Jews, Salem, Witches, Arthur Miller, Communism, Washington, Disney…
SALEM, Massachusetts – No Jews were tried for witchcraft during Salem’s notorious 1692 trials, but the Puritan world in which the hysteria occurred was deeply influenced by Jewish history and religious law.
-Locating their town on the sea coast north of Boston, the Puritans nodded directly to Jerusalem by calling their settlement Salem. Obsessed with the Hebrew Bible, these separatists identified with the Exodus from Egypt and the vision of life in a New World, covenanted to God. They called themselves “New Zion,” or “Christian Israel,” and the Old Testament was their guide to naming children, towns and mountains, and the legal source for their founding charters…
The practice of burning, hanging or otherwise executing alleged practitioners of black magic went back many centuries, and some if its victims were Jews. In Medieval depictions, Jews are seen wearing white, witch-like hats as they’re tossed into fiery cauldrons to meet their fate. The victims of Europe’s so-called “Burning Times” were usually those on the margins of official society – women, religious minorities, and the poor…
Theologically, the Salem witch trials inadvertently forced a new understanding upon New England’s faithful. As the witch judges realized there might be no end to the accusations, some began to scrutinize the evidence more closely, as well as question long-held beliefs about the nature of evil. “There were no trained lawyers on the [Salem] bench, but all believed that there was a devil and that he contracted secretly with men and women to do his evil work in the colony,” said Peter Charles Hoffer, a historian of Puritan America. “Thus, at least in theory, witches have the power to leave their bodies and in spectral form assault their victims,” wrote Hopper of the episode.
The discrediting and banning of “spectral” evidence – including dreams, premonitions and spirit visions – ultimately shut down the witch trials in 1693, with 49 accused parties released from jail for lack of non-spectral evidence. Four years later, the Puritans held a day of fasting and soul-searching, with a public admission of error by witch judge Samuel Sewall…
…Agitated by the “blacklisting” of fellow artists as Communists, Arthur Miller penned “The Crucible” in 1953 as an allegory to McCarthyism. He emphasized the role of hearsay evidence, personal vendettas and political expediency in the 1692 witch trials, leaving Americans to connect those dots with their own Red Scare.
“Gradually, over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind,” said Miller of his linkage with the witch trials and blacklisting. “For whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic,” said Miller.
“The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows — whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people,” said Miller….
In 1992, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel gave remarks to dedicate Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial, and he drew comparisons between religious-fueled persecutions – including the Holocaust – throughout history. The ribbon on a wreath placed near the new memorial read, “Never Again the Burnings,” a reference to centuries of persecution in Europe that managed to gain a foothold in the Puritans’ “New Zion.”
Just a few months after Wiesel affirmed the executed victims’ innocence in Salem, Hollywood took another direction with the 1993 Disney children’s film, “Hocus Pocus.” Problematically for those loyal to history, Disney’s Salem witches actually did “suck the lives out of little children” in their quest to remain young. They also rode broomsticks, turned people into animals, and in general behaved rankly. The film’s goofy Sanderson sisters were revived by accident, 300 years after the witch hangings, and they set out to steal the “life force” from Salem’s trick-or-treating children on Halloween.
-“Hocus Pocus” featured a heavily Jewish or part-Jewish cast – including Bette Midler, Vinessa Shaw, Omri Katz, and Sarah Jessica Parker. The former “Sex in the City” star wound up discovering that her maternal tenth great-grandmother, Esther Elwell, was actually part of the historical Salem witch hysteria…
https://www.timesofisrael.com/more-than-hocus-pocus-to-salems-jewish-past/