Magic and Witchcraft in Judaism: Law, Golem and Kabbalah
No tradition condemns magic more sharply in its law than Judaism, and few produced more of it in their folklore. The Torah commands that a sorceress not be allowed to live; the same civilization gave the world the Golem, the amulet, and the practical Kabbalah of divine names. The gap between the law and the lore is the real subject here.
Reviewed & updated June 25, 2026 by the DreamTabeer Editorial Team
Quick answer
For most of its history, yes — which is exactly why it forbade it. With the major exception of Maimonides, who in the 'Mishneh Torah' dismissed sorcery, astrology and amulets as 'falsehood and lies,' the dominant biblical and rabbinic view treated magic as a genuine and dangerous power. The Torah bans the sorcerer, the medium and the necromancer (Exodus 22:18; Deuteronomy 18:10–11; Leviticus 20:27), and the story of the medium of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 even depicts a forbidden conjuring that works. The prohibition was never really 'this is fake'; it was 'this is real, and to reach for it is to trust something other than God.'
A law against magic, a folklore full of it
Start with the contradiction, because pretending it away misses everything interesting. On one side stands a body of biblical and rabbinic law that treats sorcery as a capital crime and a betrayal of the covenant. On the other stands one of the richest magical folklores in the world — clay men brought to life, amulets crowded with angel-names, dream-questions put to heaven, a whole literature of practical Kabbalah. These are not two different Judaisms. They are the same tradition, holding a hard line in its courtrooms and a soft, anxious fascination in its homes.
The reason the tension never resolves is that Judaism never said magic was fake. With one important exception we will come to, the dominant view was that these powers are real and therefore dangerous — that the forbidden arts work, which is precisely why they are forbidden. That is a very different position from dismissing magic as superstition, and it is what gives Jewish magical folklore its particular charge: the line you must not cross is real, and so is the thing on the other side of it.
What the Torah forbids
The prohibitions are blunt and early. Exodus 22:18 gives the verse that would later echo through Europe's witch trials in its King James form: 'You shall not permit a sorceress to live' (mekhashefah). Deuteronomy 18:10–11 supplies the fullest list, banning in one breath the diviner, the soothsayer, the augur, the sorcerer, the caster of spells, the one who consults a ghost (ov) or a familiar spirit (yidde'oni), and the one who inquires of the dead. Leviticus 19:31 and 20:27 return to the mediums and necromancers specifically, attaching the death penalty.
It helps to see what these laws are for. The Torah frames magic chiefly as a boundary marker: these are 'the abhorrent practices of those nations,' and Israel is to be different by trusting God alone rather than the techniques by which its neighbours tried to compel the unseen. The sin is less the mechanics than the misplaced reliance — the attempt to secure by spell what should be sought by faith. That framing will matter all the way down, because it means the question Judaism keeps asking about magic is not 'is it real?' but 'who are you trusting when you reach for it?'
The witch of Endor and the ghost that came
Then the Bible tells a story that complicates its own law. In 1 Samuel 28, King Saul — who has himself expelled the mediums and necromancers from the land — finds God silent on the eve of battle and goes in disguise to a woman at Endor, a ba'alat ov, a 'mistress of a ghost,' and asks her to bring up the prophet Samuel. The unsettling thing is that the text does not say she fails or fakes it. Samuel appears, rebukes Saul, and foretells his death. The narrative seems to concede that the forbidden medium's power is frighteningly real.
Generations of commentators have wrestled with that scene precisely because it refuses the easy reading. It does not portray necromancy as empty trickery; it portrays it as a true and terrible thing that a desperate king should never have touched. The 'witch of Endor' became the ancestress of every later image of the conjuring-woman, and she carries the whole Jewish ambivalence in a single chapter: the power is condemned, the power is forbidden, and the power, in this telling, works.
The rabbis arguing with themselves
The Talmud inherits all this and does something remarkable with it: it takes magic seriously as real, draws fine legal lines through it, and then tells stories in which the sages do it themselves. Tractate Sanhedrin distinguishes punishable sorcery from achizat einayim, the 'holding of the eyes' — illusion or sleight that only seems to alter reality and so escapes the capital charge. The same tradition wryly concedes, in Kiddushin 49b, that 'ten measures of sorcery came down into the world, and Egypt took nine.'
And then comes the astonishment. In Sanhedrin 65b the Talmud reports that Rava created a man — a golem — and sent him to Rabbi Zeira, and that Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya would study the mystical 'Book of Formation' (Sefer Yetzirah) every Sabbath eve and thereby create a calf, which they then ate. The very text that legislates against sorcery credits its own holiest figures with creative powers through the manipulation of sacred letters. The rabbinic resolution is subtle but real: power drawn from God's own creative speech, used in holiness, is not the forbidden kishuf of the nations — it is closeness to the Creator. The line is not between power and no-power; it is between the source you draw from and the master you serve.
Maimonides says it is all nonsense
Against this stands the great dissenting voice, and it is worth hearing because it is so bracingly modern. Moses Maimonides — the Rambam, the twelfth century's supreme Jewish rationalist — simply refused to believe any of it worked. In the 'Mishneh Torah,' in the Laws of Idolatry, he sweeps away sorcery, divination, astrology, amulets, incantations and the summoning of spirits as 'all of them falsehood and lies,' the delusions of the ancient idolaters by which they fooled the foolish. The Torah forbade these things, on his reading, not because they are dangerous powers but because they are empty deceptions unworthy of a thinking person.
This is a genuinely different answer to the central question, and it split the tradition. Where the Talmud and later the Kabbalists said magic is real and must be feared, Maimonides said magic is unreal and must be outgrown. Jewish thought has been arguing between those two poles ever since — the mystic who guards the boundary because the far side is real, and the rationalist who erases the boundary because the far side is nothing. Both are speaking as committed Jews. The disagreement is not about loyalty; it is about what the universe is made of.
Practical Kabbalah and the Golem
Out of the mystical wing grew a working folklore, and the scholar Gershom Scholem, in 'Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism' (1941), taught us to distinguish its two faces: Kabbalah Iyyunit, the speculative, contemplative study of the divine emanations, and Kabbalah Ma'asit, the 'practical' Kabbalah of names, amulets and angelic invocations. The latter is where magic re-enters by the front door — through the holy rather than the forbidden. Medieval compilations such as 'Sefer Raziel HaMalach,' the Book of Raziel the Angel, gathered angelology and protective formulae, and the book itself was kept in the house as an amulet against fire and harm. The kame'a, the written amulet, and the contemplation of divine Names like the Shem ha-Mephorash belong to this stream. We describe all of it as religious history and folklore, not as anything to attempt.
Its most famous offspring is the Golem. The idea reaches back to Psalm 139:16, where the word golmi names the unformed substance God shaped, and to the rabbinic image of Adam first kneaded as a lifeless mass; the technique, in the legends, is the holy permutation of letters and the Name, the Sefer Yetzirah read as a manual of creation. The story everyone knows attaches it to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, who supposedly fashioned a clay protector for the ghetto — but honesty requires the footnote: that attribution is a nineteenth-century literary development, not a record from the Maharal's own sixteenth-century life. What the Golem really preserves is a meditation, and a profound one: that to create life is to create something you may not be able to control, and that the proper end of the story is always the unmaking. It is the tradition's warning to itself about the power it could not stop dreaming of.
Magic and witchcraft in Jewish dreams
Judaism has an unusually developed dream tradition, and it sits in the same key as everything above. The Talmud's great dream passage, in Berakhot 55a–57b, holds that 'a dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read,' and — more startling — that 'all dreams follow the mouth': the interpretation given to a dream helps determine what it becomes. The dream is treated as a real but ambiguous channel, 'one-sixtieth of prophecy,' never to be trusted whole and never to be ignored.
So when magic or witchcraft surfaces in a Jewish-framed dream, the tradition supplies a ready grammar. A dream of forbidden sorcery, of casting or being cursed, tends to stage the very tension the law is built on — the pull between trusting and controlling, between waiting on providence and seizing the lever yourself. A dream of an amulet, a holy name, or a protective figure leans the other way, toward the longing to be guarded. Read in this light the dream is not an omen to be feared but a letter to be opened, and it asks the oldest Jewish question about power: when you reached for it, who were you no longer trusting?
How to read it
If magic appears in your own dreaming and you want to read it through this tradition, begin with the direction of trust. Were you grasping for a shortcut — a spell, a charm, a forbidden source — to force an outcome you could not wait for? The Jewish tradition would gently turn the dream into a mirror: what is the thing you are trying to compel, and what would it mean to release your grip on it? Were you instead the one cursed or fascinated, the target of another's hidden art? Then ask, as the rabbis did over the medium of Endor, whether the threat is real or whether fear has gone looking for a sorcerer to blame.
And carry out the question the whole tradition keeps alive between Maimonides and the mystics. The power that moved in your dream — was it something out there that you must guard against, or something in here that you are afraid to own and so have dressed as forbidden?
A careful note
Everything above is presented as Jewish religious history, law, and folklore — not as instruction. The amulets, the divine Names, the golem-legends and the dream-practices are described as objects of belief and study belonging to the tradition that holds them, never as procedures to perform or as a means to summon, bind, or affect anything or anyone. There is nothing here to enact, and the practical Kabbalah in particular has always been hedged, within Judaism itself, by warnings to leave it alone.
We write about this tradition with respect for living Judaism, in which the mainstream view across the centuries — and emphatically Maimonides' — has been to keep well clear of magic and to trust in God instead. A symbol of sorcery in a dream is something to reflect on, not a power to seek. If a recurring dream is causing real distress, that is a matter for rest, for trusted people, and where needed for a professional — and, in the spirit of the tradition itself, far better met by prayer and study than by any charm.
Frequently asked questions
Does Judaism believe magic is real?
For most of its history, yes — which is exactly why it forbade it. With the major exception of Maimonides, who in the 'Mishneh Torah' dismissed sorcery, astrology and amulets as 'falsehood and lies,' the dominant biblical and rabbinic view treated magic as a genuine and dangerous power. The Torah bans the sorcerer, the medium and the necromancer (Exodus 22:18; Deuteronomy 18:10–11; Leviticus 20:27), and the story of the medium of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 even depicts a forbidden conjuring that works. The prohibition was never really 'this is fake'; it was 'this is real, and to reach for it is to trust something other than God.'
What is the difference between Kabbalah and magic in Judaism?
The scholar Gershom Scholem distinguished two streams. Kabbalah Iyyunit is speculative and contemplative — the study of the divine emanations and the structure of God's hidden life, aimed at understanding and devotion. Kabbalah Ma'asit, 'practical Kabbalah,' is the working folklore of amulets, divine Names and angelic invocations, and this is where something like magic re-enters Jewish tradition, framed as holy rather than forbidden. Mainstream Judaism has always treated practical Kabbalah with caution and reserved even its study for the mature and learned. The two should not be confused: most of what is called 'Kabbalah' is contemplative mysticism, not spell-craft.
Is the Golem a real Jewish tradition?
The idea is genuinely old; the famous story is not as old as people think. The word 'golem' appears in Psalm 139:16 for unformed matter, and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 65b) already tells of sages creating a man and a calf through the mystical 'Book of Formation' (Sefer Yetzirah). But the celebrated tale of the Golem of Prague, built by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the Maharal) to protect the ghetto, is a nineteenth-century literary development rather than a record from the Maharal's own time. The legend's lasting meaning is a warning: to create life is to make something you may be unable to control, which is why every Golem story ends in the unmaking.
What did Maimonides think about witchcraft and amulets?
He rejected them outright. In the Laws of Idolatry in his 'Mishneh Torah,' Maimonides treats sorcery, divination, astrology, incantations and amulets as empty deceptions — 'all of them falsehood and lies' by which ancient idolaters fooled the gullible. On his rationalist reading, the Torah forbade these practices not because they are potent and dangerous but because they are unreal and unworthy of a thinking person. His position split the tradition: where the Talmud and the Kabbalists feared magic as real, Maimonides dismissed it as nothing — and Jewish thought has argued between those poles ever since.
How does Jewish tradition interpret dreams about magic?
Through one of the richest dream-frameworks in any religion. The Talmud's dream passage (Berakhot 55a–57b) calls a dream 'one-sixtieth of prophecy,' warns that 'a dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read,' and famously holds that 'all dreams follow the mouth' — the interpretation shapes the outcome. A dream of forbidden magic, in this light, tends to dramatize the core tension of the whole subject: the pull between trusting and controlling, between waiting on providence and grasping the lever. Rather than an omen to fear, it is treated as a letter to be opened and read wisely.
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