Decapitation and the discourse of antisyncretism in the Babylonian Talmud

Intermediary Beings in Late Antique Judaism: A History of Scholarship

“…Scholars have abandoned phenomenological accounts of magic in Judaism and have become more interested in ideological, discursive and informer-identified definitions of ritual power sensitive to the rhetorical and political power of claims that another’s rituals are magic. This recognition that the label ‘magic’ is innately ideological and largely dismissive has led to recent examinations of how this label is deployed in relation to ethnicity (Avishur 1979; Van den Horst 1993–94; Seidel 1995; Veltri 1998; Gordon 1999; Lieberman 2002; Berkowitz 2002, 2009) and gender (Aubin 1998; Bar-Ilan 1993; Fishbane 1993; Lesses 2001; Swartz 2006b; Stratton 2007; Murray 2008) in particular times and places. It has also led to resistance to the use of the term ‘magic’ at all, with some scholars proposing the term ‘ritual power’ as a more apt description of the types of behaviors and rituals that get divided into the categories of religion and magic (Meyer and Smith 1994; Lesses 1998; Janowitz 2002; Ahuvia 2014).…”