laila, Erik Jan Hanussen and Abraham Hochman — are featured within the YIVO exhibit, “Jews Are Magic.” (JTA)
Among the many most colourful is Naftali Herz Imber, greatest remembered at present because the poet who wrote the phrases that turned “Hatikvah,” Israel’s nationwide anthem.
Lengthy earlier than that, nonetheless, Imber was touring America in flowing robes as a clairvoyant generally known as “The Mahatma” and “The Apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 Masters.”
Imber’s profession as a clairvoyant ultimately collapsed into alcoholism, bar fights and arrests, however his wit apparently by no means abandoned him. Thrown out of a Zionist congress for unhealthy habits, he reportedly shrugged and mentioned: “They nonetheless should sing my music.”
One other standout is Khayem-Mordkhe Shiller-Shkolnik, maybe the closest factor prewar Poland needed to a celeb psychic.
Born in a shtetl close to Lublin in 1874, Shiller-Shkolnik fused occultism with the language of recent science and self-improvement. He marketed experience in hypnosis, telepathy, handwriting evaluation, phrenology (skull-reading) and “psycho-phrenology,” a self-discipline of his personal invention.
Glauber, the Miriam Barr Librarian for Jewish & Close to Japanese Research at Washington College, mentioned practitioners like Shiller-Shkolnick took benefit of the burgeoning marketplace for mass-market periodicals and books to change into their period’s influencers.
“He was a grasp of press commercial,” Glauber mentioned. “The quantity of protection he was in a position to generate for himself was actually unimaginable.”
On the Decrease East Facet, superstar psychic Abraham Hochman operated out of 169 Rivington Avenue, the place he allotted prophecies, revealed manuals and constructed a small enterprise empire that included customized marriage ceremony contracts, a marriage corridor and a Catskills lodge.
Naftali Herz Imber, earlier than writing the poem that turned “Hatikvah,” labored as a clairvoyant generally known as “The Mahatma” and “The Apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 Masters.” (YIVO)
Hochman specialised find runaway husbands — a real social disaster in immigrant Jewish New York.
In a single celebrated case, Hochman instructed a lady precisely the place and when she would discover her lacking husband: on the nook of Pitt and Grand Streets at 10 p.m. She arrived with a police officer and located the person leaning towards a lamppost exactly the place Hochman “predicted.”
Portnoy acknowledges that many such tales are nearly definitely exaggerated or invented. However that, he says, misses the purpose.
“These persons are having actual issues, they usually haven’t had options,” he mentioned. “Having tried different issues, they lastly determine to strategy these marvel staff who can work their magic.”
The exhibit’s most tragic determine could also be Erik Jan Hanussen, born Herschel Steinschneider to a Jewish household in Vienna. Reinventing himself as a Danish aristocrat and superstar clairvoyant, Hanussen turned considered one of Europe’s most well-known hypnotists through the Weimar years, internet hosting lavish séances and publishing a newspaper known as The Clairvoyant Information.
By the early Nineteen Thirties he had insinuated himself into Nazi circles and allegedly befriended members of the SS. Communist journalists uncovered his Jewish origins, and Hanussen’s physique was later discovered dumped by the roadside, apparently by the very motion he thought he may manipulate.
It’s tempting to deal with these tales as colourful relics of an immigrant previous — quaint tales of gullible Jews and charismatic hucksters. However “Jews Are Magic” insists on one thing extra unsettling: The attract of the occult by no means disappeared.
The Hasidic press continues to hold ads for religious therapeutic, and Sephardic Jews in Israel have an ongoing custom of searching for assist and safety from marvel rabbis.
And each Glauber and Portnoy see a poignant similarity between the Yiddish-speaking amulet-makers and Jewish fortune-tellers and at present’s wellness influencers and conspiracy mongers.
“Anytime folks really feel the stress of the world, that is one thing they at all times flip to,” he mentioned. “As a result of it’s entertaining, nevertheless it additionally supplies a hopeful window into one thing else.”
Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Skilled Psychics opens Might 26 on the YIVO Institute for Jewish Analysis, positioned on the Heart for Jewish Historical past in New York Metropolis.
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