Guest post written by author Ariel Kaplan
Ariel Kaplan is the author of several books for teens and adults, including Grendel’s Guide to Love and War and We Regret to Inform You. She was raised in Virginia and has a B.A. in History and Religious Studies from the College of William and Mary. The Pomegranate Gate is her adult debut, which releases on July 20th.
Jewish folklore is filled with all sorts of supernatural beings, from angels and golems to dybbuks and vampires. But one category of supernatural creature is described in such varied ways, and with such widely varying characteristics, that it can oftentimes be difficult to imagine the tales are describing the same sort of being: the demon.
Likely the lack of consensus about demons and their underlying natures is a product of the massive diversity, both temporal and geographical, of the origins of these stories. There are (more or less) three main categories of demons:
- demons as terrifying, murdering boogeymen
- demons as positive, sympathetic figures
- demons as magic-wielding immortals often Jewish themselves.
There are so many of these demonic tales that listing them all here would necessitate a book-length article. Instead, I’ve listed only a few examples of each. All of these stories—and many, many others—can be found in the collected works of Howard Schwartz. I heartily recommend, in particular, Lilith’s Cave and Elijah’s Violin to those interested in folktales that center on demons specifically.
The first category of stories, boogeymen tales, feature demons who violate or murder humans; the most widely recognized of these is certainly Lilith, famously Adam’s first wife and slightly less famously a seducer of men and murderer of infants. Known sometimes as the Queen of Demons, she is described in some tales as the mother of all others, and was first described in the Talmud before becoming a popular (in the sense that she was widely spoken of, not widely admired) folkloric figure. If Lilith is the archetype for this sort of demon, she is not ultimately unique: there are a host of demons, named and unnamed, who behave in similar ways. In the tale of The Demon in the Tree (Germany, 16th Century), a man accidentally marries a demon after putting a ring on a finger sticking out of a tree. The demon then proceeds to murder the young man’s next two mortal brides, until his third bride, in cleverness, plies the demon with jam and make a treaty with her: the demon gets the man one hour a day, and in exchange she’ll refrain from murdering the bride’s child once it’s born (somewhat amusingly, the demon decides after seven years she’s had enough—either of the arrangement or the man himself—and departs for greener pastures). A similar story is told in the much-older Book of Tobit (2nd century BCE), in which a bride’s seven husbands are all murdered by the demon Asmodeus until he is driven away.
It’s notable that the demon-antagonist in Tobit is Asmodeus, because elsewhere he’s considered a fairly positive figure, particularly in tales in which King Solomon is the central character. Solomon, according to these stories, has enslaved Asmodeus, the King of Demons, in order to solicit his help in building the Temple, which cannot be constructed with tools of iron (Asmodeus goes on to tell Solomon about the existence of the Shamir, a creature that can cut through anything, and tells him where to find it). In later tales, Asmodeus is something of a friend and advisor to Solomon, and even in tales like The Beggar King (Babylon, 5th Century), in which Asmodeus flings Solomon some unfathomable distance away, forcing him to live as a beggar for years until he can return, Solomon acknowledges this is only done to teach him a larger lesson. Asmodeus is, in these stories, always working in some way toward a positive end. Elsewhere, we also see Asmodeus doing other good deeds: In Partnership with Asmodeus (Libya, unknown date), he prevents a man’s suicide; in The Magic Flute of Asmodeus (Persian, unknown date) he is a grateful father who rewards a shepherd for saving his son’s life (the shepherd later dies as the result of stealing a ring from another demon after being explicitly warned… it is the shepherd, in this tale, who behaves badly, not Asmodeus or his son).
Meanwhile, the third category of demons is those who are neither particularly heroic nor’
particularly wicked: those who act more-or-less like humans, even if they don’t necessarily look like them. Often, these demons maintain that they are Jewish themselves, and follow Jewish law and have their own rabbis. In The Demon Princess, (Byzantium, thirteenth-sixteenth centuries) demons are hardly distinguishable from people at all… when the protagonist wanders into the demon world, he finds himself in the company of demon rabbis and all the demons seem to be following Jewish laws. Later, when he abandons his demon wife (notably the daughter of the demon king Asmodeus), she appears before the (human) beit din demanding justice, and they recognize her as having legal standing as his wife and take her side in demanding that he either return to her or repay her dowry. In The Underwater Palace (Eastern Europe, nineteenth century), a woman follows her lover to the bottom of a river, only to learn he is a demon prince; the woman elects to remain as his beloved princess, and later sends for her aunt to act as midwife when she gives birth to their son. And finally, in A Voyage to the Ends of the Earth (Babylon, fifth century), the Babylonian sage-slash-swashbuckling adventurer Rabbah bar bar Hannah (two “bars” is correct), is shipwrecked on an island filled with incorporeal demons, and is surprised to hear them speaking Hebrew… and more surprised when they introduce themselves as fellow Jews.
Effectively, there is no consensus as to what constitutes a demon in Jewish folklore, beyond the very vague definition of non-human magic-wielder. When one considers that these tales were composed over a two-thousand year period and influenced by a large number of other cultures, one shouldn’t be surprised. The demons in these tales often function as foils to their mortal protagonists, whom Howard Schwartz refers to as “a remarkable constellation of figures,” becoming whatever the story requires. It certainly benefits the reader, when seeing the word “demon” in a traditional story, not to ascribe the modern English (negative) connotation, and think instead, that the designation is something like “supernatural being: not otherwise specified.”
