Judaism is the religion and way of life of the Jewish people, with roots in the ancient Land of Israel and communities today in Israel and across the world. It rests on a body of texts that are read, argued over and retold: the Torah, the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash and the writings of the mystics. Alongside these texts sits a large body of folklore about angels, demons, wonder-working rabbis and monsters of the primeval world. Jewish communities in different places and movements within Judaism treat these materials differently. Some read the legends literally, some read them as allegory, and some enjoy them as stories and art. This page describes what the tradition says and notes where views differ.
The Torah and the Texts
The Torah is the foundation of Jewish religious life. In its narrow sense it is the scroll read in synagogue, made up of the five books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Together with the books of the Prophets and the Writings (Ketuvim), it forms the Hebrew Bible, known as the Tanakh, which has 24 books in the traditional count and is also called the Written Torah (Torah she-bikhtav). My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah
Jewish tradition also speaks of an Oral Torah (Torah she-be'al peh). This is the body of rabbinic teaching, above all the Mishnah and the Gemara, which together make up the Talmud, that explains and applies the written text. The traditional view is that both Torahs were revealed at Mount Sinai and that the oral one was handed down by memory until the destruction of the Second Temple, when it was first written down. The classic statement of this chain is the first mishnah of Pirkei Avot (Avot 1:1): Moses received the Torah at Sinai and passed it to Joshua, then to the elders, the prophets and the Men of the Great Assembly. The Oral Torah turns short biblical phrases into detailed practice. The ban on boiling a kid in its mother's milk, for example, became the system of separating meat and dairy, and a few verses about binding signs on the arm and between the eyes became the practice of tefillin. My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah
Not everyone accepts the Oral Torah in the same way. The ancient Sadducees rejected it, and the small Karaite community still relies on the Written Torah alone. Among most Jews today, Orthodox Judaism treats the Oral Law as binding as the written one, Conservative Judaism accepts it with more flexibility, and Reform Judaism sees it as human work done within a particular historical setting. My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah
Midrash is the third great stream. The word means "searching out" the meaning of the biblical text. Midrash that deals with law is called midrash halakhah, and midrash that deals with stories, ethics and theology is called midrash aggadah (aggadah means "telling"). The classical collections date from roughly 200 to 1000 CE, and the large set called Midrash Rabbah is attached to the five books of the Torah and the five scrolls read on holidays. Midrash places several interpretations of a verse side by side without choosing among them. In the twelfth century Maimonides already warned that some readers took midrash too literally and others dismissed it, and he argued that it should be read as a code of metaphors. My Jewish Learning, Midrash Aggadah
Much of what is called Jewish mythology comes from midrash and the Talmud. The Bible itself says little about where Lilith came from, what Leviathan will become, or what the angels look like. Rabbinic storytellers filled those gaps.
God, the Divine Name and the Shekhinah
The Hebrew Bible names God with four Hebrew letters (yod, heh, vav, heh), called the Tetragrammaton. Jewish tradition does not pronounce it, and its original pronunciation is unclear. Readers say Adonai ("Lord") in its place in prayer and HaShem ("the Name") in conversation, and Elohim is another common name for God. The four letters come from the Hebrew root meaning "to be." Some Kabbalistic texts credit the Name with magical power, an idea Maimonides rejected. For this reason the page uses "God" and the Hebrew substitutes, and does not try to write out the Name. My Jewish Learning, What Is the Tetragrammaton?
Jewish sources also speak of God's nearness. The Shekhinah, from a Hebrew root meaning "to dwell," is the divine presence in the world. The word is absent from the Hebrew Bible and common in the Mishnah and Talmud. Pirkei Avot 3:2 says the Shekhinah rests among two people who share words of Torah, and the Talmud says she is present when ten people pray and when two study Torah together. The Talmud also teaches that she accompanied the Israelites into exile. The rabbis of the Talmud did not explicitly call her female, but later mystical writing did. The Zohar compares the Shekhinah to a mother, sister, daughter and bride, and the Kabbalists place her at the lowest of the ten divine attributes, the one closest to the material world. My Jewish Learning, Shekhinah: The Divine Feminine
Creation Mysticism and Kabbalah
Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, is a short, cryptic Hebrew text describing how God made the universe through 32 "paths of wisdom": the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and ten sefirot. Scholars date it anywhere from the first century CE to the ninth, with recent work favoring about the sixth. Jewish legend credits it to Abraham. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 65b, 67b) says that Rav Hanina and Rav Hoshaiah, students of Judah ha-Nasi, used a book of this kind every Friday to make a calf, which they ate on the Sabbath, and Rashi explained that they did it through the letters of the Holy Name, not by witchcraft. My Jewish Learning, Sefer Yetzirah; Jewish Encyclopedia, Yeẓirah, Sefer
Medieval Kabbalah, the school of Jewish mysticism that emerged in the thirteenth century, built on this book. Kabbalists distinguish God as Ein Sof ("Without End"), who is infinite, hidden and without form, from the ten sefirot, the "emanations" through which God acts in the world. A common list gives them as Keter (Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Hesed (Kindness), Gevurah (Discipline), Tiferet (Glory), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Splendor), Yesod (Foundation) and Malkhut (Kingship). Human good deeds are said to affect them for the better and sin to affect them for the worse. My Jewish Learning, What Are the Sefirot?
In the sixteenth century Safed in Palestine became a center of mysticism. Moses Cordovero organized earlier Kabbalistic teaching in his book Pardes, and Joseph Caro, the author of the legal code Shulhan Arukh, believed he received messages from a heavenly teacher (maggid) that he identified with the Mishnah and the Shekhinah. The Safed circle included Solomon Alkabetz, author of the prayer Lekha Dodi. My Jewish Learning, The Mystics of Safed
Angels and Heavenly Beings
The Hebrew word for angel, mal'akh, means "messenger." In the Torah, an angel stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, speaks to Moses from the burning bush, and guides the Israelites in the desert. The three visitors who come to Abraham and Sarah are called "men" in the text, and the rabbis taught that they were angels who only appeared to eat. Jacob wrestles all night with a figure who refuses to give his name, and Jacob names the place Peniel, "face of God." The Book of Daniel is the first biblical book to give angels names: Gabriel and Michael. My Jewish Learning, Do Jews Believe in Angels?
The prophet Ezekiel sees four winged beings (hayyot), each with four faces, those of a human, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Later in the same book they are called cherubs. The Midrash names Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael as the four chief angels around the divine throne, and it describes Michael as made of snow and Gabriel as made of fire. Raphael appears in the Talmud as one of the three visitors to Abraham. Angels are also invoked in folk practice, since names of angels are written on protective amulets (see below). My Jewish Learning, Do Jews Believe in Angels?
Myths and Stories
The following stories are retold from midrash, the Talmud and later folklore. Each has many tellings.
Abraham breaks the idols
Genesis introduces Abraham when God calls him, without explaining why he was chosen. A well-known midrash in Genesis Rabbah supplies a reason. It imagines Abraham as a child in Mesopotamia who smashes idols, so that his call comes after he has already questioned the religion around him and become ready to hear one God. Readers have taken it as a story about a patriarch and also as a model of spiritual character for Jews in any age and any foreign culture. My Jewish Learning, Midrash Aggadah
Elijah the prophet
Elijah appears in the Books of Kings in a handful of dramatic chapters. On Mount Carmel he challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest of sacrifice, and fire from heaven consumes his offering. Afterward he flees into the desert, where God is not in the wind, earthquake or fire but in a "still, small voice." He does not die. A fiery chariot takes him up to heaven, and later tradition says he returns. Jewish folklore is full of tales of Elijah roaming the earth, appearing as a stranger to people in need, and sitting in the heavenly court. The Talmud has rabbis meeting him and asking for his rulings. He is expected to announce the Messiah, so a cup of wine is poured for him at the Passover seder, a song asking for his return is sung when Shabbat ends, and he is invoked at circumcisions. My Jewish Learning, Elijah the Prophet
The Golem of Prague
A well-known legend says that Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (about 1525 to 1609), called the Maharal, chief rabbi of Prague, shaped a figure from clay on the bank of the Vltava river and brought it to life. He put a parchment with the divine Name in its mouth, or wrote emet ("truth") on its forehead. The Golem guarded the Jewish quarter. One Sabbath evening it grew violent, and the rabbi erased the first letter of emet, leaving met ("dead"), so that it collapsed. Tradition says its remains lie in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. Jewish Museum in Prague, The Golem of Prague
The historical Rabbi Loew was a philosopher and Talmudic scholar, and he probably never made a golem. The story was not attached to him until about two hundred years after his death. It circulated orally and was printed in the nineteenth century, and it became famous worldwide through Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel Der Golem. Jewish Museum Berlin, Legendary Prague; Jewish Museum in Prague, The Golem of Prague
The thirty-six hidden righteous
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 97b, Sukkah 45a) quotes the teacher Abaye as saying that in every generation there are at least thirty-six righteous people upon whom the Shekhinah rests. Later legend turned them into the lamed-vavniks (the Hebrew letters lamed and vav stand for 36), secret saints through whose piety the world continues to exist. In the stories they hide their holiness, usually working as humble artisans, and deny who they are if someone discovers them. When the community is in great danger they step forward to save it, then retire again. One tale places such a saint in Cracow in the time of Moses Isserles, disguised as a tailor named Hayyim, who defeats a Polish king's scheme to extort money from the Jews. Jewish Encyclopedia, Lamed-Waw
The Baal Shem Tov and Hasidic tales
Hasidism grew out of an eighteenth-century mystical revival, and many of its stories center on its founder, Israel ben Eliezer, called the Baal Shem Tov ("master of the good name"), who was born around 1700 in western Ukraine and died on Shavuot in 1760. He left no writings. What is known of him comes from tales told by his followers, whose historical accuracy is not firmly established, and they credit him with healing, visions and ascents to heaven. His teaching emphasized prayer as a way of cleaving to God (devekut), joy in serving God, and the idea that any act, even a mundane one, can carry holiness and that a simple person's heartfelt service can equal a scholar's. All Hasidic groups today look to him as the prototype of the Hasidic rebbe. My Jewish Learning, The Baal Shem Tov
Creatures and Spirit Beings
Leviathan, Behemoth and Ziz
The Book of Job describes Leviathan and Behemoth as two enormous beasts that no human can overcome. The name Leviathan comes from a root meaning "coil" or "twist," and Behemoth is a plural of the Hebrew word for "beast." The Jewish Encyclopedia says the description has mythical elements, even though the hippopotamus may have supplied some details of Behemoth. It notes a suggestion by the scholar Gunkel that the pair correspond to the Babylonian primeval monsters Tiamat and Kingu. Jewish Encyclopedia, Leviathan and Behemoth
Rabbinic legend gives them a story. A midrash says Leviathan was made on the fifth day of creation, first as a male and a female, and God killed the female so that they would not fill the world with offspring, saving her flesh for a feast for the righteous at the coming of the Messiah. Leviathan is so large that the waters of the Jordan fall into his mouth, his hunger sends out a heat that boils the deep, and his eyes give off light. Yet he fears a small worm, the kilbit. Behemoth, in these stories an ox-like beast (one version calls it the ox of the mountain, shor ha-bar), is served at the same banquet, and so is the giant bird Ziz, whom the rabbis found in Psalm 50:11. The angel Gabriel is said to hunt Leviathan, and God must finish the task. Its hide will make tents, belts, chains and necklaces for the pious, and the rest will cover the walls of Jerusalem and light the world. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the three-beast banquet shows Persian influence. Jewish Encyclopedia, Leviathan and Behemoth
The rabbis themselves disagreed about whether to take this literally. Maimonides read the banquet as a figure for the soul's intellectual joy and Leviathan as an imaginary composite animal. Kabbalistic writers read the "piercing" and "crooked" Leviathan of Isaiah 27:1 as Satan-Samael and his mate Lilith. Jewish Encyclopedia, Leviathan and Behemoth
Lilith
The name Lilith appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, and scholars connect it to a Babylonian demon. The Talmud and the apocryphal Testament of Solomon describe a demoness with long black hair. The Bible tells of the creation of man and woman in two ways, one suggesting they were made together and the other one after the other, and the rabbis resolved the difficulty by giving Adam two wives. A fuller portrait of the first one comes from the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, where she is the first companion God made for Adam. They quarrel because he insists she be subordinate. She leaves Eden, lives in a cave, takes demons as lovers and bears many more. For this reason she is widely thought of as the mother of Jewish demonology. Folk custom treats her as a danger to infants. A midrash says she makes babies sick unless an amulet with the names of angels protects them, and some Orthodox families still give babies such amulets to keep her from stealing their souls. Jewish Virtual Library, The Fury of Lilith; My Jewish Learning, The Amulet
Later tales add her daughters and the mirror as a doorway. A story from Tunisian oral tradition, retold by Howard Schwartz in Lilith's Cave, tells of an abandoned haunted house whose buyers find a handsome mirror in the cellar and give it to their dark-haired daughter. A daughter of Lilith lives in the mirror and takes over the girl, who wanders from man to man until her ashamed father curses her to become a bat. Some modern Jewish feminists treat Lilith as a figure of independence, and the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith is named for her. Jewish Virtual Library, The Fury of Lilith
Golem
The word golem is the name of the clay creature in the Prague legend above, and the idea is older than Prague. The Talmudic story of Rav Hanina and Rav Hoshaiah making a calf is one early example of making life through the divine letters, and some readers believe Sefer Yetzirah can be used to create a golem. Today the Golem has become a common image for artificial intelligence, a made thing that serves its maker and may escape control. My Jewish Learning, Sefer Yetzirah; Jewish Museum in Prague, The Golem of Prague
Dybbuk
A dybbuk (from the Hebrew word for "cleaving" or "clinging") is a spirit that enters a living person and speaks through them. The term does not appear in the Talmud or in Kabbalistic texts under that name, and it was coined in the seventeenth century from the speech of German and Polish Jews. By the sixteenth century, popular belief had joined the idea of restless dead to the Kabbalistic doctrine of gilgul, the transmigration of souls. The dybbuk was then understood as the soul of someone too sinful to be reborn. Writings from the circle of Isaac Luria describe exorcisms, performed by a baal shem or a pious Hasid, who freed the possessed person and also gave the spirit a tikkun ("repair"). Printed accounts of such cases appeared in Hebrew and Yiddish from 1560 on, and the last published protocol came out in Jerusalem in 1904. Jewish Virtual Library, Dibbuk
Demons and spirits
Demons, spirits and monsters appear in many Jewish texts. The Talmud gives instructions for detecting demons in a home, and the apocryphal Book of Tobit tells of a demon that killed the earlier husbands of the woman Tobias marries. The Talmud also cautions that dreams may be false messages sent by demons. My Jewish Learning, Jewish Magical Practices and Beliefs
Folk Belief and Protective Customs
Many Jews have long used amulets for protection. The Talmud mentions them often, and the rabbis accepted that they could work, even allowing a proven amulet to be carried on Shabbat. Maimonides, a strong rationalist, criticized those who thought a mezuzah was a protective charm, though he too permitted an effective amulet to be worn on Shabbat. Amulets were placed near newborns and women in labor, and the amulet that keeps Lilith away is written with the names of angels. The Jewish Museum holds examples, including an amulet made in 1879 for an expectant mother in Podkamen, Ukraine, a necklace worn in eighteenth-century Yemen, and a nineteenth-century Ottoman headpiece worn by a new mother to keep Lilith away. Perhaps the best-known amulet is the hamsa, a palm-shaped charm with an eye in it, and another is the red string worn on the wrist. My Jewish Learning, The Amulet
The danger these objects guard against is often the evil eye, ayin hara, the belief that a person or being can harm someone with a look. Midrash says Sarah cast an evil eye on Hagar while Hagar was pregnant, causing a miscarriage, and that Leah's fertility suffered after she thanked God for bearing many sons. The Talmud says the descendants of Joseph are immune, and it gives a formula, based on that descent, for a traveler entering a city who fears it. Folk habits include spitting after saying a vulnerable person's name and the Yiddish phrase kinehora ("not the evil eye"), said to keep luck from turning. The Rosh Hashanah custom of tashlich, casting sins into water, is traditionally done at water with fish, because fish are said to be immune to the evil eye. My Jewish Learning, Evil Eye in Judaism
Other customs are tied to saints and sacred places. Visitors to the grave of the first-century sage Jonathan ben Uziel at Amukah in northern Israel come to pray for a spouse, and many say they were married within the year. Medieval Jewish poets and Bible commentators drew on astrology, and the zodiac is a central motif in synagogue design of the Talmudic period, even though Maimonides disapproved of astrology. Magical practices have varied through history, but they have always existed alongside normative Jewish ritual and belief, and they remain controversial. My Jewish Learning, Jewish Magical Practices and Beliefs
Folk Art and Ritual Objects
Jewish folk art grows out of the same texts and stories. The mizrah ("east") is a decorated plaque hung on the east wall of a house or synagogue to show the direction of prayer toward Jerusalem. In Eastern Europe many were papercuts, made by folding a sheet, cutting through both layers, and unfolding it into a symmetrical design. One in The Jewish Museum's collection, made by Israel Dov Rosenbaum of Podkamen, Ukraine, who may have been a clockmaker, shows a domed building with a clock, together with lions, deer, eagles and leopards. These four animals usually illustrate a saying in Pirkei Avot (5:23) that one should be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion in doing God's will. The lower register has a curled Leviathan and the wild ox, the legendary food of the righteous in the world to come, and a unicorn appears in the outer frame. The museum suggests that artists drew their animals from printed sources such as Hebrew alphabet primers and the Meshal ha-Kadmoni, a collection of animal fables written in 1281 by Isaac ibn Sahula, in which the animals talk in biblical Hebrew and the rooster is a Bible scholar. The Jewish Museum, Mizrah
Ritual objects often mix folk and learned motifs. A large Eastern European Hanukkah lamp of about 1900 in the same collection combines paired birds and lions in a folk style with griffins, an Art Nouveau lion and lioness, and cast figures of a bear, a gorilla and elephants, a design that appears to have grown piece by piece. The Jewish Museum, Hanukkah Lamp
The ketubah, the marriage contract, is another art form. Its text states a husband's obligations to his wife, and the earliest surviving example, in Aramaic on papyrus from Egypt, dates to about 440 BCE. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries some Jewish communities in Venice were decorating ketubot with arches, columns, borders, human figures and nature motifs. The designs followed their surroundings. A 1722 ketubah from Ancona, Italy, in the Library of Congress is ringed with flowers and birds, and a ketubah from Tetuan, Morocco, uses only plant and animal designs, since the decoration of ketubot in Islamic lands avoided human figures. Library of Congress, The Ketubah, an Ornate Jewish Marriage Tradition
The scroll read each week in the synagogue is the central object of Jewish worship, and the synagogue itself can be a work of art and memory. The Old-New Synagogue in Prague, built in the thirteenth century, is Europe's oldest active synagogue, and the tradition of the Golem is attached to its attic. My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah; Jewish Museum in Prague, The Golem of Prague
The Year and the Life Cycle
Jewish time is built around the Sabbath (Shabbat), which runs from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, and a calendar that is both solar and lunar. The year begins at Rosh Hashanah and includes Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover and Shavuot, among other days, and each holiday starts at sundown. Many of the stories above attach to the calendar. Elijah is welcomed at Passover and sung about at the close of Shabbat, and some midrash collections began as sermons on the weekly Torah reading, while Midrash Rabbah includes volumes on the five scrolls read on holidays. My Jewish Learning, Jewish Calendar; My Jewish Learning, Midrash Aggadah
The dietary laws, kashrut, show how the Oral Torah develops the written text. The Torah twice forbids boiling a kid in its mother's milk. The rabbinic tradition extends this to a full separation of meat and dairy, separate cooking and serving equipment, and a waiting period between eating meat and dairy. My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah
A child becomes bar or bat mitzvah, meaning obligated to keep the commandments, automatically at 13 for a boy and 12 for a girl. The public ceremony is a late custom, attested between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the bat mitzvah ceremony dates from the twentieth, with the first in the United States in 1922. In a typical service the young person is called to the Torah for the first time, may chant a passage, and often gives a short talk on the weekly portion. My Jewish Learning, About Bar/Bat Mitzvah
Today
Jewish life today is varied. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and other communities, as well as the Karaites, differ on how binding the Oral Torah is, and the objects above show how communities in Italy, Morocco, Yemen and Eastern Europe have each put their own stamp on shared texts. My Jewish Learning, The Written Torah and the Oral Torah; Library of Congress, The Ketubah, an Ornate Jewish Marriage Tradition
Several of the figures above have been reclaimed or reinterpreted. Jewish feminists and the Jewish Renewal movement invoke the Shekhinah as a feminine face of God, and some feminists have adopted Lilith. Midrash remains a living method, with Jewish writers and artists retelling biblical stories to raise questions from feminism to the Holocaust. Tales of the Baal Shem Tov are a major part of Hasidic lore. Sefer Yetzirah has not been much studied by contemporary Jews, though it offers a view of mysticism focused on the physical world. My Jewish Learning, Shekhinah: The Divine Feminine; My Jewish Learning, Midrash Aggadah; My Jewish Learning, Sefer Yetzirah