esoteriqueer:

pipistrellus:

the thing that i think trachtenberg highlights REALLY WELL in jewish magic & superstition is how like… the extent to which european antisemitism is inextricable from the view of ~the jew as a dangerous sorcerer~ renders all the fake “”jewish magic”” which is made up wholesale by gentiles based on their IDEA of what jews do and have access to… it renders all of that basically libel? like

this is not just a case of cultural appropriation. there is a LOT that’s not based in the reality of jewish beliefs & practices AT ALL! so you could be like, well, THAT stuff isn’t appropriated bc it wasn’t jewish to begin with!

and that’s true, it WASN’T ever jewish

it functioned as antisemitic propaganda! like! even if that function was unintentional (which is not always the case!!!!!!!!!!) every single (medieval especially) european document fabricating “”jewish”” magical practices served as evidence for those communities of the foreignness, dangerousness, magicalness, etc, of the jews around them. served as evidence that jews had some kind of special evil powers. served as evidence that jews had some kind of secret relationship with the devil. 

those attitudes directly led to violence against jews. 

it’s not benign.

YES and this is where the modern-day ceremonial magicians crying “it’s syncretic!” can kiss my ass

culturally-Christian European magicians didn’t just write their spells and sigils in (often fake) Hebrew because they thought it was so cool and they had so much respect for the Jewish tradition they were supposedly “descended from” (…as converts to Christianity, which had already violently removed itself from Judaism centuries before and pretty much immediately set about destroying its “religious ancestor”) 

they did it because a) they fetishized Jewish mysticism as exotic otherness and b) Jews were very conveniently located to take the murderous blame from Church officials

oh, you were caught summoning demons? well who put you up to it? the Jews? shocking. let’s kill them. 

so no, 95% of Western Esotericism didn’t come from “centuries of blending Christian and Jewish mysticism” it came from Christians LARPing Great Jewish Sorcerers while real Jews died en masse