I went to the Alhambra to look for a book about a chancellor and came home with a question about a horn.
It was a summer’s day, and I climbed on foot the Sabika, the hill on which the Alhambra Bookshop stands, with a precise aim: Ibn al-Jatib y su tiempo (Ibn al-Khatib and His Time), by Celia del Moral Molina, published by the Editorial de la Universidad de Granada. To refresh the memory of the uninitiated reader: Ibn al-Khatib was born in Loja but was educated in Granada, where he scaled the highest peaks of power and glory. He was a towering figure in Granadan letters and sciences, and chancellor and chief minister to two Nasrid sultans, Yusuf I and his son Muhammad V. He is probably the most important Granadan personality, not only of the Islamic period but of all time. This is attested by a vast body of work, of more than sixty titles on a multitude of subjects, which claims more attention with every passing day, and by his political prominence in the golden age of Nasrid Granada, the fourteenth century, until his death in exile in Fez, capital of the Marinid kingdom, in the year 776 of the Hijra (1374). Keep that year in mind. In a few minutes it will matter.
I was standing before the shelves when I noticed that a couple were looking at me. They were tourists from Chimeneas (Granada), and that look, the look of someone who has been debating for a while whether to ask, I know well. My tzitzit (צִיצִית, ritual fringes) were in view, and beneath my New York Yankees cap the navy-blue velvet of my kippah peeked out. He made up his mind: ‘Excuse me, my dear fellow, don’t be cross with me, but are you Jewish?’ I nodded.
Then they told me that they had just finished reading La Alhambra de Salomón, the novel by José Luis Serrano Moreno (Roca Editorial, 2013), and that on page 94 Jews appeared with horns, associated with the devil, together with the idea that they ate gold by day and excreted it by night. They asked me, in all good faith, whether it was true. I confess that the question struck me as more revealing than the book.
I began with what the page says, which is not exactly what they remembered. There are no horns in that passage, and nobody eats gold by day. The scene is nocturnal: father and son are already asleep and Vermudo, in a gesture of candour towards Samuel, tells him what his uncle says. According to the uncle, Samuel is one of those Jews who carry gold in their belly, who ‘shit it out every night and eat it again’ (Serrano Moreno 2013, 94). The uncle, he adds, intends to cut him open one night so that they may grow rich, and Vermudo, in his place, would leave. I told them what I maintain now: this is, above all, a Christian anti-Jewish tradition, medieval and late medieval, with a well-documented presence in Castile during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The novel may be recovering or adapting it, but it should not be taken as testimony to everyday life in al-Andalus in the eleventh century.
Images have owners, and this one was not an Andalusi peasant. The horns are older than al-Andalus. Teplitsky (2024) recalls that in Christian Europe the demonic Other was the archetype of maleficent otherness and that Jews were even believed to have diabolical horns. Trachtenberg (1943) had already studied the medieval conception of the Jew as ally of the devil. There is, moreover, a philological clue that is my own observation, not those authors’. In Exodus 34:29 the face of Moses קָרַן (qaran, ‘shone’), a verb related to קֶרֶן (qeren, ‘horn’ and also ‘ray’), and the Vulgate rendered it cornuta, ‘horned’. One Hebrew word, one Latin translation, and centuries of imagery. As for the gold, by contrast, the trail is Castilian, and the most uncomfortable thing is where it is written. Echevarría Arsuaga (Ana Echevarría Arsuaga, ‘Staging Martyrdom in the Trial of El Niño de La Guardia’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 19, no. 1: 91–108, note 48) describes, carved on the Puerta de la Coronería of Burgos Cathedral, a Jew defecating gold coins and another licking the backside of a devil in the form of a pig.
That is to say, the witness is a cathedral portal, the Church itself telling what it wanted believed. To that image is added the Historia del noble Vespasiano, an anonymous Castilian romance of the late fifteenth century studied by Fuchs, in which the Jews are forced to eat gold dust as a punishment for the destruction of Jerusalem. The novel’s formula, eating by day and defecating by night, seems a popularised version of those two traditions: the Jew bound to gold and usury, and the Jew as an impure being. As far as the evidence at my disposal extends, no medieval Andalusi, Arabic, Hebrew or Romance source formulates it in this way. Nor would it be fitting to idealise the neighbours. The Partidas of Alfonso X record the rumour that certain Jews crucified children on Good Friday and provide for punishment should it be proven (VII, 24, 2). In early twelfth-century Seville, the hisba treatise of Ibn Abdun orders that Jews and Christians wear a distinctive sign and that they not be greeted with ‘peace’, because the devil would have gained dominion over them. There was, then, legal and religious anti-Judaism in al-Andalus.
While I was speaking, something in the sequence sounded familiar: a Christian puts horns on a Jew and places him beside the devil. I did not know from where until I reached home and remembered a book. It is the אֶבֶן בֹּחַן (Eben Bohan, ‘the touchstone’). The title comes from Isaiah 28:16 (אֶבֶן בֹּחַן, ‘a stone of testing’), from the root בחן (b-ch-n, ‘to examine, to put to the test’), the same that appears in Job 23:10 with gold as the image: בְּחָנַנִי כַּזָּהָב אֵצֵא (‘he has tested me; like gold shall I come forth’). A touchstone is, moreover, what is used to assay the fineness of gold, and after the afternoon I had had, the coincidence seemed to me suspiciously timely. It was written by Shem Tob ibn Shaprut, born in Tudela around 1340 according to Niclós, who deduces it from the colophons of 1386 and 1405 (Niclós 1997, 17). It is a work of Jewish–Christian controversy, whose Castilian edition, by Niclós, was published by the CSIC in 1997. Book I is philosophical speculation; the polemical core (books II–X) rests on the Milchamot HaShem of Ya’akov ben Reuven; books XI and XII contain a commentary on the aggadah and the Hebrew translation of the Gospel of Matthew; and books XIII–XV refute the Christian creed (Niclós 1997, 24). Its origin, according to Niclós, was the public debate to which Cardinal Pedro de Luna, the future Benedict XIII, compelled him in 1379 (Niclós 1997, 15; 18–19). Let us do the sum: Ibn al-Khatib died five years before that debate, and the chancellor of Granada and the physician and polemicist of Tudela lived in the same century and in neighbouring kingdoms. Shem Tob says in the preface that he wants his book to serve for answering the Christians (Niclós 1997, 22), and Niclós notes that chapter 13 of book I is devoted to the existence and manifestations of demons (Niclós 1997, 24–25). In that chapter, a Jew of Tudela writes, in a book intended to answer the Christians, the name of an angel and says what they call him. It was then that I asked myself the question I could no longer let go: if the horns were the devil’s, whose devil was he?
The sentence is in the Eben Bohan, book I, chapter 13, and from it everything that follows begins. I present it with the Hebrew first and the English afterwards, without reordering anything, and only then my comments. My reading instruction is simple: read the sentence attending to who speaks and to whom he is speaking, and do not go on until you have an answer of your own:
וכתוב בפרקי רבי אליעזר, פרק י"ג י"ג וט"ו, שסמאל נקרא לכם לוציפאר' היה המלך הגדול של מעלה.
‘And it is written in Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 13, 13 [sic] and 15, that Samael, called by you Lutzifer, was the great king of on high.’
I left the sentence in suspense and now I resume it, because Shem Tob does not stop there. The complete passage, which opens with that same sentence, answers the instruction without need of help: a Jew of Tudela speaks and a Christian listens, and the ‘you’ of the first line is the frame of the whole page. Note the sequence. The midrash cited, Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, speaks of Samael; the name Lutzifer is put there by Shem Tob, for his reader, as one who translates a label. The figure is an angel of twelve wings who envies Adam, instructs the serpent and falls with his company when God curses. Immediately afterwards, Shem Tob fixes a genealogy: the ‘men of our covenant who went out from our community’ built their faith upon sayings of the Sages that they took, or wished to take, literally. He does not censure it, for he himself declares that, although he could interpret them otherwise, he takes them literally with regard to the existence of demons. But he does affirm a provenance: the material is ours, and Christian doctrine on the fallen angel was built from it. It is, in a single paragraph, the same movement we have already seen with qaran and cornuta: a Hebrew text that crosses into another language and returns transformed into imagery. What this passage does not yet say is whose patron Samael is. That is said by Shem Tob:
וכתוב בפרקי רבי אליעזר, פרקי י"ג וי"ד וט"ו, שסמאל נקרא לכם לוציפאר' היה המלאך הגדול של מעלה, שכלם היו בעלי שש כנפים והוא היה בעל שנים עשר, ונתקנא באדם הראשון כאשר היה בגן עדן במעלתו העליונה, וירד הוא וכת שלו מהשמים, וראה שהנחש היה ערום מכל שאר הבעלי חיים והסיתו שילך לפתות את חוה ובאמצעותה לאדם. והוא סייעו ולמדו כל מה שיאמר ויעשה ובעת קללת האל לאדם ולנחש ולחוה על החטא, גירש גם כן לסמאל וכת שלו מהשמים.
עוד שם, פרק כ"[ב], רבי אומר, המלאכים אשר נפלו מקדושתם ראו את בנות קין וכו'. וטעו אחריהן ולקחו להם לנשים דכתיב, ויראו בני האלהים את בנות האדם כו', ויקחו להם נשים. אמר רבי יהושע, המלאכים אש לוהט והאש בא על האשה ואינה נשרפת, אלא יש לנו לומר שאחר שנפלו מקדושתם לבשו גוש ועפר. וזה דעת נמשך לחזייל בהרבה מקומות אמרו, בשלשה דברים דומים למלאכי השרת ובשלשה דומים לאדם אוכלים ושותים ופרים ורבים ומתים כאדם יש להם כנפים ושטים ויודעים מה, שעתיד להיות כמלאכים.
ולפי דעתי שעל המאמרים האלה בנו, אנשי בריתנו אשר יצאו מכללנו, אמונתכם, באשר לקחום או רצו לקחתם בפשוטם כאשר הם, למען עשות כיום הזה. ועם היות נוכל לעשות לכתובים ולמאמרים ההם פירושים אמתיים וצורות קרובות לשכל מאד, נקחם כפשוטם אחר שהעידו על מציאות השדים יוסף שידא ובן תמליון שהיו בני שדים מנשים כמו שהעידו חז"ל. הנה קייום בזה שלדעת רבי השדים הם מלאכים רעים בלתי מתגשמים פועלים רע בבחירתם. ולדעת רבי יהושע הם מתגשמים.
‘And it is written in Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, chapters 13, 14 and 15, that Samael, called by you Lutzifer, was the great angel of on high; all of them had six wings, and he had twelve. And he envied Adam, the first man, when he was in the Garden of Eden in his supreme station, and he and his company descended from the heavens; and he saw that the serpent was more cunning (ʿarum) than all the other living creatures, and he incited it to go and entice Eve, and through her Adam. And he aided it and taught it all that it should say and do; and at the time of God’s curse upon Adam, and upon the serpent and Eve, for the sin, he also banished Samael and his company from the heavens.
‘Also there, chapter 22, Rabbi says: the angels who fell from their holiness saw the daughters of Cain, etc., and went astray after them and took them as wives, as it is written, “And the sons of God saw the daughters of men,” etc., “and they took wives for themselves.” Rabbi Yehoshua said: the angels are blazing fire, and does fire come upon a woman without her being burned? Rather, we must say that after they fell from their holiness they clothed themselves in clod and dust. And this opinion is drawn from [the sayings of] the Sages in many places. They said: they resemble the ministering angels in three things and resemble man in three: they eat and drink, are fruitful and multiply, and die as man; they have wings, and roam, and know what is to be, like the angels.
‘And in my opinion, it was upon these sayings that the men of our covenant who went out from our community built your faith, inasmuch as they took, or wished to take, them in their plain sense as they are, so as to do as on this day. And although we could make for those verses and sayings true interpretations, and forms very close to reason, we take them in their plain sense, since Yosef Shida and Ben Temalion testified to the existence of demons, in that they were sons of demons by women, as the Sages testified. Behold, there is confirmation in this that, in the opinion of Rabbi, the demons are evil angels, incorporeal, who work evil by their own choice; and in the opinion of Rabbi Yehoshua they are corporeal.’
— Niclós, José-Vicente. 1997. Šem Tob ibn Šaprut, «La piedra de toque» (Eben Bohan). Madrid: CSIC, book I (Sha’ar Alef), ch. 13, pp. 411–413.
Nahmanides (the RaMBa"N) explains in his commentary on Leviticus 16:8 (cf. 17:7) that the sar (‘prince’) to whom the goat of Yom Kippur is sent, whose name, Samael, is given by the midrash of Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer 46 which he himself cites, is ‘the soul of the sphere of Mars’, that his portion among the nations is Esau, and that the shedim (demons) form part of his patrimony. Samael is, therefore, the angel of Edom and, for the later rabbinic tradition, of Christendom. The passage reads thus (extracts):
[…] אָמְרוּ בִּבְרֵאשִׁית רַבָּה (בראשית רבה ס"ה:י'), "וְנָשָׂא הַשָּׂעִיר עָלָיו" (ויקרא ט"ז:כ"ב) זֶה עֵשָׂו, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (בראשית כז יא) "הֵן עֵשָׂו אָחִי אִישׁ שָׂעִר". […]
וּמְפֹרָשׁ מִזֶּה בְּפִרְקֵי רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר הַגָּדוֹל (פרק מו), לְפִיכָךְ הָיוּ נוֹתְנִין לוֹ לְסַמָּאֵל שֹׁחַד בְּיוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים שֶׁלֹּא לְבַטֵּל אֶת קָרְבָּנָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר "גּוֹרָל אֶחָד לַה' וְגוֹרָל אֶחָד לַעֲזָאזֵל", גּוֹרָלוֹ שֶׁל הקב"ה לְקָרְבַּן עוֹלֶה, וְגוֹרָלוֹ שֶׁל עֲזָאזֵל שְׂעִיר הַחַטָּאת, וְכָל עֲוֹנוֹתֵיהֶם שֶׁל יִשְׂרָאֵל עָלָיו, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר "וְנָשָׂא הַשָּׂעִיר עָלָיו". […] וְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא שׁוֹמֵעַ עֵדוּתָן שֶׁל יִשְׂרָאֵל מִן הַקָּטֵגוֹר שֶׁלָּהֶם וּמְכַפֵּר עַל הַמִּזְבֵּחַ וְעַל הַמִּקְדָּשׁ וְעַל הַכֹּהֲנִים וְעַל כָּל עַם הַקָּהָל, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (ויקרא ט"ז:ל"ג) "וְכִפ�ֶּר אֶת מִקְדַּשׁ הַקֹּדֶשׁ" וְגוֹ', ע"כ אַגָּדָה זוֹ. וְהִנֵּה הוֹדִיעָנוּ שְׁמוֹ וּמַעֲשֵׂהוּ, וְזֶה סוֹד הָעִנְיָן […]
וְהִנֵּה הַתּוֹרָה אָסְרָה לְגַמְרֵי קַבָּלַת אֱלֹהוּתָם וְכָל עֲבוֹדָה לָהֶם, אֲבָל צִוָּה הקב"ה בְּיוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים שֶׁנִּשְׁלַח שָׂעִיר בַּמִּדְבָּר לַשַּׂר הַמּוֹשֵׁל בִּמְקוֹמוֹת הַחֻרְבָּן, וְהוּא הָרָאוּי לוֹ מִפְּנֵי שֶׁהוּא בְּעָלָיו, וּמֵאֲצִילוּת כֹּחוֹ יָבֹא חֹרֶב וְשִׁמָּמוֹן, כִּי הוּא הָעִלָּה לְכוֹכְבֵי הַחֶרֶב וְהַדָּמִים וְהַמִּלְחָמוֹת וְהַמְּרִיבוֹת וְהַפְּצָעִים וְהַמַּכּוֹת וְהַפֵּרוּד וְהַחֻרְבָּן, וְהַכְּלָל נֶפֶשׁ לְגַלְגַּל מַאְדִּים, וְחֶלְקוֹ מִן הָאֻמּוֹת הוּא עֵשָׂו, שֶׁהוּא עַם הַיּוֹרֵשׁ הַחֶרֶב וְהַמִּלְחָמוֹת, וּמִן הַבְּהֵמוֹת הַשְּׂעִירִים וְהָעִזִּים, וּבְחֶלְקוֹ עוֹד הַשֵּׁדִים הַנִּקְרָאִים מַזִּיקִין בִּלְשׁוֹן רַבּוֹתֵינוּ, וּבִלְשׁוֹן הַכָּתוּב (ויקרא י"ז:ז') "שְׂעִירִים", כִּי כֵן יִקָּרֵא הוּא וְאֻמָּתוֹ "שֵׂעִיר". וְאֵין הַכַּוָּנָה בַּשָּׂעִיר הַמִּשְׁתַּלֵּחַ שֶׁיִּהְיֶה קָרְבָּן מֵאִתָּנוּ אֵלָיו חָלִילָה, אֲבָל שֶׁתִּהְיֶה כַּוָּנָתֵנוּ לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן בּוֹרְאֵנוּ שֶׁצִּוָּנוּ כָּךְ. […]
וּמִפְּנֵי זֶה אָמְרוּ רַבּוֹתֵינוּ (ת"כ פרק יג ט) "וְאֶת חֻקֹּתַי" (ויקרא י"ח:ד') - דְּבָרִים שֶׁיֵּצֶר הָרַע מְקַטְרֵג בָּהֶם וְאֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם מְשִׁיבִין עֲלֵיהֶם, לְבִישַׁת שַׁעַטְנֵז וּפָרָה אֲדֻמָּה וְשָׂעִיר הַמִּשְׁתַּלֵּחַ; וְלֹא מָצְאוּ בַּקָּרְבָּנוֹת תְּשׁוּבָה לְאוּמוֹת הָעוֹלָם עָלֵינוּ, כִּי הֵם עַל אִשֵּׁי ה', אֲבָל בְּשָׂעִיר הַמִּשְׁתַּלֵּחַ יָשִׁיבוּ עָלֵינוּ, כִּי יַחְשְׁבוּ שֶׁאָנוּ עוֹשִׂים כְּמַעֲשֵׂיהֶם […]
[…] They said in Bereshit Rabbah (65:10): ‘“And the he-goat shall bear upon him” (Lev 16:22): this is Esau, as it is said (Gen 27:11): “Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man.”’ […]
And it is explained from this in Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer the Great (chapter 46): therefore they used to give Samael a bribe on the Day of Atonement, so that he would not nullify their sacrifice, as it is said, ‘one lot for the Eternal and one lot for Azazel’: the lot of the Holy One, blessed be He, for the burnt-offering, and the lot of Azazel the he-goat of the sin-offering, and all the iniquities of Israel upon it, as it is said, ‘and the he-goat shall bear upon him’. […] And the Holy One, blessed be He, hears the testimony of Israel from their accuser (qategor) and makes atonement for the altar, for the Sanctuary, for the priests and for all the people of the assembly, as it is said (Lev 16:33), ‘and he shall make atonement for the Holy Sanctuary’, etc. Thus far this aggadah. And behold, it has made known to us his name and his deed, and this is the secret of the matter […]
And behold, the Torah utterly forbade the acceptance of their divinity and any service to them; but the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded that on the Day of Atonement a he-goat be sent into the wilderness to the prince (sar) who rules over the places of desolation, and this is fitting for him because he is its lord. And from the emanation of his power come the sword and devastation, for he is the cause of the stars of the sword, of blood, wars, strife, wounds, blows, separation and ruin; and, in sum, [he is] the soul of the sphere of Mars. His portion among the nations is Esau, which is the people that inherits the sword and wars; among the beasts, the he-goats (se’irim) and the goats; and in his portion are also the demons, called mazzikin in the language of our Rabbis and ‘se’irim’ in the language of Scripture (Lev 17:7), for so he and his nation are called: ‘Se’ir’. And the intention in the sent he-goat is not that it be a sacrifice from us to him, God forbid, but that our intention be to do the will of our Creator, who thus commanded us. […]
And on this account our Rabbis said (Torat Kohanim, chapter 13, 9) on ‘and My statutes’ (Lev 18:4): matters in which the evil inclination accuses (mekatreg) and to which the nations of the world reply: the wearing of sha’atnez, the red heifer and the sent he-goat. And they found in the sacrifices no ground of reply for the nations of the world against us, for these are [offered] upon the fire-offerings of the Eternal; but concerning the sent he-goat they would reply against us, for they would think that we do as their deeds […]
— Ramban (Nahmanides), Commentary on the Torah, on Lev 16:8. Hebrew text according to Daat (link above); my own translation.
Therefore Samael, as the incarnation of evil, is regarded as the heavenly patron of Rome, and his rival is the archangel Michael. Samael, ‘poison of G-d — סמאל’ (sam, poison, סמ), has twelve wings, and at his orders there is an army of demons, because he does not possess the gift of ubiquity; when the Shabbat is about to end, he gathers them and exhorts them to continue their work after the truce. Then he goes about poisoning wells and causing harm; his actions always tend towards the destruction of man: it was he who descended from heaven to seduce Adam HaRishon and Havah (Eve) (see Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 13) and, afterwards, when Yitzchak was weaned and Avraham gave a great banquet (Bereshit 21:8), Samael came to accuse him before G-d, saying: ‘amid so many rejoicings he does not remember to offer You a dove’; he is also the angel who tempted Avraham so that he would not sacrifice Yitzchak, and who seduced Yitzchak into not fulfilling his destiny on Har HaMoriah (Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 56:4). Furthermore, the Zohar in Ra’ya Meheimna III, 277b says that when the Babylonian stock of the building of the Tower of Babel, Samael and Lilith descended to their idols, to which the Babylonians paid worship, and placed in the idols’ snouts the Shem HaMeforash (the Explicit Name of G-d), in consequence of which they began to speak (Tikkunei Zohar 99b). Samael is the angel of trials and of temptation, and it is to him, in my judgement, that Paul resorts when he delivers certain men ‘to Satan’ (1 Cor 5:5; 1 Tim 1:20): a practice that, seen in the light of the Torah, is nothing other than magic. And he will not go unscathed. One of his own, Alexander the coppersmith, will turn against him and, according to 2 Timothy, will cause him great harm when he appears for the last time before the tribunal, in Rome:
Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ χαλκεὺς πολλά μοι κακὰ ἐνεδείξατο· ἀποδῴη αὐτῷ ὁ κς κατὰ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ· ὃν καὶ σὺ φυλάσσου· λίαν γὰρ ἀνθέστηκε τοῖς ἡμετέροις λόγοις.
‘Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; may the lord repay him according to his works; of him be on your guard, you also, for he has vehemently opposed our words.’
2 Tim 4:14–16a, Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, AN IV 2, f. 140v
Moreover, the testimony of this Alexander, confirmed by the original (or a copy) of the ‘first letter to Timothy’, will imply for Paul, already accused of something more terrible, the further accusation of black magic. And this was already sanctioned in advance with the death penalty by the Torah for whoever practised sorcery, spells or incantatory words, or maleficia against persons, animals or crops, as is prohibited in the Torah, Parashat Shofetim, Sefer Devarim / Deuteronomy 18:10:
לֹֽא־יִמָּצֵ֣א בְךָ֔ מַעֲבִ֥יר בְּנֽוֹ־וּבִתּ֖וֹ בָּאֵ֑שׁ קֹסֵ֣ם קְסָמִ֔ים מְעוֹנֵ֥ן וּמְנַחֵ֖שׁ וּמְכַשֵּֽׁף׃
‘There shall not be found among you one who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, a diviner of divinations (qosem qesamim), a soothsayer (me’onen), an augur (menachesh), or a sorcerer (mekhashef).’
This prohibition had already been stated in Vayikra 19:31, whose sentence is the death penalty for practising it, as is said in the Torah, in Parashat Kedoshim, Sefer Vayikra / Leviticus 20:27:
א֛וֹב א֥וֹ יִדְּעֹנִ֖י מ֣וֹת יוּמָ֑תוּ בָּאֶ֛בֶן יִרְגְּמ֥וּ אֹתָ֖ם דְּמֵיהֶ֥ם בָּֽם
‘A medium (ov) or a diviner by familiar spirit (yidoni) shall surely be put to death; with stones they shall stone them; their blood is upon them.’
Moreover, the presence of magic in Paul’s life cannot be denied. We shall cite simply these two passages from his Epistles:
εγω μεν γαρ απων τω σωματι παρων δε τω πνι ηδη κεκρικα ως παρων τον ουτως του το κατεργασαμενον εν τω ονομα τι του κυ ημων ιηυ χρυ συναχθεν των υμων και του εμου πνς συν τη δυναμει του κυ ιηυ παραδου ναι τον τοιουτον τω σατανα (סטנא) εις ολεθρον της σαρκος ινα το πνα σωθη εν τη ημερα του κυ
‘For I, absent indeed in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as though present, the one who has thus done this thing: in the name of our lord Iesous Christos, you and my spirit being gathered together, with the power of our lord Iesous, to deliver such a one to Satan (סטנא) for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.’
1 Corinthians 5:3–5.
ων εστιν υμενεος και αλεξανδρος ους παρε δωκα τω σατανα ινα παιδευθωσι μη βλασφημειν
איך הומנאוס ואלכסנדרוס הלין דאשׁלמת לסטנא דנתרדון דלא נהוון מגדפין
‘Of whom are Hymenaios and Alexandros, whom I delivered to Satan that they may be taught not to blaspheme.’ Syriac: ‘Like Humenaos and Alexandros, those whom I delivered to Satan, that they may be chastened not to be blasphemers.’
1 Timothy 1:20, Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, AN IV 2, f. 134v
Hence the mekubal R. Ya’akov Hillel, shlit"a, in his work Tamim Tihyeh, says that the Tur (Yoreh De’ah 179), citing the Rema and R. Yeshayah, holds that dealing with demons is prohibited as sorcery. Moreover, R. Yosef Caro warns that dealing with demons is dangerous:
Most of those who deal with demons do not remain unharmed. If they wish to safeguard their lives, let them keep away!
Bet Yosef, Yoreh De’ah 179.
The Rebbe of Komarna explains that the person who uses demons suffers the same punishment reserved for sorcery and idolatry. Therefore, the Jews in Paul’s case applied what the Torah commands about how to treat idolaters and sorcerers:
זבח לאלהים יחרם בלתי לה' לבדו
‘One who sacrifices to the gods shall be utterly destroyed, save to the Eternal alone.’
Shemot, Parashat Mishpatim 22:19:
המסית זה הדיט המסית את ההדיוט
אמר לו יש יראה במקום פלוני
כך אוכלת כך סותה כך מטיבה כך מריעה
כל חיבי מיתות שבתורה
אין מכמינין עליהם והם עדין
מביאין אותו לבית דין וסוקין אותו
אמר לאחר
הוא אומריש לי חברים רוצים בכך
אם היה ארום ואינו יכול לדבר בפניהם
מכמינין לו עדים אחורי הגדר והוא אומר לו
אמר מה שאמרת לי ביחוד והלה אומר לו
והוא אומר לו
היאך נניח את אלהינו שבשמים
ונלך ונעבד עצים ואבנים
אם חוזר בו הרי זה מוטב
ואם אמר כך היא חובתנו וכך יפה לנו
העומדין מאחורי הגדר
מביאין אותו לבית דין וסוקלין אותו
האומר אעבר אלך ואעבר נלך ונעבד
אזבח אלך ואזבח נלך ונזבח
אקטיר אלך ואקטיר נלך ונקטיר
אנסך אלך ואנסק נלך וננסך
אשתחוה אלך ואשתחוה נלך ונשתחוה
המדיח זה האומר נלך ונעבד אבודה זרה
משנה מסכת סנהדרין ז:י
The mesit: this is a layman who entices another layman. He said to him: ‘There is an object of awe (yirah) in such-and-such a place; thus it eats, thus it drinks, thus it does good, thus it does harm.’ As to all those liable to death penalties in the Torah, witnesses are not hidden against them [save this one. If he said it to two,] and they are witnesses, they bring him to the court and stone him. If he said it to one, he [the hearer] says: ‘I have friends who would wish for this.’ If he was shrewd and could not speak in their presence, they hide witnesses for him behind the fence, and he says to him: ‘Say what you said to me in private’, and the other says it to him; and he says to him: ‘How shall we forsake our God who is in heaven and go and serve wood and stones?’ If he retracts, it is well; but if he says, ‘This is our duty and thus it is good for us’, those standing behind the fence bring him to the court and stone him. One who says: ‘I shall serve’, ‘I shall go and serve’, ‘Let us go and serve’; ‘I shall sacrifice’, ‘I shall go and sacrifice’, ‘Let us go and sacrifice’; ‘I shall offer incense’, ‘I shall go and offer incense’, ‘Let us go and offer incense’; ‘I shall pour a libation’, ‘I shall go and pour a libation’, ‘Let us go and pour a libation’; ‘I shall bow down’, ‘I shall go and bow down’, ‘Let us go and bow down’. The maddiach: this is one who says, ‘Let us go and serve idolatry.’
Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin 7:8
The proof of this, he says, is that he was stoned (lapidated) once by the Jews, as he tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:25, which his friend Luke ratifies in Acts 14:2 and especially in Acts 14:19, which says:
Ἐπῆλθον δὲ ἀπὸ Ἀντιοχείας καὶ Ἰκονίου Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ πείσαντες τοὺς ὄχλους καὶ λιθάσαντες τὸν Παῦλον ἔσυραν ἔξω τῆς πόλεως, νομίσαντες αὐτὸν τεθνάναι
(אתו דין לתמן יהודיא מן איקנון ומן אנטיכיא ושׁגשׁו עליהון לעמא ורגמוהי לפולוס וגרוהי לבר מן מדינתא מטל דסברין הוו דמית לה)
‘But Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and, having persuaded the crowds and stoned Paul, they dragged him outside the city, supposing him to be dead.’ Syriac: ‘But Jews came there from Iconium and from Antioch, and they stirred up the people against them, and stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, because they supposed that he was dead.’
We have seen that the dark methods implemented by the ‘New Testament’, which give the appearance of being permitted, in the light of the Torah only foster spiritual perdition; for this reason, more than 2,000 years ago, the Jews of Antioch and Iconium had seen the destructive and toxic power possessed by the mumar of the Apostle Paul of Tarsus. Do not allow the words of the apostate of Tarsus, any more than those of Yeshu HaMamzer, to contaminate your soul. Instead of resorting to the occult and impure powers of the ‘New Testament’, resort to the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Torah, studying His Torah and fulfilling His mitzvot.
I took away from that afternoon a thorn, and it was not the gold. It was a symmetry that I only saw when I stopped reading the sources separately: the horn that the people from Chimeneas believed they had read and the name that Shem Tob notes with a ‘by you’ come out of the same book, the Vulgate. In Exodus 34:29 the face of Moses קָרַן (qaran, ‘shone’) and Jerome writes cornuta. In Isaiah 14:12 the text says הֵילֵל בֶּן־שָׁחַר (helel ben shachar, ‘morning star, son of the dawn’) and Jerome writes Lucifer, where the Septuagint, more sober, had put ἑωσφόρος (heōsphóros, ‘bringer of dawn’). And that song, verse 4 announces, is a מָשָׁל (mashal, ‘satire’) עַל־מֶלֶךְ בָּבֶל (‘against the king of Babylon’): a satire against a king, turned into the biography of an angel.
But Jerome did not stop there. The verse that the Ramban points to as the key to the secret of Azazel, Leviticus 17:7, forbids sacrificing לַשְּׂעִירִם (la-se’irim, ‘to the hairy ones’, ‘to the he-goats’), and Jerome writes daemonibus. Isaiah 13:21, in the oracle against Babylon, a chapter before Helel, sets the se’irim dancing among the ruins: pilosi. And Isaiah 34, the oracle against Edom, brings together the inventory that the Ramban attributes to the sar of Azazel: the sword that ‘descends upon Edom’ (v. 5, עַל־אֱדוֹם תֵּרֵד), the slaughtered he-goats (v. 6, עַתּוּדִים) and, among the ruins, the שָׂעִיר who calls to his fellow and the לִילִית who finds rest there (v. 14), rendered as pilosus and lamia. Sword, he-goats, ruin and hairy ones: what the Ramban calls ‘the prince who rules over the places of desolation’ was already written in Edom. I do not claim that every carver in Burgos opened the Vulgate; I say that the horn, the morning star and the hairy one are Latin from one and the same book, and that this book drew them from pages directed against Babylon and against Edom.
What took away my sleep came afterwards. Shem Tob says what they call him; the Ramban says whose he is. His name, Samael, is given by the midrash that the Ramban cites (PRE 46). His office, that of sar of a nation, has a written basis: Daniel knows the שַׂר of Persia and that of Yavan, and Michael, ‘your prince’ (שַׂרְכֶם, Dan 10:13, 20–21). His portion has a name: just as ‘the portion of the Eternal is His people’ (חֵלֶק ה' עַמּוֹ, Dt 32:9), so the Ramban’s is chelqo min ha-umot hu Esav, ‘his portion among the nations is Esau’. And the Ramban puts into the mouth of the nations the foreseeable objection to the Yom Kippur goat: yachshevu she’anu osim ke-ma’aseihem, ‘they would think that we do as their deeds’. The accusation of communion with the demonic is not born in Burgos. The Ramban records it as Edom’s rejoinder to Israel, and he writes it a few years after the Barcelona disputation, just as Shem Tob writes after that of Tortosa, to which Pedro de Luna compelled him.
That angel is called, by his office, קטיגור (qatigor, ‘accuser’), a rabbinic word that is Greek in Hebrew letters (κατήγορος), and the Apocalypse returns it to Greece in a form that no Greek would write: in Revelation 12:10 Codex Alexandrinus reads κατήγωρ (katḗgōr), which Thayer’s lexicon describes as a literal transcription of the Hebrew. In that same passage, 12:9, the New Testament gives three Greek names to one single office: ὁ διάβολος, ὁ σατανᾶς, ὁ κατήγωρ. The office was already in Zechariah 3:1, וְהַשָּׂטָן עֹמֵד עַל־יְמִינוֹ לְשִׂטְנוֹ (‘and the Accuser was standing at his right hand to accuse him’), where שָׂטָן bears the article, because it is a function before it is a name, and where the Septuagint puts ὁ διάβολος.
Let us now see how that Accuser acts upon persons in our sources. Never through a handing-over. He acts where room is opened for him, and the sage closes it to him. Gittin 52a:
הָנְהוּ בֵּי תְרֵי דְּאִיגָּרִי בְּהוּ שָׂטָן, דְּכֹל בֵּי שִׁמְשֵׁי הֲווֹ קָא מִינְּצוּ בַּהֲדֵי הֲדָדֵי. אִיקְּלַע רַבִּי מֵאִיר לְהָתָם, עַכְּבִינְהוּ תְּלָתָא בֵּי שִׁמְשֵׁי, עַד דַּעֲבַד לְהוּ שְׁלָמָא. שַׁמְעֵיהּ דְּקָאָמַר: וַוי, דְּאַפְּקֵיהּ רַבִּי מֵאִיר לְהָהוּא גַּבְרָא מִבֵּיתֵיהּ.
‘There were these two men whom Satan had incited, for every Friday at dusk they would quarrel with one another. Rabbi Meir happened to come there. He detained them for three Fridays at dusk, until he had made peace between them. He heard [Satan] saying: “Woe, that Rabbi Meir has driven that man out of his house.”’
The discord is the crack, and peace is the verb that expels him (אפק, ‘to cast out’). Rashi reads ‘that man’ as Satan himself, who names himself thus. Berakhot 19a puts the crack in the mouth:
אמר ריש לקיש: לעולם אל יפתח אדם פיו לשטן. אמר רב יוסף: מאי קרא? כמעט כסדום היינו לעמורה דמינו. מה אמר להם הנביא? שמעו דבר ה' קציני סדום.
‘Resh Lakish said: A man should never open his mouth to Satan. Rav Yosef said: What is the verse? “We were almost like Sodom, we resembled Gomorrah” (Is 1:9). And what did the prophet say to them? “Hear the word of the Eternal, you rulers of Sodom” (Is 1:10).’
Kiddushin 81a puts it in pride, and not even a sage is safe:
רַבִּי מֵאִיר הֲוָה מִתְלוֹצֵץ בְּעוֹבְרֵי עֲבֵירָה. יוֹמָא חַד אִידְּמִי לֵיהּ שָׂטָן כְּאִיתְּתָא בְּהָךְ גִּיסָא דְנַהֲרָא, לָא הֲוָה מַבָּרָא – נְקַט מִצְרָא וְקָא עָבַר. כִּי מְטָא פַּלְגָא מִצְרָא שַׁבְקֵיהּ, אָמַר: אִי לָאו דְּקָא מַכְרְזִי בִּרְקִיעָא «הִזָּהֲרוּ בְּרַבִּי מֵאִיר וְתוֹרָתוֹ» שַׁוֵּיתֵיהּ לִדְמָךְ תַּרְתֵּי מָעֵי.
‘Rabbi Meir used to mock transgressors. One day Satan appeared to him in the likeness of a woman on the other bank of a river. There was no ferry; he took hold of a rope and began to cross. When he reached the middle of the rope, [Satan] let him go, saying: “Were it not that they proclaim in Heaven, ‘Take care with Rabbi Meir and his Torah’, I would reckon your blood at two ma’ah.”’
In all three tales Satan is a power that enters through an opening and that the rabbi, at most, limits. The Babylonian incantation bowls, which are magic and not halakhah, preserve the same gesture, but carried over into the legal formula of expulsion. Bowl M59, according to Levene:
לכל ל ליליתא בישתא דפורא רמינא ושקילנא ועבדי עבדנא במתיבי יהושע בר פרחיה כתבית גיטא דיכרי וניקבתא משמתא מלויתא דלויא ושריא ודירא בביתיה דארדוי בר כירכשידוך ואנה כתיבנא עליכון גיטא גיט פיטורין ושבוקין ותיזחון ותיפקון מן ביתיה ואיסקופתיה דארדוי בר כירכשידוך מיטול דפטרנא יתיכון מיניכון בסיפר תירוכין וגיטא גיט פיטורין ואיגרת שבוקין כדת משה וישראל
‘To all the evil Liliths: I have cast a lot and taken it, and I have wrought deeds in the academies of Yehoshua ben Perachiah. I have written a bill of divorce for males and females, for the banned ones, the attendant spirits who attend, dwell and abide in the house of Ardoi son of Kirkishiduch. And I write you a bill of divorce, a bill of divorce and dismissal and release; and be gone and depart from the house and the threshold of Ardoi son of Kirkishiduch, because I have dismissed you from myself by a book of expulsion, a bill of divorce, a bill of dismissal and a letter of release, according to the law of Moses and Israel.’
And another bowl, which presents itself as a get addressed to Lilith:
הדין גיטא דליליתא דלוטתא די כתבית לה לאימי בת קאקי וכל שום דאית לה תיתסי תינטרי תישתזבי מן חרשי מעבדי חרשי
‘This is the get of Lilith, the accursed, which I have written for Aimi daughter of Qaqi and for every name that she has: may you be healed, guarded and delivered from sorcerers, from the works of sorcerers.’
There is only one corpus in which the fact is inverted, and it is that of aggressive magic. In a recipe book from the Cairo Genizah (T-S AS 142.228 + T-S NS 322.53 + T-S AS 142.23, an eleventh-century hand, according to Bohak), the magician commands the demon:
ותזל על פ׳ ב׳ פ׳ ותנעיר יתיה / ]ה ותנבח יתיה ככלבה / ולא תימר ליה דאנא שדרתך / ולא תפוק מיניה עד דש[רי / ואמרנא פוק אמן אמן סלא
‘And you shall go against N. son of N., and make him bray […], and make him bark like a dog, and you shall not tell him that I sent you, and you shall not go out of him until [I release him] and I say: “Come out!” Amen, amen, selah.’
The lexicon is different: the rabbi casts out (אפק), the bowl dismisses and divorces (פטר, שבק, זחי), and only the sorcerer sends (שדר), and does so in secret, under a Torah that condemns him (Dt 18:10; Sanhedrin 7:10 and 7:8, already cited). In none of the sources I have gathered, neither in halakhah, nor in the bowls, nor in the Genizah, is there a formula that delivers a man to Satan. And the Peshitta renders Paul with that verb: דאשׁלמת לסטנא (d-ašlemt l-Saṭana), ‘whom I delivered to Satan’. Paul knows, moreover, the rabbinic idiom of the crack: ‘give no place to the devil’ (μηδὲ δίδοτε τόπον τῷ διαβόλῳ, Eph 4:27, with anger and the setting sun) and ‘lest Satan tempt you’ (1 Cor 7:5). What 1 Corinthians 5:5 does is change the subject of the grammar: where the Satan of Gittin waited for someone to give him room (didote), the apostle, with ‘my spirit’ gathered, is the one who delivers (para-dounai). The rabbi shuts the door, and the apostle, in his own name, opens it from within.
Now I add up what I have. If Samael is, as I cited with the Ramban, the sar (patron) of Esau and of Edom; if his title, by the midrash that Shem Tob copies, is that of Accuser, and that is also the name of Satan in Zechariah, in the Septuagint and in Revelation 12:10; and if whoever delivers a man to that Accuser confesses who presides over the tribunal, then the bookshop question is no longer where the horns came from, but what kind of tribunal needs to disguise the defendant with the insignia of his own prosecutor. What the Iberians of old saw carved in Burgos, the Ramban describes, centuries earlier, as Edom’s rejoinder: ‘they would think that we do as their deeds’. And Paul himself left us the key to the disguise, when he writes that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (αὐτὸς γὰρ ὁ σατανᾶς μετασχηματίζεται εἰς ἄγγελον φωτός, 2 Cor 11:14). The ‘light-bearer’ (φωσφόρος, lucifer) of the Vulgate already had, in his Epistle, the garb of his angel of light, of Christendom and protector of Paul of Tarsus.
