Gilgul

Gilgul neshamot, the rolling or cycling of souls, is the Jewish doctrine of reincarnation. It is not found in the Hebrew Bible or in the Talmud, and medieval Jewish rationalism rejected it: Saadia Gaon, in Beliefs and Opinions, dismissed it explicitly as a notion imported from outside. Its entry into Jewish thought is by way of Kabbalah, first attested in the twelfth-century Sefer ha-Bahir, developed in the Zohar, and made central by the Lurianic school of sixteenth-century Safed.

In the Lurianic system, set out in Hayyim Vital's Sha'ar ha-Gilgulim, souls return in order to complete commandments left undone, to repair damage done in an earlier life, or to be matched to circumstances that permit a specific rectification. A related mechanism, ibbur (impregnation), has an additional soul temporarily join a living person to accomplish a particular task or to assist them. Hasidism absorbed the whole doctrine, and it lies behind the popular figure of the dybbuk, a soul that has failed to move on and attaches itself to the living.

Its standing in Judaism has never been that of a required belief. It is widely accepted in Hasidic and kabbalistically inclined Orthodox circles, treated as an optional or non-operative view in much of Modern Orthodoxy, and generally not held in Reform, Conservative or Reconstructionist Judaism. Comparisons with Indian doctrines of rebirth are frequently drawn but the differences are substantial: gilgul is not governed by a general law of moral causation of the kind karma describes, is often held to be limited in number, and does not displace the resurrection of the dead as the tradition's ultimate horizon.

Where gilgul in its constructive form describes a soul returning to complete or repair something, the dybbuk, literally "attachment" or "clinging," describes the doctrine's darker counterpart: a wandering or unsettled soul that fails to move on after death and instead attaches itself to and speaks through a living person, understood as possession requiring exorcism.

Early modern Jewish communities, particularly in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Safed and later Eastern Europe, produced documented accounts of dybbuk cases and of the rabbis called to perform exorcisms, typically through prayer, the blowing of a shofar, and formal adjuration commanding the spirit to depart through the smallest toe, on the reasoning that a soul should leave the body causing the least damage; a number of these accounts were recorded and circulated as cautionary and edifying literature, presenting the phenomenon as evidence of divine justice rather than mere superstition.

The concept reached its widest audience through S. An-sky's play The Dybbuk, written in the early twentieth century and first performed in 1920, in which the soul of a dead young man, denied marriage to his beloved in life, possesses her on the eve of her wedding to another, drawing directly on the folklore and exorcism rituals of the Pale of Settlement's shtetl culture that An-sky had documented as an ethnographer. The play became a foundational work of modern Yiddish theater and, through later adaptations in film and drama, the primary channel through which the dybbuk, and a popularized image of gilgul generally, became familiar to audiences with no connection to the kabbalistic tradition that originated it.