The Kabbalist’s Recipe Book: Magic, Medicine, and Curious Amulets in Premodern Europe
What might a premodern Jewish recipe book contain? Alongside household cures, cosmetics, herbal preparations, and alchemical experiments, these handwritten collections preserved instructions for producing amulets, invoking divine names, and protecting people from illness, demons, misfortune, and the evil eye. Drawing on Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts from Central and Eastern Europe, this lecture explores a world in which magic, medicine, religion, and practical craft were closely intertwined. It follows the makers and users of these books—from physicians and practical kabbalists to household practitioners—and asks what their extraordinary recipes reveal about everyday Jewish life, encounters with surrounding Christian cultures, and the enduring human desire to make uncertain worlds more manageable.
Image: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, Ms. 9380. Courtesy of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Speaker Bio:
Agata Paluch is Professor of Premodern Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on Jewish esotericism, magic, and Kabbalah, as well as the history of the Jewish book and material text cultures. She earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from University College London in 2013. Before joining the University of Cologne, she led the DFG-funded research group “Patterns of Knowledge Circulation” at Freie Universität Berlin (2019–2025) and held fellowships from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Herbert D. Katz Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has also worked as a cataloger for the British Library’s collection of Hebrew manuscripts
Curated & Hosted by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Don’t worry if you can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
