An Inheritance of Dreams

How did Jewish men and women in early modern east-central Europe respond to their dreams? Some answers to this question emerge from a manuscript written by Yehuda Katz, a Jewish man from seventeenth-century Żółkiew. Writing after the Khmelnytsky uprisings of 1648, Yehuda presented his own attitudes to dreams and memorialized the dream-related practices of his mother Frieda and sister Henna. Whereas Yehuda was inspired by popular kabbalistic literature to record his dreams, Frieda and Henna observed the ‘dream-fast’, a halakhic ritual meant to neutralize bad dreams through fasting. Drawing on several sources, I argue that early modern Jews also associated the ‘dream-fast’ with penitence, relief, and even divination. Through Yehuda’s manuscript, I explore writing and fasting as two pious Jewish responses to dreams with distinctly gendered overtones.