Dybbuk
In Jewish folk belief, the spirit of a dead person that clings to a living one and speaks through them.
Also: dibbuk, ibbur, possession in jewish folklore
Dybbuk, from the Hebrew for clinging, appears in accounts from the sixteenth century, notably in Safed in Galilee, where Kabbalists described spirits attaching to a person. Eastern European Jewish communities told of a restless soul of someone who had sinned or died too soon, entering a living body and speaking in its own voice. A rabbi or a wonder-working healer, known as a baal shem, was asked to conduct an exorcism, with prayers and the blowing of a shofar. The idea reached a wide audience through S. An-sky's play The Dybbuk, written around 1914. Modern readers often interpret reported cases as a way of speaking about trauma, grief or illness, which the community had few other words for.