Quoted By:
>Even some religious ceremonies, still in use today among Jews, have an undoubted magical and superstitious origin: they are, among others, the one known as tashlij, consisting of waving clothes in the waters of a river or throwing crumbs on the first day of Rosh. ha-Shaná (Jewish New Year), symbolizing that the sins committed during the year that ended were thrown into the water to be carried away by the current (in its origins it is, in all probability, a propitiatory rite of the water spirits); or that which takes place on Hoshana rabba (the great supplication), that is, the seventh day of the festival of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles), when the ground is struck with a mound of five willow branches and which appears to be bound together in their origins for invocations for rain
>Many rely on Maimonides – a medieval Jewish philosopher – to reject magic, but even if we have to emphasize Maimonides' radical opposition, other Jewish scholars adopted less belligerent positions in relation to magic. This is the case of the prominent Catalan jurist Shelomoh ben Adret (1235-1310), as is deduced from the epistolary correspondence he maintained with the Provençal Jew En Bonet Abram, and this is a good reflection of the controversy surrounding the work of Maimonides who was involved in the Sephardic Judaism since the beginning of the 13th century. In the correspondence Bonet Abram departs from the authority of Maimonides and attacks all arts and practices related to magic; however, Adret leaves the door open to its use for therapeutic purposes
