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The term ‘Jewish horror’ has not been given yet a clear-cut definition in current scholarship. It would apparently sound as a straightforward label for cultural products delving into a a hazy yet identifiable cluster of frightful, occult, or grotesque figments of the imagination rooted in Jewish tradition, materializing timeless and exotic figures such as golems (artificial humans revived from clay by means of magic) and dybbuks (spirits of the dead possessing the living). In the last years, these ghosts of Jewish mythology have been protagonists in widely distributed horror films, such as The Golem by Doron and Yoav Paz (2018), The Vigil by Keith Thomas (2019), and The Offering by Oliver Park (2023), to name a few. Horror literature, too, is reinterpreting classic Jewish motifs with a contemporary, as in the a recently published anthology of short stories edited by Josh Schlossberg with the title The Jewish Book of Horror (Denver Horror Collective, 2021).

We can claim that, nowadays, Jewish horror is experiencing a revival in globalized pop culture. In contrast to its appeal among the general public, academia appears to be still stalling. Scholarly investigations of the Jewish side of horror are scant, even in the thriving field of horror studies, which is expanding more and more from Western-centric premises towards post-colonial concerns. Jewish culture would indeed provide fertile ground for an investigation of the uncharted forerunners of the fantastic, the weird, and the pulp. These surprising incarnations of the fearsome were incorporated Jewish literatures – in Hebrew and other Judeo-languages, such as Yiddish and Ladino – already in antiquity, the middle ages, and the early modern period, before the rise of the gothic and the horror in European cultures.

The common thread between these miscellaneous sources, including contemporary ones, is their potential for emotional performance. All these materials work as ‘emotion machines,’ triggering feelings of fear, repulsion, or morbid fascination in the public, for either educational or recreational purposes. In light of this emotional function, ‘horror’ can be described as a mode of expression aimed at eliciting the emotion of fear. Thus, ‘Jewish horror’ can indicate the manifestation of the fear and its cognate emotions in cultural products that can be identified as Jewish, due to their peculiar content or intended public.

The project “Horror and Manifestations of Fear in Early Modern Judaism” focuses on the literary representation and enactment of fear in Jewish textual culture. The inquiry addresses motifs and theories of horror in Hebrew literature from the early modern period (16th to 18th centuries), combining historical criticism with the study of emotions as a cultural means of knowledge transmission. The three-year project aspires to produce a monographic introduction to horror as an analytical category in Jewish literature, in addition to inaugurating a research network around the new field of Jewish horror.

The project is funded by a research grant of the German Research Fundation (DFG).