Possession by the dead entered Jewish literature in force in the sixteenth century, and the setting was Safed, the Galilean hill town where Lurianic kabbalah was made. The circle of Isaac Luria treated the wandering souls of sinners as a standing feature of the cosmos, and its members recorded exorcisms as case histories: Hayyim Vital's writings describe possessions he attended and the procedures used, and later collections gathered dozens of such narratives, with names, dates, witnesses and verbatim interrogations, a genre scholars now read as a window on early modern Jewish communities under stress. The narratives follow a stable pattern, historians note, and did real communal work: the spirit's confessed sins preached repentance more vividly than any sermon, and the successful exorcism displayed the authority of the kabbalists and the efficacy of the tradition's holy names.
Cases continued to be reported for centuries, in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman lands and into the twentieth century, with a famous Jerusalem exorcism recorded in 1999; rabbinic authorities have ranged from full belief through reinterpretation of the phenomena as illness, and modern scholarship, following Gershom Scholem's foundational studies of the concept, treats the dybbuk complex as kabbalistic doctrine meeting popular need. Its cultural afterlife outgrew the rite entirely: S. Ansky's drama The Dybbuk, written from his ethnographic expeditions and premiered in 1920, carried the possessed bride and her exorcism into world theatre, opera and film, making the dybbuk the most famous Jewish spirit and its exorcism one of the tradition's best-known rituals, known now to millions who will never see one performed.