“They Have Countless Books of This Craft”: Folklore and Folkloristics of Yemeni Jewish Amulets

Authors

Tom Fogel, Hebrew University of JerusalemFollow

Abstract

The nineteenth-century voyager Yaakov Sapir published accounts of Yemeni Jewish amulets that provide significant historical and ethnographic sources for a study of Yemeni Jewish occult practices and the perception of them by non-Jews. The combination of blurred religious boundaries characterizing occult traditions, the prominent place of the Judeo Arabic language, and Arabic or pseudo-Arabic magical scripts constructed occult traditions as an essential social and cultural role for the Jewish minority, and simultaneously made these traditions the center of a polemical discourse.

Recommended Citation

Fogel, Tom (2022) "“They Have Countless Books of This Craft”: Folklore and Folkloristics of Yemeni Jewish Amulets," Jewish Folklore and Ethnology: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 3.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/jewishfolklore/vol1/iss1/3