General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

The Dybbuk

The Dybbuk (Yiddish: Der dibek; Hebrew: Ha-Dibuk), also known by its alternative title Between Two Worlds, is a dramatic work by the writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, 1863–1920) that became the most celebrated play in the history of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater.¹ Set among nineteenth-century Hasidic Jewry in the Pale of Settlement of the Tsarist Empire, it tells a story of thwarted love ending in a fatal demonic possession.²

Key fact	Detail
Author	S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, 1863–1920), writer, ethnographer, and folklorist¹
Alternative title	Between Two Worlds (Der dibek—tsvishn tsvey veltn)²
Composition	Conceived as early as 1911; first drafted in Russian in late 1913, then translated by An-ski into Yiddish³^•⁴
World premiere	December 9, 1920, Warsaw, by the Vilna Troupe, after An-ski's death⁵
Landmark production	Habima, Moscow, 1922, in Bialik's Hebrew translation, directed by Evgenii Vakhtangov, starring Hanna Rovina as Leah¹
First-year reach	More than 390 Vilna Troupe performances to a cumulative audience of over 200,000⁵
Afterlife	A 1937 Yiddish film directed by Michał Waszyński; at least sixteen operas in five languages¹^•²

Plot

The play is set in a small East European town, presumably in the nineteenth century. Khonen, a poor yeshiva student devoted to kabbalistic study, loves Leah, the daughter of a wealthy man. Leah's father has betrothed her to another for material reasons. Khonen pursues every magical means to stop the wedding, but, as he says, "they didn't help—not the fasts, not the ablutions, not the mortifications of the flesh, not the kabbalistic spells!" He dies from the intensity of these efforts and returns as a spirit, a dybbuk, to possess Leah's body on her wedding day.¹^•⁶

The last two acts are an extended exorcism before a rabbinical court. The exorcising rabbi drives the dybbuk from Leah's body, but she dies; in the final moments Reb Azriel rushes into the synagogue saying, "We are too late," and the spirits of Leah and Khonen are reunited.¹^•⁶ One critic dismissed the result as simply "an ethnographic museum," a charge that reflects how densely the customs gathered on An-ski's expedition appear in nearly every line.⁶

The dybbuk in Jewish tradition

In Jewish usage since the sixteenth century, a dibbuk is an evil spirit that enters a living person and cleaves to the soul, speaking through the person's mouth as a foreign personality. The word is an abbreviated form of the Hebrew dibbuk m'ru'aḥ ra'a (a cleaving of an evil spirit) or dibbuk min ha'ḥizonim (a dibbuk from the outside); the term entered literature among Ashkenazi Jews only in the seventeenth century.² Later explanation held that some dibbukim were the spirits of the dead whose bodies had not been buried properly, interwoven with the kabbalistic doctrine of gilgul, the transmigration of souls. In Hasidic belief, the power to exorcise was divinely bestowed on the Baal Shem Tov and on spiritually advanced Hasidic masters, and successful exorcism could redeem the wandering soul by granting it tikkun, repair.²

An-ski's treatment departed from the tradition. As the scholar David Roskies observed, "No story before Ansky's had ever told of a dybbuk who was a lover in disguise."²

Origins in the ethnographic expedition

An-ski proposed and directed the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition (1912–1914), financed primarily by Baron Horace Guinzbourg, which traveled through areas of heavy Jewish concentration in the Pale of Settlement, notably Podolia and Volhynia. The expeditioners collected folklore, folktales, religious artifacts, folk art, photographs, and field recordings of music; by most accounts the accumulated material came to significantly more than 8,000 items, including 500 wax cylinders of folk music.²^•³

According to the account told about the expedition, An-ski and Joel Engel, the head of its music section, heard from an innkeeper's wife the tale of frustrated love and demonic possession that became the substance of the play, recounted as an actual occurrence. Variants of the story differ on where, when, and even whether it was told, and An-ski's source may instead have been a composite of tales heard from town to town. He wrote the play on the road, in trains and horse-drawn carts, pouring into it the same curiosities that went into his ethnographic questionnaire of 2,087 questions.²^•⁶

Composition and translations

An-ski conceived the play as early as 1911 and drafted it in Russian in late 1913, anticipating a Russian-speaking audience. He submitted it to Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theater, who was favorably impressed and suggested adding the role of the Messenger, a neutral figure who serves as the author's veiled presence on stage. The Russian production never materialized; by most accounts Stanislavsky concluded the play would resonate best with a Jewish audience performed by a Yiddish company. A Russian version presented to the censor in 1916 was later discovered and published in Moscow.²^•³^•¹

An-ski translated the play into Yiddish, but his initial translation was lost during his flight from the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 coup. In 1918 Haim Nahman Bialik published a Hebrew translation in the journal Hat'kufa. An-ski then made a second Yiddish translation, published in 1919, working mostly from Bialik's Hebrew version, so that the play passed from Russian to Yiddish, to Hebrew, and back to Yiddish. Before his death he had completed the work in manuscript as a four-act play.²^•⁷

Productions

An-ski died of a heart attack in Warsaw in November 1920, aged 57, shortly after a meeting of a new ethnographic society he was trying to form. On December 9, 1920, after the traditional thirty-day mourning period, the Vilna Troupe opened the world premiere of the Yiddish version in Warsaw. The acclaim was immediate; in the first year alone the troupe performed the play more than 390 times to a cumulative audience of over 200,000 theatergoers, and two nearly identical productions by two branches of the company toured simultaneously.⁶^•⁵

The Hebrew production by Habima, which opened in Moscow in 1922 using Bialik's translation, directed by Evgenii Vakhtangov and starring Hanna Rovina as Leah, became the troupe's signature work. It accompanied Habima on tours around the world beginning four years later, was staged more than one thousand times reviving Vakhtangov's direction, and remains the play's best-known production. Rovina's portrayal later formed the basis of the theater's logo, a girl in a white dress with two long braids.¹^•⁸^•⁹

The play was subsequently produced in Polish, Ukrainian, German, English, French, Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian, and Russian, and became the subject of several movies, an opera, and a ballet. The best-known film is the 1937 Yiddish version shot in Poland, directed by Michał Waszyński, with Lili Liliana as Leah, Leon Liebgold as Khonen, and Avrom Morevski as the Miropolyer Tsadik.¹ Later adaptations include Tony Kushner's English version A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds and Krzysztof Warlikowski's Polish production combining the play with a short story by Hanna Krall, seen at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2008.¹⁰^•¹¹

Operatic and musical legacy

The Dybbuk has seeded the composition of the greatest number of operas of any Jewish subject: at least sixteen by the count of the musicologist Neil W. Levin, in five languages, with more on the way. The first, Il Dibuk by the Italian composer Lodovico Rocca, premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1934. Aaron Copland used the play's nign, a wordless song, in his Vitebsk Trio (1929), and David Tamkin's opera premiered in New York City in 1951.²^•¹²

Significance

The play depicts the shtetl as a place saturated in magic, where the dead mingle with the living, and it preserves the oral traditions An-ski spent his last decade collecting. Commentators have also read it as an expression of the horror of a world in collapse: the possessed Leah's cry, "You are not my bridegroom!", delivered in a voice that is not her own, has been described as addressed to modernity itself and to the waves of murder to come. An-ski did not live to see the worst of it; the communities whose songs and legends fill the play were largely destroyed two decades later.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Theater and dance › Playwrights and dramatists › Language, minority, and identity dramatists › Yiddish-language dramatists

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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