(or Dybbuk). A term which connotes the attachment to a soul of an evil spirit, or the soul of a wicked person who has died to the body of a living person. The dibbuk is thus the presence of a foreign entity inside a person, which speaks through his throat and causes the person distress and spiritual disturbance. The belief in dibbuks is a common folk view, but the term appears for the first time in 17th-century Eastern Europe and is related to the kabbalistic theory of Transmigration of souls.
The idea of evil spirits entering the human body was prevalent among Jews of the Second Temple era and the talmudic period. Stories about this are common in the Gospels of the New Testament. The belief that certain souIs of the dead could not find rest and therefore attached themselves to living persons was common in both Judaism and Christianity in the Middle Ages.
According to the kabbalistic theory of the transmigration of souls, there is a phenomenon known as ibbur, the joining of the soul of a dead person to that of a person who is alive. According to the kabbalists, the soul of the righteous person joins the soul of another person in order to strengthen its good qualities and in order to aid the Jewish people as a whole. Only at a later period of time do the kabbalists speak of an "evil joining," the entry of the soul of an evil person into the body of a person who has allowed it entry through a sin which he committed.
The phenomenon of the evil ibbur is described at length in the writings of the kabbalists of Safed, primarily of R. Ḥayyim Vital and of his son R. Samuel Vital. The pupils of Isaac Luria describe ceremonies for the exorcism of such dibbuks and in many writings they give detailed instructions about how to chase away common ones.
Descriptions of dibbuks and ceremonies of exorcism are quite common from the 16th century on. They form the basis for a number of literary works, the most famous of these being The Dibbuk, a play written by S. An-Ski in 1916, which has been staged on numerous occasions and also filmed .
