From the Creation of the World to the Creation of a Foetus: Pregnancy in Jewish Mystical and Magical Sources

Lecture by Andrea Gondos, University of Michigan. Held jointly with the RFE-research network “Between Encyclopaedia and Epitome" https://fit.uni-tuebingen.de/Project/Details?id=9826

Building on Wendy Wall’s observation that recipes transform “natural elements into made worlds,” this talk examines pregnancy remedies as technologies through which raw matter – foods, gemstones, herbs, bodily substances, sacred letters, and domestic objects – was transformed into culturally and cosmologically charged instruments of protection. The speaker argues that pregnancy in Jewish magical and medical traditions was understood not simply as a private biological condition but as a religiously and cosmologically charged state, one whose dangers and possibilities carried consequences for the family and the wider community.

Particular attention will be given to threshold rituals in which the pregnant woman herself becomes the operator of protection. Through the activation of angelic forces, sacred letters, amulets, and domestic space, she transforms her immediate environment into a managed ritual technology. The talk culminates with an eighteenth-century Rosenthaliana birth amulet, now largely inaccessible and preserved only in degraded reproductions. Its concentric circles, zodiac signs, patriarchal blessings, divine names, and formulas for repelling Lilith bring into focus the central argument: the pregnant body was imagined simultaneously as microcosm and macrocosm – a threshold at which sacred history, bodily vulnerability, magical technologies, and communal continuity converged.

Andrea Gondos is the Padnos Family Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Michigan. Her research explores early modern and medieval Kabbalah within the broader contexts of Jewish cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on how esoteric knowledge was preserved, transmitted, and reimagined in the premodern world. She recently co-edited Life of the Soul: Jewish Perspectives on Reincarnation from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period (SUNY, 2024). Her first monograph, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (SUNY) traced the intersection between technological change and esoteric knowledge diffusion. Her current book project, Chaining Lilith, Healing Eve: Amuletic and Medical Technologies of Birth in the Early Modern Shtetl, investigates the intersections of gender, healthcare, and practical Kabbalah in East European Jewish magic. It examines how Jewish male miracle workers (ba‘alei shem) developed and applied healing strategies for managing the female body and its reproductive functions.