TikTok is awash in tarot readers, crystal healers, astrology influencers and wellness gurus promising access to unseen forces. Influencers peddle alternative COVID cures and supernatural explanations<\/a> for current events. Essayists and social sciences are attributing the popularity <\/a>of the occult, the supernatural and conspiracy-minded thinking to a rejection of institutional authority. In a period of profound economic and political instability, they suggest, people seek metaphysical answers when the official explanations feel insufficient.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tGet The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition \t\t\t\tBy signing up, you agree to the terms<\/a><\/p>\n But if this all feels very 2026, a new exhibit at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research suggests we\u2019ve been here before.<\/p>\n \t \u201cJews Are Magic,\u201d<\/a> now open at YIVO\u2019s Manhattan headquarters, explores the Jewish fascination with mysticism, fortune telling, amulets, psychics and occult practices. While the exhibit reaches back to the biblical and Talmudic periods, its main focus is on the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. In the face of increasing urbanization, oppression in Russia and the pull of assimilation, Jews in Eastern Europe and New York\u2019s Lower East Side, no less than their non-Jewish neighbors, found solace in the occult.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this time period, when people commonly think that sort of magic is getting left at the wayside and people are becoming more modern, they\u2019re just as engaged with these unseen realities as they were beforehand,\u201d said Samuel Glauber, a specialist on the Jewish occult and adviser to the exhibit.<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t just the huddled masses. Writers, intellectuals and scientists were fascinated by the supernatural, adding a sheen of respectability to fortune-telling, seances and what Sigmund Freud called the \u201cuncanny.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibit includes palm-reading manuals, amulets against the evil eye, fortune-telling guides and advertisements for Jewish psychics drawn from YIVO\u2019s archives. They promise to help readers and clients find romance, settle lawsuits and cure illness. One display includes heavily used Yiddish divination books whose margins still contain penciled calculations from long-ago readers trying to conjure their futures.<\/p>\n At least in theory, Jewish tradition forbids such practices. The exhibit opens with an admonition in Deuteronomy against consulting with an \u201cenchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits.\u201d Nevertheless, folk religion flouted these prohibitions, and many rabbis went along.<\/p>\n \u201cOfficially, these kinds of materials are, at some level, considered unacceptable,\u201d Eddy Portnoy, YIVO\u2019s senior academic advisor and director of exhibitions, said during a tour of the exhibit last week. \u201cYet a lot of rabbis participate in this.\u201d<\/p>\n \t Some of the exhibit\u2019s most poignant artifacts are drawn from a cache of roughly 5,000 kvitlekh, or handwritten petitions, sent to Rabbi Eliyahu Guttmacher, a 19th-century Polish rabbi and mystic known as the \u201cTzaddik of Grodzisk.\u201d The letters were discovered in an attic in 1932 by YIVO collectors and offer an intimate archive of Jewish anxiety on the edge of modernity.<\/p>\n After Guttmacher reportedly cured a child believed to be possessed by a demon, Jews from across partitioned Poland began writing to him seeking help with illness, infertility, poverty, bad luck and psychological torment. The letters blur the line between religion, folk healing and occult practice. Guttmacher\u2019s responses haven\u2019t survived, but a nearby display case includes various spells written by other rabbis, meant to ward off the evil eye, which often invoke kabbalah, the Jewish mystical practice that offered rabbis an acceptable foothold in the esoteric.<\/p>\n The stars of \u201cJews Are Magic,\u201d though, are the flamboyant hustlers, healers and self-invented mystics who turned Jewish occultism into performance art and entrepreneurial spectacle.<\/p>\n Among the most colorful is Naftali Herz Imber, best remembered today as the poet who wrote the words that became \u201cHatikvah,\u201d Israel\u2019s national anthem.<\/p>\n Long before that, however, Imber was touring America in flowing robes as a clairvoyant known as \u201cThe Mahatma\u201d and \u201cThe Apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 Masters.\u201d<\/p>\n \t Imber\u2019s career as a clairvoyant eventually collapsed into alcoholism, bar fights and arrests, but his wit apparently never deserted him. Thrown out of a Zionist congress for bad behavior, he reportedly shrugged and said: \u201cThey still have to sing my song.\u201d<\/p>\n Another standout is Khayem-Mordkhe Shiller-Shkolnik, perhaps the closest thing prewar Poland had to a celebrity psychic.<\/p>\n Born in a shtetl near Lublin in 1874, Shiller-Shkolnik fused occultism with the language of modern science and self-improvement. He advertised expertise in hypnosis, telepathy, handwriting analysis, phrenology (skull-reading) and \u201cpsycho-phrenology,\u201d a discipline of his own invention.<\/p>\n Glauber, the Miriam Barr Librarian for Jewish & Near Eastern Studies at Washington University, said practitioners like Shiller-Shkolnick took advantage of the burgeoning market for mass-market periodicals and books to become their era\u2019s influencers.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was a master of press advertisement,\u201d Glauber said. \u201cThe amount of coverage he was able to generate for himself was really incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n On the Lower East Side, celebrity psychic Abraham Hochman operated out of 169 Rivington Street, where he dispensed prophecies, published manuals and built a small business empire that included custom wedding contracts, a wedding hall and a Catskills hotel.<\/p>\n Hochman specialized in finding runaway husbands \u2014 a genuine social crisis in immigrant Jewish New York.<\/p>\n In one celebrated case, Hochman told a woman exactly where and when she would find her missing husband: on the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at 10 p.m. She arrived with a police officer and found the man leaning against a lamppost precisely where Hochman \u201cpredicted.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\tby email and never miss our top stories\n\t\t<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/abstract-geometric-background-shapes-texture-overlay-e1779790735250-640x400.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n\t\tYiddish advertisement for Professor Abraham Hochman\u2019s Clairvoyancy services. Reprinted in \u2018Der shlisl tsu der nevueh\u2019 (\u2018The Key to Prophesy\u2019) in 1909. (YIVO via JTA)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_1749-1-640x400.jpeg\")
<\/a>
\n\t\tYIVO\u2019s Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit \u2018Jews Are Magic,\u2019 with a reproduction of a High Holiday card featuring a Jewish palm reader, Warsaw c. 1910. (JTA)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/abstract-geometric-background-shapes-texture-overlay-2-e1779790707610-640x400.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n\t\tNaftali Herz Imber, before writing the poem that became \u2018Hatikvah,\u2019 worked as a clairvoyant known as \u2018The Mahatma\u2019 and \u2018The Apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 Masters.\u2019 (YIVO via JTA)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/trefer_postcard_c._1910-e1779792427694-300x480.jpg\")
<\/a>