The place of psychoanalysis in the history of the Jews.

Situating psychoanalysis in the context of Jewish history, this paper takes up Freud's famous 1930 question: what is left in Judaism after one has abandoned faith in God, the Hebrew language and nationalism, and his answer: a great deal, perhaps the very essence, but an essence that we do not know. On the one hand, it argues that "not knowing" connects psychoanalysis to Judaism's ancestral preoccupation with God, a preoccupation different from that of the more philosophical Greek, Latin and Christian traditions of theology. On the other hand, "not knowing" connects psychoanalysis to a post-Enlightenment conception of the person (i.e. of personal life), as opposed to the more abstract notion of the subject associated with Kant.

Exe(o)rcising power: women as sorceresses, exorcists, and demonesses in Babylonian Jewish society of late antiquity .

This article examines talmudic discussions and archaeological finds from Sassanian Babylonia to explore two distinct but related topics: how some actual women employed ritual practices to gain power (such as the recitation of incantations and the use of bowls with incantations written on them) and how some rabbis thought about women's relationship to ritual power. First exploring rabbinic statements and narratives about women as sorceresses, the article then turns to the incantation bowls, ordinary earthenware bowls inscribed with Aramaic incantations, which were buried on the thresholds or in the courtyards of dwellings. A comparative look at these two types of sources reveals that rabbinic accounts of witches are actually more nuanced than the bald talmudic statement (b. Sanh. 67a) that "most women are sorceresses" and reveals that both the incantation bowls and the talmudic sources give information about women who used incantations and amulets to protect themselves and their families from demons and illness.