In his 1928 study of ‘Jewish beliefs and customs connected with death’, H. Hayoys documented the belief that  ‘99% of deaths were caused by an evil eye.’ [Khayoys, 1928] The same was true of most illnesses and misfortunes. Abraham Rechtman, an ethnographer who travelled through the shtetlekh of Ukraine in 1913 with the famous S. An-Ski Ethnographic Expedition, also noted the pervasiveness of beliefs in the evil eye and of remedies against it. He also described how throughout the area the expedition visited, they encountered professional exorcists and magical healers, both men and women, skilled in providing these remedies.

Often translated in English as 'exorcist', the male practitioners were known in Yiddish as shprekhers, opshprekhers or farshprekhers,  and the women as shprekherins, shprekherkes,opshprekherins, opshprekherkes, or farsphrekherins – literally 'speak awayers', a reference to the incantations they used. While male opshprekhers provided their clients with written charms in Hebrew and Aramaic, often given to the customer in the form of an amulet like the one in the picture above, female shprekherins spoke their incantations by heart, in their native Yiddish or in one of the non-Jewish languages that they and their clients spoke everyday. Noting that opshprekherins were usually more popular than their male counterparts, Rechtman recorded that the expedition encountered these female elders in every single town that they visited, and that the most skilled among them were often widely sought out, with people travelling many miles for their services.

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Using a mixture of incantations, movements and herbal and natural remedies, opshprekherins had a cure for every kind of illness. According to Rechtman, they were particularly sought out by pregnant women, especially those pregnant for the first time. Their role therefore overlapped with that of the midwife, and some of the techniques and incantations they used were also used by midwives. Bobe Tzinke, the midwife of Wselub, for example, was particularly gifted at ‘pouring led’ – a procedure that, also performed with wax, involved pouring the substance over the head of the affected person into a bowl of cold water. Used to remove a number of afflictions, this method could also be used for diagnosis, and as a means of fortune telling, by reading the shapes formed by the wax or led in the water. Another popular remedy was ‘rolling eggs.’ This involved circling a raw egg over the afflicted part of the body whilst saying an incantation. Similarly, this could be used to diagnose the problem, by cracking the egg into a bowl of water and reading its contents. 

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Particularly skilled at these remedies, opshprekherins were paid by their clients, and were often highly sought out, with people travelling many miles to see them. At the same time, many of their remedies and charms were also widely used by women at home. While they shared techniques and formulae with non-Jewish healers in the region, similar practices are also found in Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish communities, suggesting a tradition of Jewish women’s practice like that described by Jill Hammer and Taya Shere in The Hebrew Priestess (2015).

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As their title suggests, opshprekherins’ particular magic lay in their incantations, which were never written down, but passed down orally and never written down. Believing that the power of an incantation could be affected if repeated to an unbeliever, opshprekherins were very reluctant to share their magical words with male researchers. However, the Ansky team did manage to record several examples, as did Rechtman in his hometown of Proskurov and later in New York. In contrast to the Jewish tendency to avoid any explicit mention of illness or even certain body parts, these incantations were often very explicit. They frequently evoke natural imagery, and – like the tkhines (Yiddish prayers) used by other ritualists discussed here – call on ancestors whose particular qualities might help the sufferer. Like many of these tkhines, shprekherin's incantations also reveal a deep familiarity with Jewish texts and tradition. 
 

Contrary to their somewhat witchy portrayal in Yiddish literature, memoirs and ethnographic studies suggest that shprekherins were often highly educated women. Again calling into question the division between religion and folklore, many of these so-called ‘folk-healers’ were also active in religious institutions, for example as mikvah attendants, prayer leaders or as the wives of male communal functionaries. In his memoirs of his childhood in Kamieniec Litewski, Yekhezkel Kotik recalls an opshprekherke named Golda. Married to a very learned preacher, she was known as ‘Golder the preacheress’, and was rumoured to herself be something of a scholar. Another famous Ashkenazi memoirist, Y. Y. Trunk, remembered an evil-eye healer and cemetery measurer from the shtetl of Hendrikov, near Warsaw. Describing her as an ‘eyshes khayil’ – a woman of valour – Trunk described her as a deeply religious woman, who, behaving like a rebetsin, spent more time at synagogue than she did at home.

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