Jewish Magic and Superstition

By: Joshua Trachtenberg

Narrated by: Gary Tredwell

Discover the rich tapestry of folklore woven into Jewish traditions. From magical creatures like Golems and Succubi to talismans, charms and even the esoteric origins of the celebratory cry of "mazel tov", this comprehensive review by Joshua Trachtenberg, a Reform rabbi and PhD holder from Columbia University, offers a detailed and captivating history of Jewish magical belief and practice from the 10th to 15th century.

©1939 Joshua Trachtenberg (P)2022 Licensing Management, Inc.

Fascinating information, flawed reading

The information about Jewish magic and superstition is fascinating and well researched. No doubt it could be updated, since this book was published in 1939, but I highly recommend the content as is.

This audiobook is marred because the producer has followed what seems to be an iron-clad role of the audiobook industry: If a book has a large number of words from languages other than English (as this book does), the person chosen to read the book for the recording shall have no knowledge of how to pronounce those words correctly. The reader of this book is not even aware that the English name of the fourth book of the Bible is not Numerology but Numbers. It grates on the ears to hear frequent correct references to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, interspersed with equally frequent references to the book of "Numerology."

awful performance

in addition to the fact that the performer didn't even try to look up how to pronounce the Hebrew correctly, he insists on saying "quote end quote" whenever there are quotation marks. in the original text, Trachtenberg sometimes intersperses 3 or 4 quoted fragments in the same sentence. the constant reading out of all the quotation marks may be technically faithful to the book, but it's so distracting as to make it unlistenable