“Beat the Copper Nail in the Eye with a Hammer”: An Ancient Magic Spell in Yiddish for Catching a Thief

What is it about?

Exposing a thief magically with the aid of a painted eye on the wall, existed since antiquity. The spell includes instructions for drawing the eye, incantations, summoning up God’s help and knocking a nail into the painted eye, thus harming the thief’s eye, and exposing him. In this paper we present the same spell written in Yiddish dating between the 15th-16th century. In tracing the Yiddish spell’s sources for both text and its illustration, our examination reinforces previous scholarship of magical praxis, which assert that rituals are cross-cultural and cannot always be traced to its Jewish or non-Jewish origins.

Featured Image