Streaming Availability: Public Domain
The Dybbuk is the most important film about the specifically Jewish, specifically Kabbalist conception of demons. We know our Christian demons very well, they've filled pop culture. The Dybbuk, however, is a bit more obscure. I grew up in a secular Jewish home and I never feared this monster.
The Dybbuks emerge in the Middle Ages as souls of the dead turned foul. The word "dybbuk" means "clinging", as in the dead holding onto living bodies. With the mysticism Kabbalah came a more spiritual and fantastic view of the universe. There are Rabbis who are treated as saints, good spirits who can be summoned to aid the living. But with good spirits come evil spirits. Like the Christians, Jews perform exorcisms against their demons. Notably, however, even in the classic exorcism tales, there's a mark of Jewish bitterness and cynicism. The rituals are not always successful. The great Rabbi Isaac Luria, immensely important in shaping Kabbalah, failed to save a young woman possessed by a wicked uncle in a famous episode. The demon choked her to death. And Dybbuks have not disappeared. Exorcisms still happen in the modern day, there was a 1999 exorcism performed in Dimona, Israel, and you can find videos of that event online.
As for our movie today, The Dybbuk is not the most explicitly "horror" film you'll find about Jewish demons. It is really more of a tragic romance with ghostly elements than a movie made specifically to scare its audience. It is an adaptation of a 1910s stage drama of the same name by the Russian Jewish playwright, S. Ansky. That play continues to be performed regularly today, and not because of spookiness. But The Dybbuk is a terrifying movie for reasons beyond its actual text. Its historical context is what is most disturbing.
The Dybbuk is a 1937 Yiddish film shot in a town called Kazimierz Dolny in the Second Polish Republic. By the end of 1942, with Poland now-erased from the map, the Nazi butchers would declare that Kazimierz Dolny was officially "free of the Jews" after most of its inhabitants were gassed in the extermination camp, Belzec. And while some Jews of Kazimierz Dolny would survive the war, the Yiddish film industry would never recover. Its speakers would flee around the world, and the language (a Germanic tongue) would lose much of its cultural prominence compared to Hebrew. The stars of The Dybbuk, Leon Liebgold and Lili Liliana, were lucky to have been in the US in 1939 at the start of the war. Today they are buried together as husband and wife in a cemetery in Queens. Many of the cast members were not so lucky.
That means The Dybbuk finds itself in a heartbreaking place as one of the last documents of a world that would be destroyed. You can hear the song of a cantor who would die in the Warsaw Ghetto. The shtetl life of the Ashkenazi Hassidim is depicted in great detail, from a Rabbi's court to the various minor details of a wedding ceremony's hymns and prayers. The Dybbuk was not meant to be a documentary, yet it finds itself as an invaluable historical artifact. Perhaps even the filmmakers were aware how tenuous this form of life would be and felt they had to show what they could before the nightmare to come. This film is a terrible reminder that the Nazis might have been defeated, but they were unsuccessful in their deranged schemes. My own grandparents lost their entire families and would never have a home in Poland again.
Now as for The Dybbuk the movie, it's the story of star-crossed lovers, Khannon (Liebgold) and Leah (Liliana) each the children of two best friends who were promised to each other before their births. When this promise is ignored by Leah's father, Sender (Mojżesz Lipman) for a more profitable match, Khannon turns to despair. Already a boy dangerously obsessed with Kabbalah and fasting, he summons Satan to toss away his life. He willingly becomes a Dybbuk to possess Leah, to have her in death if he cannot have her in life. And intriguingly, The Dybbuk imagines this as an almost heroic act, since Leah will later join her lover in the conclusion of the film, rejecting her Rabbi's exorcism and choosing death as well. Again, Jewish exorcisms are often failures. The story becomes a kind of Romeo & Juliet with ghosts, it's a solid drama.
As a horror film though, The Dybbuk only occasionally scary. We never see any Satan or ghosts or demons on screen. The only supernatural figure is Meszulach (Ajzyk Samberg), a mysterious man who wanders in and out of the plot. He's this stern creature, almost Rasputin-like, with terrible knowledge of what is to come but no little interest in stopping it. I believe he is meant to represent the divine forces in this drama, which are disturbingly ambivalent and inscrutable. The most scary scene of The Dybbuk is the wedding, where Leah, an unwitting bride, imagines her Big Day as this moment of chaos. The poor beggers invited in are a nasty grasping horde. Leah finds herself dancing with a figure dressed as Death. The film turns very German Expressionist in these instances.
But horror or not, The Dybbuk is an extremely important film. Yiddish literature is full of many stories like this of unhappy marriages born of village politics and the supernatural forces that pray on the miseries of heteronormativity. The Dybbuk is not just a classic film in a doomed world, it's the best movie depicting that topic. And I love the imagination involved of using demons not as purely negative scourges of humanity, but vehicles for romantic escape, a kind of triumph beyond reality. The current version of this movie was a heroic effort of restoration cobbled together from a dozen or so badly damaged incomplete prints. It is a miracle we have The Dybbuk today.
Next Time! In place of movies that are a hundred-years-old, how about ones that are merely fifty-years-old? We got a big one tomorrow, Rosemary's Baby.
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