Simulations of Capital Punishment
Patrick B. Koch
My project explores the transformation of theosophical concepts and elitist exercises into everyday practices, with a special emphasis on Lurianic Kabbalah. More specifically, it analyses early modern adaptations of the four rabbinic types of capital punishment—strangling, drowning, decapitation, and burning. By investigating the literary strategies that promote the implementation of these highly symbolic simulations, the monograph will address both the social meaning of physically performed practices and the spiritual dimension of imaginative exercises of self-execution. It will examine both the mechanisms of performative speech acts and attitudes towards emotional and physical pain by paying attention to the distinction between the role that language plays in rituals and the language that tells us about rituals. Ultimately, this comprehensive study aims to show how the engendering of “as if” experiences of dying serves different functions—such as purification, self-punishment, or subordination—and how the rabbis’ purely theoretical and legalistic discussions were transformed into a recurrent pattern of death and spiritual rebirth in early modern literature. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how the initially esoteric practices developed into a crucial aspect of an everyday pietistic lifestyle. Particular attention will be paid to the place and purpose of capital punishment in prayer, hagiography, and rituals that are performed on a daily, monthly, or annual basis. The reception history of these three fields of application will be presented in the context of Hebrew book printing of the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries.