The only thing that resonated as spiritual was magic. The wizards of fantasy novels appeared to have more direct access to some spiritual reality than my rabbi did. They didn’t wear prayer shawls, but they did commune with higher powers. The supernatural monsters that populated those Saturday morning B movies, however overtly fake in their rubber masks and makeup, could still induce chills and feelings of dread because they drew from real legends and myths. Vampires, werewolves, and mummies—even when incarnated by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff—led directly into old, maybe even ancient, locks in our unconscious. When Colin Clive playing Victor Frankenstein, in the 1931 Universal Pictures version, imbues his monster with alchemical life and he cries out, “It’s alive!” his eyes reflect a mad ecstasy, a revelation that there are powers and realities beyond the known phenomenal world.

The colorful fantasies of comic books lent a heroic dimension to the implausible, and none treaded in the far-fetched more than those cosmic adventures Marvel Comics published. I bypassed Spider-Man and the Hulk for the enormous, galaxy-spanning adventures of the Fantastic Four, in which the team of misfits met anthropomorphized forces of nature, like the world-eater Galactus, Ego the living planet, and the Celestials, ancient giants whose vast technology secretly altered Earth’s history by creating the wondrous Eternals. In the other team comic, The Avengers, there were characters like the all-powerful alien Korvac, who wrestled with his godlike powers, a time-traveling despot known as Kang the Conqueror, and the Kree, a race of military scientists forever battling the shape-shifting Skrulls.

These stories’ majesty and vigor cooled the anxiety that was becoming a little heated wire under my skin. In these strange environs, I felt cozy. With the Marvel Universe one could create a massive family tree, an elaborate cosmic drama involving gods, mutants, androids, and heroes. Encyclopedias and atlases mapped out every detail of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and even the music of progressive rock bands like Styx, Rush, and ELO that slid down the record player’s spindle one after the other seemed crafted out of intricate stories and mythologies. It wasn’t just about getting lost in these otherworldly chronicles; my anxiety was soothed by the vastness of worlds beyond my home. Whether or not they were fiction was irrelevant. Their details made them real. And if they could be real, maybe my own imagination had the power to become actualized.

By the time I was 14, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns began to take on a different quality, a more profound sense that what we were playing had ramifications for our own lives outside the game. If I was the one to defeat the dragon, my luck would change at school. The jock who intimidated me every day and sneered with a face full of fury would recognize something powerful in me and know, without understanding why, to leave me alone.

Then, like a cliché right out of a parents’ handbook on the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons, I started to collect books on magic and witchcraft and imagined what it would be like to have real sorcerous powers. I didn’t desire the power to make girls love me or know the future so much as I yearned for magical knowledge. I wanted to know if the astral plane was real, if spirits inhabited rocks and trees and could be communicated with, if behind the veil angelic and demonic beings were engaged in a celestial war. I wanted to know if God was real. This search for spiritual awareness by occult methods was not unique. I was a stowaway on a boat that, by the time it made it to the American suburbs, had undergone such a battering from the winds and storms of time and culture that all I had left was a sliver of wood and a paddle.

Those days were a gold mine for the weird and the uncanny—by the late ’60s and early ’70s, the commingling of all these various spiritual ideas manifested into an impenetrable mixture of correspondences. Go into any New Age bookstore to see the result. Everything is permitted, nothing is discerned. Zen sits side by side with The Satanic Bible; Rosicrucians snuggle up against accounts of UFOs and ancient astronauts; tarot cards, rune stones, astrology, and water divining are just to the left of JFK assassination conspiracy theories and exposés on the truth of the Knights Templar.

This pockmarked, bumpy, and often treacherous spiritual highway wound its way right into the suburbs north of Boston, where I could be found sitting on the floor, rolling dice and reading the eternal statistics tables in the D&D manual, wishing that the magic within the confines of the game was not merely drawn from fantasy novels and mythology, but offered a shadow of something genuine. If magic was real, then maybe these suburbs were also a shadow of some greater reality. Even though the townhouse we lived in was built in the 1970s, maybe the spirits of Native Americans that could have hunted on the very spot where my parents parked their car were still haunting this once hallowed ground. The pulp horror author H. P. Lovecraft wrote about ancient alien gods worshipped in the small towns of New England. Could a similarly strange cult have performed their arcane rituals where the mall now sat, and might their terrible deities be waiting for a neophyte to unlock their secrets? But beyond even these questions was another greater mystery: What, if anything, did the God my rabbi spoke of have to do with any of this, with any of these feelings, these imaginings?

Bus number 455 picked me up right in front of the townhouse association and went straight into Salem, which, I assumed, was the best place to learn about magic. It was here, after all, where real witches lived; at least, that was what the whole city wanted you to believe. The history of the city, whether real or imagined, has attracted self-identified Wiccans and neopagans for decades, and so there really is no better place for a 13-year-old dungeon master to get a book on real arcane knowledge. So, I took a bus alone for the first time, in search of a primer on witchcraft. I chanced upon The Key of Solomon the King, a medieval grimoire (magical text) made popular in the late 19th century during what is called the Occult Revival.

I had never seen another book like it. This was very different from what I had imagined magic was, as described by the fictional worlds I spent so much time inhabiting. In the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, magic was something you collected in the form of spells and objects. There was no ritual, practice, or discipline. Spells worked immediately and either hit their intended target or missed, depending on the laws of chance generated by the dice. Magic was not mysterious or dangerous. It involved no sacrifice. You simply learned new spells as you went along. In fantasy novels, magic could be deadly to wizards, but it was usually because they were inexperienced or evil and deserving of their fate. But mostly wizards were drawn as if their power were innate, not anything that required much more than studying a few books, maybe cooking up a potion or two.

The Key of Solomon explained how, through an intensely detailed preparation and ritual, one could conjure demons and bend them to the magician’s will, as well as perform other magical feats, like invisibility and flight (with the aid of some magic garters, no less). The rituals involved the construction of magic circles and the use of implements, such as seals, swords, and particular clothing, all of which had to be prepared in almost impossible ways. A spell for invisibility involved writing a certain phrase on the skin of a toad and suspending it from a hair in a cave at midnight. The text was filled with strange sigils, magical seals, and long incantations. While I had read about spells and tarot cards, Ouija boards, and spirit knockings, I had never before read something so old and, well, religious. All of the spells in The Key of Solomon included prayers to God, and much of the text used Hebrew. This was magic that required great preparation of mind and body, a devout belief in God, and the willingness to risk one’s soul. There was almost no practical way in which I was capable of attempting any of the spells or conjurations, but just owning the book was like having access to a source of great power. It was the manifestation of what I wanted to be true about the world, while at the same time being too complex for me to really use. I could barely get away with lighting a candle without instantly alerting my mother’s sixth sense of anything on fire. My innate skepticism was held at bay by the impossibility of it all. Nevertheless, the Key was an actual key, one that could unlock the secrets of the world.

Having no control over my surroundings, I thought magic seemed like the perfect organizing principle, except that for every stone unturned, another, even stranger one appeared in its place. When all I had to soothe my anxiousness were video games and role-playing, the kind of magic found in The Key of Solomon offered some small hope that there was a secret order and meaning to the universe, that all things on Earth were a mere reflection of some greater divine truth. That hope, however, led to an even greater confusion. I wasn’t sure I knew what I would do if I really did turn invisible or fly. Would I sneak into the girls’ locker room or take Fantastic Four #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 from the wall behind the clerk’s counter at the comics shop?

These weren’t the things I wanted magic to attain for me. Even when I played D&D, I was loath to use magic as an offensive weapon. It felt like cheating to cast infinite magic missiles at the hopeless horde of orcs. But I studied the book and felt that smoldering around the edges of the words was something not unlike those forbidden experiences I gleaned from the pamphlets on illegal drugs, and very much like the Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums in my brother’s stack of records.

While I wanted to understand something about magic, my instincts told me that God and magic were somehow incompatible, or at least that magic might not be the right tool if what I was looking for was spiritual in nature. So I had to ask myself what I was after: Was it mysticism or magic, communion with God, or power over his angels?

Excerpted from Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood by Peter Bebergal. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Bebergal. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Soft Skull Press.

This is not entirely surprising. Since his death in 1926, Houdini has attracted many explainers, but few have grappled well with what can be seen as the two sides of the escape artist’s Jewish identity. The first is well-known: his popular death-defying theatrical acts, which represented freedom from his father’s financial failure as well as a more general liberation from the limitations immigrant Jewish life. But there is also Houdini’s less-known second act as a debunker of a mystical group known as the Spiritualists, a crusade that shared much with Emma Goldman’s fiery political tirades and that proved the boundaries of Jewish entertainers in the face of American anti-Semitism.

The first several chapters of Houdini’s life fit easily into the familiar coming-to-America immigrant story. Born in Budapest, Houdini (né Erich Weiss) arrived in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his mother and four brothers in 1878, at age 4; his father, a rabbi, had secured a job. By 1882, the congregation decided it wanted a more modern, English-speaking leader, and the Weisses (by now there were six children) moved, first to Milwaukee, and, in 1887, to New York.

Houdini worked as a newsboy and in a tie factory alongside his father, who died of cancer of the tongue in 1892. “Such hardships and hunger became our lot … the less said on the subject the better,” he later said.

He and his brother performed as The Houdini Brothers—the name an homage to the French conjurer Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, whose act he would later debunk. The Houdinis polished their act at dime museums and possibly at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. By 1899, Houdini was a solo star in vaudeville. He began a five-year tour in Europe, where he became an international celebrity.

The eminent authors of the essays in the gorgeous exhibit catalog published by Yale University Press make a good case for seeing Houdini’s escape acts as aspirational, for Jews and for all Americans of the era. The historian Alan Brinkley writes that Houdini was “a symbol of escape … physical power … success and upward mobility.” Kenneth Silverman, Houdini’s most respected biographer, notes that the escape artist’s Jewishness made him “a symbol of freedom.”

But a casual look at the props Houdini used makes it difficult to explain his escapes as only representing power and success; they also hint at what was at times an adversarial—even hostile—relationship with his audiences. In much the same way that white performers parodied African Americans by wearing blackface, Houdini parodied criminals, freaks, and the mentally insane by wearing their costumes and using their artifacts. Houdini sometimes went to great lengths to prove himself as an almost real criminal, allowing himself to be strip-searched by the police. But the fact that audiences were ultimately able to root for him turned on the distance between him—a celebrity—and those nameless deviants. The hero always escaped from his escapes, albeit sometimes breathless, and other times injured.

Houdini was aware of the blood-lust in his audience, whom he referred to at least once as a mob. They were always trying to expose him, to tell how he did it, to sue him or to imitate him. Houdini mostly won on stage. Besides the exotic costumes—thick, long ropes, shackles, or leather straitjackets he wore onstage as proof of his imprisonment—Houdini performed either nearly nude, like a strong man, or in a tuxedo, like a male Marlene Dietrich. Some of the photos of him brim with barely contained violence, such as the one where the escape artist in a loincloth and chains is poised to dive off Harvard Bridge surrounded by dark-suited, hatted policemen with billy clubs in their belts.

As Houdini reached middle-age, he began to feel confined by his escape acts. Every time he writhed free from one container, he had to design a more confining one: locked handcuffs, straitjackets suspended high above city streets, glass boxes underwater, milk-cans sealed shut, buried coffins, piano cases, jail cells of murderous criminals, even a Siberian prison. Around the time of World War I, which also coincided with his mother’s death, Houdini began to explore escapes besides the ones he had pursued on stage. He became the first man to fly an airplane in Australia. He starred in silent films, and he founded his own film production company.

Houdini’s mid-life crisis appeared to arise at least in part from an unresolved tension in his Jewish past. The man whose father was a rabbi and a poet seemed to long for a more erudite legacy than the one that had made him a celebrity and was based on derring-do. Thus during this period, he wrote (or at least oversaw) books exposing the failures of earlier generations of magicians. He amassed an enormous theater archive, which he donated to Harvard. “I come from a race of students. I am not entirely illiterate and I do read and study,” he once said.

And then in 1920, Houdini found a satisfying second act: demystifying Spiritualism, a cult many Americans turned to after losing their loved ones in World War I. From being an escape artist, Houdini became an exposer of psychics whom he considered charlatans because they used trickery to pretend to commune with the dead—as opposed to merely pretending to escape. This was not just Houdini’s competitive spirit. What he did was entertainment. Spiritualism was magic in supernatural clothing.

Like many Jews of his generation, Houdini had until this moment seemed to stave off anti-Semitism by becoming an entertainer and by intermarrying—his wife, Bess, was Catholic. Houdini lived a mostly secular life. He was as likely to express his own brand of anti-Semitism as he was to brag about his Jewishness. But he did write about anti-Semitism in Europe and in Russia, which he visited while a pogrom was decimating the town of Kishinev.

And yet, once Houdini traded the stage for the pulpit, anti-Semitism rose up to haunt him and to urge him on. It was as if once he stopped playing at his stage escapes, he could no longer be tolerated. He intuited that many Spiritualists belonged to an elite WASP class from which he would always be excluded. In 1922, Arthur Conan Doyle invited his old friend to a séance hosted by his second wife, who supposedly made contact with Houdini’s beloved late mother, Cecilia. While communicating with Cecilia, Lady Doyle drew a cross; then, she transcribed an emotional letter to Houdini. Instead of convincing Houdini, the séance outraged him. He would later point out in public the unlikeliness of his mother, a Jew and a rabbi’s wife, drawing a cross—or communicating in English since she never spoke it in real life. Conan Doyle explained that his wife drew a cross whenever she channeled any spirit and that in the beyond, “Hebrew” was translated into English. The fact that Houdini’s mother spoke not Hebrew but German ended the men’s friendship.

The more ferociously Houdini pursued the Spiritualists, the uglier the anti-Semitic jibes became. Doyle called Houdini “our Disraeli.” When Houdini testified in front of Congress to promote a bill requiring fortune tellers to have licenses, one Spiritualist referred to him as Judas.

Not content with just tracing Houdini’s fascinating biography, the Jewish Museum exhibit also links the “mystifier,” as he liked to call himself, to 20th-century writers and artists. The most famous fictional Houdini, that of E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime, captures best the beleaguered escape artist ignored by the very American aristocracy that pays him money for his dog-and-pony show. But many of the post-modern artists represented in the  exhibit catalog are less interested in Houdini’s Jewishness than in amplifying the escape artist’s particular historical meaning into a universal metaphor for S & M-style bondage: Typical is a still from Matthew Barney’s film, Cremaster 5, showing the naked artist manacled by plastic handcuffs to a stump in the snowy woods, a large mushroom sprouting from his thigh.

None of this work is anywhere near as enticing as Houdini himself. Captured in the 1920 gelatin print on the front flyleaf of the catalog and made visible on the front cover through a keyhole, Houdini gazes directly at the camera. Several strands of white hair frame his face, which is feline. His pupils are dilated, and his eyes are hooded with kohl. Houdini looks not unlike Al Jolson, another iconic Jewish performer in flight, another showy enigmatic son of a rabbi and mother-lover. Houdini died a year before Jolson starred in The Jazz Singer. Perhaps he had to die for Jolson to sing.

Rachel Shteir, a professor at the Theatre School of DePaul University, is the author of Striptease: the Untold History of the Girlie Show and Gypsy: the Art of the Tease.

The current Yiddish revival movement, spurred by institutions like KlezKamp and artists like DJ Socalled, has attracted a small but devoted following among young Jews, largely through its ability to provide a cultural home for those who feel an affiliation with a secular, politically progressive, haimish—and slightly anachronistic—version of Jewishness. One of the most interesting things about the movement, though, is that it’s also swept up some non-Jews for whom Yiddish has no connection to a real or imagined ancestral past. No one exemplifies this better than Baker, who grew up Episcopalian and stumbled, apparently by intuition and chance, into New York City’s Yiddish scene, where he’s risen to the helm of not one but two Yiddish organizations: the Congress for Jewish Culture and the New Yiddish Rep, a theater company. The unlikely arc of his life so far is the subject of Baker’s new one-man-show, The Big Bupkis, which opens tonight at the New Yiddish Rep.

“I’m from the Midwest, and I was born just 20 miles outside of Peculiar, Missouri. It wasn’t at all clear that I was destined to stand before you here tonight,” says Baker, who is tall, thin, elegant, and prematurely graying at 41, at the start of the show. “Gosh, when I was a child, I was an acolyte in Saint Andrew’s Episcopal church in Kansas City…. But I remember even then, as I’d walk down the aisle carrying the crucifix, or wash the priest’s hands before he administered Holy Communion, I would daydream about Yiddish vaudeville.”

The reality was a little bit different, though no less bizarre. Baker really was an acolyte at Saint Andrew’s, where his father, a judge, and mother, a romance novelist, were active members. He was also, on a local level, a professional performer as a child, doing magic routines in ad-hoc neighborhood variety shows and occasional other gigs. (“I don’t know how this was arranged,” he said, “but when the circus came to town, I would ride the elephants.”) On Saturday mornings, as he notes in the show, he would visit Claude Enslow, an aging former vaudevillian and carny.

In the Big Bupkis version of the story—which is frequently interrupted by magic tricks, ventriloquism, rubber chickens being shot out of canons, and audience members being sawed in half—Baker left Kansas City after summoning the ghost of Yiddish vaudevillian Ludwig Zats in a séance. “I found out that Ludwig Zats was buried in New York, so naturally I packed my bags and hopped the fastest train to New York City, where I knew there was Yiddish vaudeville on every corner,” he deadpans. “This was in 1993.”

This is, once again, not entirely untrue. Baker came to New York a few years after college to pursue theater (he still performs regularly as a magician and has acted and directed off-Broadway and in regional theaters). He also became close with two octogenarian actresses, Luba Kadison Buloff and Mina Bern. Both were one-time stars of the Yiddish stage, which had been, in its heyday, a site of exciting theater not only for Yiddish speakers but for sophisticated non-Jewish audiences. Baker began studying Yiddish himself, and, he bragged, quickly excelled at it. Often, though, Yiddish speakers he met didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“I would go to an event—like, they would have a mock shtetl wedding at the Workmen’s Circle”—a fraternal organization devoted to promoting Yiddish—“and I would stand by the side and wait to run into somebody I knew,” he said. “Always, a pair of older women would come over: ‘So, are you Jewish?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have a Jewish girlfriend?’ ‘No.’ ‘Converting?’ ‘No.’ And they would shake their heads.”

The easiest solution to the riddle—how did this Midwestern goy wind up in the Yiddish theater?—is that Baker is gay. Gay and thus a likely candidate to leave Kansas City to pursue theater in New York; gay and thus attracted to the campy elements of vaudeville, of Yiddish culture, and indeed, of speaking a “dead” language at all; gay and thus at home in the contemporary secular Yiddish scene, which itself has been shaped extensively by young gay Jews seeking to create an alternative Jewish culture.

Baker gamely discussed these connections, but refused to wrap things up quite so neatly; instead, he seemed more inclined to telegraph his sexuality and its relation to his adopted culture the old-fashioned way, through broad hints and knowing looks.

This is even more true in The Big Bupkis, which comes very close to making the gay/Yiddish equation explicit but never quite does. In the first gag of the show, Baker sings a Yiddish version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” When he gets to a line that means, “I say that as a Jew,” he gives the audience a huge wink, as though letting them in on the joke: that what’s really funny about the show is watching a young gay goy channel an old straight Jew. The play ends with Baker in drag as the Yiddish actress Annie Hoffman, who is having a catfight with Sophie Tucker (“No one sings that song but me, you little oysvurf !”) Whole books have been written about the connection between queerness and Yiddish, but Baker doesn’t talk about it, he performs it.

Baker earned a Master’s degree in Yiddish from the University of Texas in 2002, and when he returned to New York he became the director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, which hosts Yiddish-related events and publishes Yiddish books. More recently, he became a director of the New Yiddish Rep, which was founded two years ago by a group of Yiddish theater folk who wanted to produce shows that were too off-beat for the Folksbiene, New York’s long-established Yiddish theater. (The cadre includes Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson, who play the shtetl couple at the beginning of A Serious Man.) They have taken an unusually aggressive approach to the goal that almost every Yiddish organization shares: attracting younger audiences. A page about the Rep in the Big Bupkis program, for instance, all but directly targets other Yiddish organizations: “The days when Yiddish theater could depend on audiences coming for the language itself are over. Nowadays the theater that we present must be the selling point, not the language that we present it in. We must present Theater That Happens to Be in Yiddish, not Yiddish That Happens to Be On Stage.” As a publicity stunt for the show, the Rep also announced that no one over 65 would be admitted into the theater. (When they’ve occasionally “enforced” this rule during previews of the show, audience members who appear to be over-age are sold fake IDs for a quarter. No one was “carded” on the evening this reporter attended, but the entire audience of 15 could have been.) This approach has exacerbated the Rep’s already strained relationship with the Folksbiene; in an offended response to the no-one-over-65 stunt, Folksbiene director Zalmen Mlotek told the New York Post, “I would hardly call them a theater company.”

Despite this rivalry and the generally argumentative culture of the remaining Yiddish organizations, Baker said he’s rarely felt marginalized or resented in the Yiddish scene for not being Jewish. In fact, “I’d say sometimes I get more respect than I necessarily deserve,” he said wryly. “Oscar Wilde said of women writers that they’re like a dog who speaks English: it doesn’t matter what they say. It’s the same with a gentile who speaks Yiddish.” Others simply assume he’s a member of the tribe, thanks to his ambiguous last name. “I get a lot of mail addressed to ‘Miss Sheyna Baker,’” he said.

Baker’s not in Kansas City anymore, but does the Yiddish world remind him at all of home? His answer was, as usual, satisfyingly odd. “I happen to like a little tongue with my pastrami, and I prefer the tip of the tongue,” he said. “That was something I learned from Mina and Luba. My mother used to serve tongue but I didn’t know what the parts were. Was it exotic or uncannily familiar? Both.”

As early as the Roman period, Jews used amulets as a best defense against evils—both real and supernatural—that lurked outside their doors, a practice that continued into the late 17th and 18th century. The amulets could be made on flattened bits of metal inscribed with the names of angels or on small, encased scrolls, much like the mezuzah. But there were other kinds of magic as well. Medieval Jews called out God’s name and those of His angels to smite enemies and to gain affections. In addition, Jews of all ages practiced astrology and looked for omens in the form of animals. Since traditional liturgy made little room for personal prayers, these extra-liturgical means helped people combat what they saw as constant threats.

It was the Jews of the Middle Ages, however, who helped to create a more systematic approach to magic. Mystical writings have always detailed the strange and mysterious levels of heaven, but it was Jewish magicians who provided the correct formulas and rituals needed to pass through the gates. They had to make magic seals (small tokens engraved with Hebrew names), which forced the angel or demon on guard to flee, belying the essential belief that Hebrew letters are filled with divine energy that can be manipulated for various ends, from conjuring demons to making golems. This form of Jewish magical practice, along with mystical and kabbalistic texts, was to be a major influence on later non-Jewish occult practitioners. And this is a phenomenon that really took root during the Renaissance.

What we typically refer to as Western occultism—that is, the body of knowledge related to the supernatural workings of the universe—started in the Renaissance, an era that maintained both an abiding interest in astrology, magic, and alchemy and a growing interest in empirical thought and Greek philosophy. To Renaissance thinkers, the natural world was a reflection, or imitation, of the divine and through certain magical practices—such as communing with spirits and astral projection—a person could achieve true salvation. At the same time, Jewish mystics similarly believed that God is inseparable from his creation, and the non-Jewish Renaissance magicians looked to Jewish mystical texts to map out proof that of that fact and to glean secrets about God through magic; such texts offered very specific instructions, often involving the use of seals and the recitation of angelic and divine names, which were used to try to understand the divine. These ideas and symbols wound their way through the centuries, through fraternal and secret societies, and the Freemasons, theosophists like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, and New Age Wiccans incorporated Jewish mystical and magical elements into their own mythologies.

Among the methods that mystics used in their quest for understanding was gematria, the art of finding hidden meaning by assigning numerical value to Hebrew letters. For non-Jews, performing gematria on Hebrew words that seemed to correspond to occult ideas became central to magical practice. It mattered little whether or not the meaning of the words was understood within the context of the Jewish religion or the Torah. Judaism was irrelevant to what was perceived as mysterious. Even more significantly for non-Jewish occultists, Hebrew letters took on a kind of occult power. Adorn something as simple as a pentagram with the tetragrammaton (the name of God rendered in the Torah as yod, heh, vav, heh) and you suddenly have a symbol that looks like it has great magical power.

Such beliefs persisted at least until the late 19th century, when many Jews became intent on embracing modernity and rationalism. By the time of the immigrant wave to America in the later part of the 19th century, the superstitions of the shtetls—that dybbuks could take possession of the body, or that the demon Lilith would come for misbehaved children, for instance—were largely left behind. Still, American immigrants couldn’t leave it all in Eastern Europe and many Jews in North America grew up tossing salt over their shoulder to ward off the evil eye and avoiding touching themselves when describing the illness of another person lest they contract the same affliction.

As Judaism struggles between assimilation and the preservation of tradition, Jewish magic suggests that Jews are very much like everyone else in so many beliefs. Ghosts, evil spirits, bad luck, and good are a part of a world view that co-exists with an omnipotent God and a complex moral system. And despite how far into the modern world Jews have moved, they continue to hear the echo of Sefer Hasdim, the famous medieval text, which advised, “One should not believe in superstitions, but it is best to be heedful of them.”