How Did Vampires Get into Medieval Jewish Texts?

Feb. 16 2016

While the array of demons mentioned in talmudic literature does not include vampires, occasional reference to such creatures does appear in medieval rabbinic texts. Elon Gilad notes some examples, most prominently a passage from the 13th-century ethical-pietistic work Sefer Ḥasidim which describes a flying, blood-sucking, female human-like creature called a striya. (Free registration required):

Belief in striyas was probably borrowed from [Jews’] Gentile neighbors, who believed in living-dead beings called strigoi in Romanian, shtriga in Albanian, and strzygi in Polish. So it seems some Jews believed in vampires after all, but this belief never caught on and became widespread.

Today nobody believes in vampires anymore. But when the vampire fiction making the rounds in the West began to be translated into Hebrew, revivalists needed to find a word for the imaginary being of the night. They did: the modern Hebrew word for “vampire” is arpad—taken from an obscure Aramaic word in the Talmud for “bat” (Bava Kama 16a).

Read more at Haaretz

More about: Ḥasidei Ashkenaz, History & Ideas, Middle Ages, Midrash, Superstition

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict