When news of my lat­est book, A Prac­ti­cal Guide to Dat­ing a Demon, came out, I start­ed to get mes­sages from Jew­ish read­ers ask­ing the same ques­tion: Are the char­ac­ters in your book Jewish?

Yes, I respond­ed. And also, no.

My last six books have been con­tem­po­rary roman­tic come­dies, and the major­i­ty of my char­ac­ters in these nov­els have been Jew­ish. Some have been deeply con­nect­ed to their Judaism, oth­ers more casu­al­ly so, but it’s always been impor­tant to me to show Jew­ish expe­ri­ences on the page. For exam­ple, some of these char­ac­ters go home for the High Hol­i­days or praise their mom’s kugel or have a grand­moth­er who sur­vived the Holocaust. 

My lat­est book, A Prac­ti­cal Guide to Dat­ing a Demon, how­ev­er, is a cozy roman­tic fan­ta­sy. As I planned it, I was con­front­ed with a new ques­tion: What does it mean to write a Jew­ish fan­ta­sy novel? 

The Jew­ish fan­ta­sy nov­els that came to my mind felt inspired and tied to Jew­ish his­tor­i­cal events, like the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion (Leigh Bardugo’s The Famil­iar) or the Holo­caust, (Lisa Gold­stein’s The Red Magi­cian) or oth­er eras of our his­to­ry (Cas­san­dra Clare’s Sword Catch­er and Nao­mi Novik’s Spin­ning Sil­ver). I want­ed to write a cozy, whim­si­cal book, where the Jew­ish ele­ment of the sto­ry sprang not from trau­ma, but oth­er parts of our iden­ti­ty. And so I was faced with the ques­tion of how to make my mag­i­cal world clear­ly Jew­ish. I turned to our mythology.

And soon asked myself – what did I know of Jew­ish mythol­o­gy? I, who’d stud­ied Clas­sics and steeped myself in tales of Perse­phone and Helen of Troy? I real­ized, to my embar­rass­ment, that I knew lit­tle besides tales of golems. 

But I had an idea. First, I knew demons showed up in Jew­ish mythol­o­gy, since a friend of mine had writ­ten her dis­ser­ta­tion on Jew­ish demons. Sec­ond, I’d long want­ed to write a book about a girl who made up a fake boyfriend, only to have some­one appear claim­ing to be said fake boyfriend. What if, I won­dered, my hero­ine told peo­ple she was betrothed to a demon? What if, by doing so, she acci­den­tal­ly sum­moned a demon (an attrac­tive one, of course) who insist­ed the betrothal was real?

I set off on a whirl­wind of research. Jew­ish demons, I found out, have a rich and var­ied lore. Referred to as shed­im, or shayd in the sin­gu­lar, there’s no one hard and fast descrip­tion of them. They come up in the Baby­lon­ian Tal­mud, the Zohar, and Midrashic lit­er­a­ture. Some ref­er­ences are neg­a­tive, and oth­ers are neu­tral, describ­ing them as the gods of foreigners. 

The take I liked most, though, was the one where the shed­im were unique­ly Jew­ish – bound by Jew­ish laws, Jew­ish courts, Jew­ish sacred objects. There is a sto­ry in the Tal­mud (Chullin: 105b) about a demon who destroys a bar­rel of wine belong­ing to porters and is sub­se­quent­ly brought to court, and made to pay. Anoth­er sto­ry in the Tal­mud depicts Ashmedai, King of the Demons, who is wise and well acquaint­ed with the Torah. I liked that. My demons, I decid­ed, would be Jewish.

If you have demons, you bet­ter have safe­guards against them. The more I researched, the more I found: blow­ing a sho­far might ban­ish shed­im; mezuzahs should ward them off. If you’re wor­ried about an infes­ta­tion, scat­ter ash on your floor and check in the morn­ing to see if any demons left behind chick­en-like footprints. 

Here, my hero­ine, Nao­mi, uses a few of the details I dis­cov­ered in her attempt to ban­ish the demon Daziel:

We’d removed all the mir­rors from my rooms. We’d tried cap­tur­ing Daziel via incan­ta­tion bowl. I threw a thrift store ring at him, based on lore that rings could cap­ture demons. He caught it and slid it on, smil­ing. I even spat at him, which was a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence for every­one involved.

I dug deep­er into oth­er Jew­ish mythol­o­gy, read­ing the Tree of Souls: The Mythol­o­gy of Judaism by Howard Schwartz along with count­less aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cles. I came across the three pri­mor­dial beasts – two of which I was well acquaint­ed with, for fan­ta­sy nov­els often use the term ​“behe­moth” and ​“leviathan” in pass­ing. But I’d nev­er heard of the Ziz, who ruled the sky as the Behe­moth ruled the land and the Leviathan the sea. I delved deep­er into the subject. 

“The Ziz is a giant grif­fin-like bird,” I told my boyfriend excit­ed­ly the very morn­ing I learned about it. ​“With a wingspan large enough to block out the sun! One leg­end says that once it dropped an egg and that destroyed cities. It rules over all the birds. It’s going in my book.” 

Anoth­er mag­i­cal crea­ture also crept in – the tiny sala­man­der I named Paz, who jumped into my head as soon as I read about myth­i­cal crea­tures born of fire. He even made the cover.

There are oth­er bits of lore woven into A Prac­ti­cal Guide to Dat­ing a Demon. The belief that if you tie a red string around your wrist, it will pro­tect you from evil and the addi­tion­al leg­end that if you lose your bracelet, it means you’ve met your hus­band; the pow­er of rings, and the sym­bol­ism behind pome­gran­ates. I learned about sym­bols known as charak­têres, incor­po­rat­ed by Jews dur­ing ancient and medieval peri­ods into their tra­di­tion of mag­i­cal writ­ing, and it became the basis for spell-writ­ing in my book.

To make the world around my char­ac­ters feel deeply Jew­ish, I pulled in his­tor­i­cal con­cepts, the same way a fan­ta­sy nov­el based on Ancient Rome might have a Sen­ate or a Col­i­se­um. The polit­i­cal sys­tem is based on the Great San­hedrin of the Sec­ond Tem­ple peri­od (516 BCE – 70 CE), which had an assem­bly of sev­en­ty-one judges that act­ed as a supreme court. I tweaked it, as fan­ta­sy authors often do, and com­prised mine of elect­ed offi­cials from the twelve tribes. (Naomi’s aunt is one such offi­cial). The twelve tribes show up fre­quent­ly, in fact, and peo­ple wear amulets reflect­ing their tribe. In hon­or of Judaism’s aca­d­e­m­ic tra­di­tion, I cre­at­ed the Lyceum, which Nao­mi attends, a mag­i­cal uni­ver­si­ty com­prised of five schools. In this world, the reli­gious lead­ers are rab­bis, and the year, as an astute read­er might notice, is the 5660s – which cor­re­sponds to the first decade of the 1900s.

And so, to return to the ques­tion I often receive – are my char­ac­ters Jew­ish? Well, the world and demons are Jew­ish, with a hefty dose of artis­tic license. It’s inspired by Jew­ish mythol­o­gy. But I nev­er use the term Jew­ish, or Judaism. 

I will let you debate whether that means A Prac­ti­cal Guide to Dat­ing A Demon is Jew­ish or not.

After all, that’s the Jew­ish thing to do.