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12* Gideon Bohak and Matthew Morgenstern

dusk, to immerse himself in water, and to fast and abstain from sexual
intercourse during these three Fridays. Thus, it seems that the ritual
instructions were applied to a set of three adjurations, one of which was
intended for the memorization of Torah and the other two for protection
against demons.6 Such mixtures might be due to copying errors or
deliberate editorial activities taken by our scribe or by one of his
predecessors, and they certainly reflect the recipe’s complex transmission
history and contribute to the difficulties inherent in interpreting magic spell
texts.

Another feature of these recipes, which also reflects their long
transmission history, is that whereas the spells to be recited or inscribed are
consistently given in Aramaic, the ritual instructions are sometimes given
in Aramaic (e.g., 3a:5–3b:4 and 7b:7–11), but in other cases are given in
Arabic, here written in a phonetic manner that is also typical of the earliest
Judaeo-Arabic fragments from the Cairo Genizah (e.g., 5a:1–4).7 This is an
example of a phenomenon that is well attested in both Jewish and non-
Jewish magical recipe books, namely, that when the society using these
recipes switches from one language of communication to another (in this
case, from Aramaic to Arabic), its spell-mongers often continue
transmitting the spells to be recited or inscribed in the old language, even
though it is no longer fully understood, but gradually translate the practical
instructions into the new vernacular.8 In this respect, our booklet is a clear

6 As both the ritual instructions and the first of the three spells bear some resemblance
to the Sar Torah rituals of the Hekhalot literature, it is likely that the anti-demonic
spells are a later addition to whatever the “original” recipe may have contained.

7 For the “pre-Saadian” methods of writing Judaeo-Arabic, see J. Blau and S. Hopkins,
“On Early Judaeo-Arabic Orthography,’ ” Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik 12
(1984): 9–27 and more recently J. Blau and S. Hopkins, “On Aramaic Vocabulary in
Early Judaeo-Arabic Texts Written in Phonetic Spelling,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic
and Islam 32 (2006): 433–71.

8 For this phenomenon, see further discussion in G. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 220.