S. Ansky and the Play That Fixed the Word

The dybbuk entered wide public awareness chiefly through S. Ansky's 1914 Yiddish play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, which dramatised a young bride possessed by the soul of her dead beloved and became one of the most performed and adapted works of modern Yiddish theatre, later staged in Hebrew by the Habima Theatre and adapted repeatedly for film. Ansky researched the play using ethnographic material he gathered on expeditions through Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement before the First World War, meaning the drama drew directly on documented folk belief about possession, exorcism and the role of the tzaddik or rabbi in mediating between the living and the restless dead, rather than inventing its supernatural framework from nothing.

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe situates dybbuk belief within a wider Ashkenazi folk-religious world of amulets, protective custom and named spirits that existed alongside, and sometimes in tension with, more strictly rabbinic and Kabbalistic theology, and the term has since passed into general English usage as shorthand for spirit possession well beyond its specifically Jewish origin.