Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1970 study of pre-kabbalistic Jewish magic and superstition remains the seminal work in its field. I haven’t found anything else dealing with Jewish magic that isn’t about the Kabbalah. He sets his cut off date for his sources at 1600, the year that kabbalah was popularized, but which makes a convenient end date for our SCA purposes. He argues that alongside traditional religion was a lively folk religion that was at times so popular that rabbis had no choice but to accept it or even incorporate it into the religion. For example, he argues that the mezzuzah was originally a form of amulet that got incorporated and remains a part of the religion to this day.
Trachtenberg takes us from forbidden and allowed types of magic. It was allowed to force a demon or angel to do your will, but was forbidden to use your own skills to effect magic under the commandment “you shall not suffer a witch to live.” Although it may seem like splitting hairs, it is a hair that needed to be split because the Christians living around the Jews were doing both regularly, and the rabbis needed that commandment to mean something enforceable. They couldn’t just say “well that one didn’t mean anything.” So the hairs were split.
He then discusses several types of allowed magic including amulets, astrology, divination, necromancy, and medieval medicine, which was largely sorcery because it was believed that bad things happened to people because of other people’s sorcery. He includes an appendix about how to create an angel’s name which will largely only be of interest if you read Hebrew.
Overall the book is interesting, and unique.