הערות מבוא להתגבשות התודעה המגית בשלהי ימי הביניים

The article examines a broad distinction between "Ashkenazi magic," which gravitates toward popular or folk practices, and "Sephardic magic," with in which rationalist currents incline toward a learned, more scholarly form of magic rooted in scientific thought. It argues that:(a) Conservative groups within the Sephardic and Provençal cultural contexts wavered between folk magic and learned magic.(b) Rationalist thinkers in these contexts oscillated between endorsing a scientific conception of magic and embracing Maimonides’ uncompromising rejection of it.(c) Jewish creativity in the Ashkenazi regions developed almost exclusively along a spectrum that ranged from varying degrees of folk magic to the radical stance represented in the approach of the author of Sefer Ḥasidim .To substantiate these arguments, the article applies them to a test case: the question of the existence of spiritual entities and the extent to which they were taken into consideration.