Medieval Jewish Exorcism in Byzantine context: Emperor Basil I confronts Rabi Shepatiah in Megilaat Ahima’az

The episode of the exorcism of Basil’s daughter appears in a book that, at first sight, we can consider just as a familiar chronicle written in Hebrew by a Jew living in the south of Italy in the XI century. Nevertheless, it comes out that, while going through its pages, we see that the prevalence of fabulous tales and strange phenomena is so manifest that the chronicle turns into something more than a plain family story. The author pretends mainly to glorify his ancestors for the next generations to be aware of it. However, in doing so, he describes them able to do prodigies of any kind. The consequence of it is that the wonderful and fantastic accounts traverse the book from beginning to end, and place it as a prototypical paradoxographic work.

One of the most extraordinary events included in the book is that of the exorcism we indicate in the title. On the one hand, because it gives us news of Basil we cannot find in Byzantine sources. On the other hand, it informs us about how, at the time, the exorcism works as a broad common denominator in the field of magic and/or religious beliefs, around which members of different communities could be united, to turn for help from one another.

Demons, possession and magic are woven throughout Jewish tradition same as through Christendom from Ancient times till Middle Ages, as literary sources witnessed recurrently. Already Josephus recounted incidents of possession and exorcism in his Antiquities of the Jews. And, in rabbinic times we come across the, somehow, direct antecessor of the exorcism we want to deal with here, performed by a Jew who drove out the demon from the daughter of a Roman emperor in order to help his community. Correspondingly, the exorcism of Basil’s daughter serves for the abrogation of a decree set against the Jews of Oria.

Keywords: Medieval Historiography; Medieval Hebrew sources; Medieval Jewry; Hebrew Language; Exorcism.