Shamans of Ashkenaz I: Video Recordings

This series ran live in the spring of 2023. Recordings of the class sessions are available for purchase.

Not too long ago, Jewish shamans roamed through Ashkenaz offering healing and mystical ecstasy. These practitioners were called Ba’alei Shem, masters of the name, because kabbalistic names of God and angels were a core part of their medical craft—written in amulets or chanted over herbs. Trained in herbalism, Kabbalah, bloodletting, hypnotism, and magical incantations, they offered a uniquely Jewish style of healing throughout the early-modern period. They were turned to as resources for all sorts of maladies: depression, madness, headaches, infertility, lice, the mortal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, exorcisms, and epidemics. But now they roam no longer. In this series we will excavate their healing modalities, explore why they disappeared, and revive their wisdom for contemporary Jewish concerns, such as mental health, psychedelics, herbalism, and ecstatic-transformative ritual.

Sessions

1: What happened to our magic?

2: What happened to our medicines?

3: The Toolkit of a Ba’al Shem

4: The Ba’al Shem Tov

5: The Modern Afterlives of the Ba’alei Shem