The season of the Jewitch: Meet the occultists who blend witchcraft and Jewish folklore

Occult practices and totems are a mainstay of Halloween season, and sage bundles, altars and crystals are an increasingly trendy way to dabble in divination and witchcraft. But the spooky supernatural world also has a long history in Judaism, and modern “Jewitches” are encouraging the connection — though their practices often slightly differ from their non-Jewish contemporaries.

“I do not burn sage,” said Zo Jacobi, who runs Jewitches, a popular blog and podcast that deep dives into ancient Jewish myths and folkloric practices. The sage-related ritual of “smudging,” an Indigenous ceremony popular among modern witches for cleansing a person or place of negative energy, “is not a Jewish practice,” she said. “But Jews had crystals. Actually, they were called ‘gems.’”

Jacobi and her peers are revitalizing ancient Jewish practices of witchcraft, which have been seeing something of a revival as of late. Far from having an uneasy relationship with magic practitioners, Judaism — or at least Kabbalistic strands of it — has long embraced them.

Jacobi, based in Los Angeles, studies those gems’ role in Jewish ritual, along with the connections between assorted other magical artifacts and Judaica. Eight shelves in her home are filled with books on Judaism as well as Jewish magic, witchcraft and folklore.

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