by Rabbi Jeremy Rosen
There are many stories about evil spirits who are supposed to surround us and interfere in our lives. That’s one way of explaining evil in our world. Such ideas are still popular amongst the credulous and the superstitious. Most evil spirits are male, like Asmodeus. But the mistress of evil is Lilith. Queen of the night. The name comes from the Hebrew word Liyla which means night. The time she likes to venture forth to cause havoc to men, women, and babies. Her persona might have been derived from Delilah the prostitute who ensnared Samson. She figures prominently in ancient Mesopotamian cultures but is mentioned only once in the Bible in passing, and then not as an evil spirit but as a bird that comes out at night (Isaiah 34:14).
Somewhere and sometime after the Biblical period, Lilith emerged, absorbed from Persian and Mediterranean religions, and she is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud. A woman grows her hair long like Lilith (Eruvin 100b). She deforms fetuses (Niddah 24b.) Anyone sleeping alone in a house will be seized by Lilith (Shabbat 151b ). She is the mother of the evil spirit called Hormin who runs along the ramparts of Machoza, a Babylonian city with a strong Jewish academic population (Bava Bata 73a). Since then, Lilith has become a prominent figure not only in Jewish demonology and superstition but in early Christian apocryphal writing and Muslim mythology.
In Midrash and Myth, she becomes the first wife of Adam, made like him out of the dust. Before Eve who was created later out of Adam’s rib. Lilith introduced Adam to the nefarious possibilities of sexuality and tried to control him. When she was driven out, she became the partner of Satan or Samael and resorted to different ways of subverting humanity. In the Midrash, she is a child killer. Moses pleads with God who threatens to destroy the Israelites after the Golden Calf that He will destroy the Israelite people. Moses pleads that God should not be like Lilith who kills her own children (Numbers Rabbah 16:25). Lilith became the mother of witches and the archetypal bad, dangerous woman and conniving wife. Once they blamed Eve, but then Lilith took over.
The great rationalist rabbis, Maimonides and Menachem Miri rejected the stories of Lilith as non-Jewish superstitions. But it was the medieval Kabbalah that popularized stories about Lilith coming out at nighttime to kill babies and seduce men. Which gave rise to the popularity of amulets, spells, and other prophylactics to ward off Lilith’s malign influence on men and babies. Even to the point of a custom of having a knife at the circumcision ceremony to protect the baby from Lilith should she appear.
With the rise of feminism, Lilith was adopted by Jewish feminists as their mascot and indeed a magazine called Lilith was founded in 1976 by a group of women “to foster discussion of Jewish women’s issues and put them on the agenda of the Jewish community, to give women a greater voice and choice in Jewish life.” An aim I fully approved of then and now.
But not the way things have turned out with organized feminism today. During its early years, Lilith focused on religious topics and the organizational establishment of the Jewish community. They chronicled the fight to ordain women and published frequent updates and articles on the topic.
In recent years Feminist organizations have fallen prey to the rabid anti-Semitism that has infected all the feminists who will overlook any anti-feminism coming from Muslim societies but exclude Jewish feminists from their organizations unless they repudiate Israel. They have denied the rapes and torture of Jewish women on October 7th and have even praised them as legitimate resistance to occupation. And asking for proof of Gazan’s crimes against women. Something they never did when it came to raping Bosnian and Ukranian women, Nigerian or Yazidis. And if you look at the demonstrations against Israel around the world particularly in the USA and Congress you will see how dominant the female presence is and their spokeswomen the most shrill, incoherent, and ignorant they are.
In other words, the destructive and murderous characteristics associated in mythology with Lilith are now the characteristics of modern feminism. Even those of us who never took Lilith seriously previously can now truly say that Lilith has come alive to haunt and demonize the world.
For further details on Lilith, you can refer to the Encyclopedia Judaica/ Demonology.
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Jeremy Rosen was born in Manchester, England, the eldest son of Rabbi Kopul Rosen and Bella Rosen. Rosen's thinking was strongly influenced by his father, who rejected fundamentalist and obscurantist approaches in favour of being open to the best the secular world has to offer while remaining committed to religious life. He was first educated at Carmel College, the school his father had founded based on this philosophical orientation. At his father's direction, Rosen also studied at Be'er Yaakov Yeshiva in Israel (1957–1958 and 1960). He then went on to Merkaz Harav Kook (1961), and Mir Yeshiva (1965–1968) in Jerusalem, where he received semicha from Rabbi Chaim Leib Shmuelevitz in addition to Rabbi Dovid Povarsky of Ponevezh and Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Shapiro of Yeshivat Be'er Ya'akov. In between Rosen attended Cambridge University (1962–1965), graduating with a degree in Moral Sciences.