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.”

During the final decade of the 19th century, a man known variously as the Mahatma, and the “apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 masters” traipsed around the Western United States prophesizing about catastrophes in Paris and future civil wars in the United States. With a leonine shock of gray-streaked black hair, he would stand before journalists and spectators and nonchalantly comment, “I’m going to shake the foundations of your world.” Whether or not his predictions shook those foundations is unclear, but he was popular enough to draw large audiences to his occult performances throughout the 1890s.

Before all that, he was a Hebrew poet and scholar known by the somewhat less exotic name of Naphtali Imber. Born into a Hasidic family in 1856 in Zlotshev, Poland, the same Galician shtetl that gave us the great Yiddish writer Moyshe Leyb Halperin, Imber was alleged to have been deaf, dumb, and paralyzed until the age of seven, when he underwent what could only be called a miraculous recovery and subsequently became known as a brilliant talmudic and kabbalistic prodigy. He also dabbled in poetry—a matter that might strike any Hasidic parent as boding poorly for his future as a scholar—and, in his teens, he wrote a poem on the occasion of Bukovina’s joining the Austrian empire that earned him an award from Emperor Franz Joseph.

A peripatetic young man, Imber broke out of Zlotshev while still in his teens and traveled throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire before leaving for Palestine in 1882, where he published Morning Star, his first book of poems. To earn his keep, he served as the secretary to the English adventurer Sir Laurence Oliphant, a Christian millennialist who, in an attempt to hasten the apocalypse, developed a plan in 1879 to lease the northern portion of Palestine for resettlement of the world’s Jews. Oliphant’s mystical beliefs influenced Imber, who left Palestine in 1887, returning briefly to Europe before leaving for India and, finally, the United States.

His American sojourn was marked by itinerancy and an increasing obsession with the occult. During a short stay in Boston in 1894, Imber married a local Brahmin named Kate Davidson, whom writer Israel Zangwill referred to as an “American Christian crank.” The couple went west, seeking audiences with other mystics, rivals whom Imber denounced as “bluffers.”

Dressing in a white gown, Imber offered remarkable predictions. In an 1896 report in the San Francisco Post, he warned Americans to stay away from Paris, where a disaster would soon occur. Within six months, an enormous fire broke in Paris’s Bazar de la Charité, the result of a film exhibition during which a projector set a pile of highly flammable film alight, killing hundreds and destroying many city blocks.

In 1897, at an event in Los Angeles, he predicted that in 50 years’ time, a Jewish state would violently come into existence in Palestine, and that, in the future, power from the sun’s rays would provide energy to heat homes and power transportation. A serious drinker, Imber also prophesized that California wines would one day rate among the best in the world.

Whether his prophecies always turned out remains to be seen. In October 1897, the Los Angeles Times reported on one of his visions: in 2010, he said, a new civil war would break out in the United States. Imber’s claim was that the ultra-liberal state of Kansas, whose female governor will have declared “the West for Westerners,” will secede from the Union. Kansas will be joined by Illinois and Missouri, prompting the Eastern states to launch a war against all of the Western states, which will have supported the secessionists. The West will rout the East, and the two sides will remain separate. The East, which will wage war with Canada and annex most of it, will be governed by what Imber called “the Manhattan Empire,” and the West, which will take on Mexico and annex most of it, will be governed by Chicago. Meantime, he said, California will split in two, with Los Angeles as the capital in the south and San Francisco as the capital in the north. Farfetched as Imber’s prophecy seems, its major question right now seems to be how quickly Kansas can become ultra-liberal.

Around the time Imber made his second civil war prophecy, he and his young wife attempted to settle in San Francisco, but, perhaps unable to compete with the memory of the city’s most famous Jew, Emperor Norton, and afflicted with the disease known as shpilkes, he left his wife, never to return. According to the Los Angeles Times, he resurfaced shortly thereafter in a Los Angeles police lineup after having been arrested for disorderly conduct in a flophouse where he was staying. Another resident had tried to hold him down and cut off his hair. Molested and mocked by onlookers, Imber went wild and, stalking the hallways of the place all night, screamed about cutting out his assailant’s heart. Imber stood with a black eye before the judge, the Times reported, and explained, “Conzidering ze zituation zat I was hit by a drunken man and called a little sheeney only to show ze anti-semitic feeling, is it any wonder zat I got angry, Your Honor?” He was found guilty and fined $20.

Imber then made his way to New York City, leaving his work as a seer behind and cementing his reputation as a poet, writer, and aspiring alcoholic. In their memoirs, Yiddish writers like Aaron Davidson commented on Imber’s infamous pub crawls. As an intellectual, he impressed philanthropist and judge Mayer Sulzberger, who became his benefactor and gave Imber a stipend of a dollar per week, doled out by the head of the New York Public Libraries Jewish Division, Abraham Freidus, a bug-eyed fat man, known to patrons as “the hippopotamus.” Freidus, a brilliant bibliographer who suffered from a glandular disorder, would stick Imber’s dollar in a book and have it delivered to Imber at his table at the library. Imber apparently spent more time at the library than at home: on his 1905 passport application, he gave his address as “New York Public Library.”

But hard drinking and hard schnorring had taken their toll. After Imber’s death in 1909 at the age of 54, one of the eulogies in the Yiddish newspaper commented that he was the only true Jewish bohemian. A few days later, a letter appeared noting this fact was wrong, that Imber was not a Bohemian at all and, in fact, from Galicia.

Although his history as a clairvoyant and knife-wielding drunk is not particularly well known, Naphtali Herz Imber was never an unknown quantity. He became famous, after all, as the eminent author of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, a ditty he first wrote while on the road in Romania in 1877. He tweaked it when he got to Palestine, publishing it as the poem “Tikvateinu” (“Our Hope”).

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life. Legitimized as “prophets” in the ancient period, they have become, in subsequent eras, excused as products of their times or categorized as special “mystics.” But even by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, science and mysticism still mixed in weird and uncomfortable ways: mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, for example, was a big fan of alchemy and divination, among other matters of the occult. (Apparently, rationality has never been beholden to the laws of motion and gravity.) In the modern period, where science and reason begin to edge out the occult, the terms “fraud” and “charlatan” are bandied about as terms to describe those who work as palm readers, phrenologists, and telepaths. But that didn’t make them disappear or make people any less interested in their abilities, including some with top flight educations.

Khokhmes hayad is an 1882 reprint of a 1799 reprint of a Hebrew palm reading manual that dates to the 16th century. This is just one of many examples of such Jewish occult manuals. The frequent reprinting of such manuals over many centuries is but one indication of their popularity.

Indeed, Jews have worked in the occult for as long as they have been Jews. Instances of necromancy and other occult activities are peppered throughout the Bible and the Talmud, as well as later rabbinical texts. Indeed, prophesying is hardwired in the tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 monograph, “Jewish Magic and Superstition,” for example, regales the reader with an excellent exposition of the history of Jewish occult activity.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and political and social emancipation it brought in its wake, Jews were expected to have abrogated this silliness. But shtetl superstitions simply migrated in variant form to cities, where—in an attempt to slap a veneer of sophistication on their ancient crafts—occultists often presented themselves as “scientists” or “professors.” They could be found in Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw, Krakow, and New York City plying their trades.

One such specimen, a man named Abraham Hochman, came to prominence in mid-1890s New York, following the 1895 publication of Fortune Teller, a popular booklet reprinted several times—as were his subsequent Yiddish publications on astrology and fortune telling. Operating out of a building he owned at 169 Rivington Street, Hochman was a Lower East Side fixture who told fortunes, read palms and foreheads, and found lost spouses and kin for people in the neighborhood. He kept innocent men out of prison, found lost property and, occasionally, knew which horse would come in at the track. When business flagged, he contacted journalist friends and pulled stunts, most of which were reported upon assiduously in the Yiddish press, to attract customers.

Occasionally, when Hochman did something really dramatic, news of his exploits would appear in the general press. The New York Sun, among other outlets, reported on an episode in May 1904, when a bushy-haired Hochman waltzed into the Essex Market Police Court and inexplicably paid the bail for Abie Langener, who’d been arrested with seven other youths on a burglary charge. The magistrate asked why Hochman was paying bail for someone he didn’t know.

“I can read the future,” he replied. “I have read this man’s mind and know he is innocent. I can also read your mind. You will discharge him when the case comes up before you tomorrow. If he were guilty, I would know it and I would not bail him out. I will be here tomorrow to show you that my predictions come true.”

Hochman did, in fact, show up the following day. And, sure enough, when Langener and another suspect were brought before the court, the magistrate released them due to lack of evidence.

“What did I tell you?” said Hochman.

The psychic was mobbed outside the courthouse by hundreds of friends of the accused who, according to press reports, practically tore off his clothes. It’s not clear why this would be necessary and, in any case, the courthouse bailiffs came outside to rescue him from his demonstrative well-wishers.

But Hochman was usually surrounded by a mob, though typically of what they called “wildly gesticulating women.” The stoop of his Rivington Street studio was frequently crammed with flailing ladies, often accompanied by children all desperately trying to find missing husbands and fathers. These men ranged from immigrants who had conveniently “forgotten” about their families in the Old Country, to guys who couldn’t tolerate the cramped quarters of their 300-square-foot tenements and their half dozen screaming kids, to jerks who ran out of money and disappeared. The situation was so bad, the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest-circulation Yiddish daily in the world, began running the “Gallery of Missing Men,” a page full of mug shots and descriptions of these nefarious characters to help locate them and bring them to justice. (The National Desertion Bureau was also founded to help women and children whose husbands and fathers were on the lam.)

Forverts’ Gallery of Missing Men, 1909

Locating missing husbands was a Hochman specialty. He gained quite a bit of fame for this ability when, in 1903, the press reported on the predicament of Minnie Cohen, whose her husband went missing for a month. Minnie decided to avail herself of Hochman’s services. With a dollar in hand, she made her way through the labyrinthine snarl of panhandlers and pushcarts to Hochman’s office. He informed Minnie that her husband would be up to no good at the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at exactly 10 o’clock that night. So sure was he of his prophecy that he promised to give her 50 dollars if he turned out to mistaken. With unshakable faith in the Hebrew Seer of Rivington Street, and hope in the possibility of getting a wad of cash if her runaway husband didn’t show, Cohen pulled a cop out of the Essex Street Station and told him what Hochman had said. When they got to the corner of Pitt and Grand, Minnie’s truant husband was there, scratching his back on a lamppost. Officer O’Grady arrested Cohen’s husband and brought him into the station, where he was held on a $100 bond and instructed to begin paying his wife Minnie two dollars a week alimony. “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!” Hochman asserted to the women gathered on his stoop.

News of his exploits made Hochman realize that he could expand his psychic constituency further than the local Hebrews. He went straight for the top: one day in the spring of 1905, Hochman went chugging into the Grand Street clubhouse of Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan, grabbed the local strongman’s hand, and told him that he dreamed that the horse King Pepper was going to come in first, paying eight to one. Sullivan, who forswore belief in the occult, nevertheless took a bet on Hochman’s advice. King Pepper won, making Sullivan a small fortune. Hochman’s gambit worked; he became the Sullivan gang’s official mind-reader and phrenologist. Hochman was so successful that his son Frank’s 1906 bris, which brought out a full police battalion and included performances by Yiddish theater actors, was besieged by thousands of well wishers, who devoured 320 pounds of chicken and six crates of fruit. On account of this sumptuous affair, an entire block of Rivington Street was closed down for two days.

Even The New York Times was not immune to the lures of Abraham Hochman. Tongue in cheek as it may have been, the Times still reported on the 1904 story of how Hochman’s psychic abilities helped to locate Jacob Greenberg’s (of the Essex Street Greenbergs) missing horse, cart, and load of grapes.
Unlike most clairvoyants, Hochman was happy to share his secrets, publishing his prophetic techniques in books and articles. He based his method on what he called his “Astro-biblical chart,” which anyone could use to answer questions like “will I fall in love?”; “should I take dance lessons?”; “does my husband know I’ve been bad?”; “should I get a job as a tailor?”; “is my landlord in love with me?” Determining the answer required readers to hold some herbs or nuts in the right hand, count backwards by sevens with the left hand, add whatever remained to the number of the question, and find the corresponding number on the astro-biblical chart, which provided the name of a Hebrew symbol and a natural element. Then, inquirers were to take the Hebrew symbol and the element and consult Hochman’s system of charts for another number which led to the answer chart, whereupon a person would punch in the original number subtracted after the initial step of nut-holding and backward counting. That is your answer. How could it miss?

Hochman disappears from the papers around 1910. Nobody seems to know what became of him, though Yiddish-speaking clairvoyants, palm readers, and psychics continued to hold Jews in their thrall. In 1933, for example, a dybbuk was exorcised in a Harlem tenement. But that’s a story for another time.

Eddy Portnoy, a Tablet contributing editor, teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University.