So I am a non-thiestic Jew, which means I don't believe Lilith, or any comparable figures, exist, which is why I felt able to offer a few alternate folkloric figures. I am not genuinely afraid of anyone attracting the attention of a hostile, powerful, and vicious, mother and baby killing night spirit.
But yeah, according to the folklore of Lilith, which is inextricably Jewish, Lilith is a murderer of babies and pregnant and laboring women. She is the folkloric personification of maternal and infant mortality. She is the folkloric personification of SIDS. She is the folkloric personification of waking up to find your child dead in their crib. She is the folkloric personification of dying in agony days after you brought a child into the world, as your blood is poisoned with septic shock. She is the folkloric personification of finding out you were pregnant as you are miscarrying, bleeding and crying from the pain of your body expelling the child you didn't even know you were carrying.
The people who want to worship Lilith are people who at least nominally believe in mysterious and potentially dangerous powers, and if I were one of them, Lilith is not the kind of figure I would want to draw the attention of. But I can actually understand the impulse, and I can understand wanting to confront and work with the personification of that kind of fear and pain. Which is why I laid out alternates.
The problem is a lot of the Gentiles who want to work with or worship Lilith are very insistent that actually the Jews are lying about her. The people from whom's culture the figure that you are trying to work with or worship derives, are wrong about her and lying about her. And I have two things to point out about this particular logic. The first and the simplest, is that if I were a baby and gestating parent murdering demon, who wanted a bunch of people to worship them, and leave themselves open to my influence, that is exactly what I would want them to think.
The second is where my non-theistic Jewish concern with the worship of Lilith really comes from. And it's that bit where the Jews are lying. Christians have been accusing the Jews of lying about their deity figure for almost two millennia, as a way of dealing with the challenge posed, as early Christians viewed it, by the continued existence of Jews and Jewish interpretations of their shared holy texts. And this idea has dug deep into the psyche of the historically Christian world. Witches and neopagans absorb this idea, this trope, that Jews lie about other people's gods, that Jews lie about their own traditions to deny other people's gods, from the culture around them without even realizing it, or identifying it as the traditional Christian antisemitism that it is.
And in this case, with Lilith, this idea gets combined with another popular little Christian antisemitic trope that has dug its way deep into the psyche of the historically Christian world. And that idea is one that I have seen Christians and people from the Christian world, from every branch, and no branch, and from every political persuasion use, the idea that Jews and Judaism are somehow responsible for everything that a given Christian might dislike about Christianity, which has morphed into everything that a given person might dislike about society. This is a great idea, for the Christians at least. One of the niftiest tricks Christians ever pulled was convincing themselves, and lots of other people, that any problem they might have with Christianity or Christian society, this small marginalized minority was to blame. It's been really useful to Christianity and to the historically Christian world to have a scapegoat, which is one of the many reasons antisemitism has such staying power. "The violent Old Testament God is the reason XYZ Christian thing exists and it is bad," is the classic example, but popular political examples are right wing Gentiles insisting that communism is the Jews fault, or left-leaning Gentiles insisting that the Jews are all greedy capitalists. The key is that whatever you think the problem in society is, it's the Jews fault.
And one specific iteration of this is that during the 60s and 70s, among certain feminist thinkers, the idea arose that before Judaism brought monotheism to the world, the patriarchy didn't exist. This is absolute historical hogwash. The ancient people who we now call the Jews were of course a deeply patriarchal society, but so were all of the other societies around them, whether or not they worshiped powerful goddesses. Inanna/Ishtar was a certified badass, but that didn't make Mesopotamian civilization any less male-dominated. Athena was a powerful war goddess, and she was the eponymous divine patron of a city with one of the most misogynistic societies ever to develop.
But the fact that this was historical hogwash did not mean that this idea that Jews and monotheism were responsible for the patriarchy didn't have a lot of popularity and prominence during the second wave feminist movement, especially in people who floated to the spiritual side of that movement, ie goddess worship, witchcraft, certain forms of neopaganism. This is the context in which Lilith entered the Gentile witchy and neopagan consciousness.
So Lilith's appeal to a lot of Gentile witches and neopagans, both at the time and now, relies on the idea of "reclaiming" her as the fierce Goddess that she's supposedly is, from those evil patriarchal Jews who clearly have been lying about her, to slander her divine feminine awesomeness. This is the subtext to the ask I answered above in the original post.
So when I wrote my post about three different alternatives to Lilith for Gentile witches and/or neopagans: https://a-s-fischer.tumblr.com/post/724297755667873793/yo-i-had-this-queued-and-didnt-realize-it-was I wrote describing alternatives which were similar to the Jewish folkloric version of Lilith, not the Lilith described in the previous paragraph. As such I was very aware of the fact that there were going to be plenty of Gentile witches and neopagans for whom none of the figures I suggested would be in any way appealing. I knew this because of something that I don't actually see talked about very often in discussions of cultural appropriation. We usually talk about it as the appropriators seeing something shiny in a culture that is not their own, that they want to use or experience. We talk about it as if the appeal were in the thing being taken, and this is true a lot of the time. But sometimes, the appeal is in the act of taking.
And the appeal, for a lot of people who venerate or want to work with Lilith, is in the antisemitism, whether they realize it or not. The appeal is in the ability to fall back on those old comfortable habits of mind absorbed from Christianity: the habits of mind that go "The Jews are lying about our glorious Goddess/Lord and savior, because she/he stood against their evil patriarchy/hypocracy and corruption." It's about leaving Jesus and the trappings of Christianity behind, without leaving behind that sense of safety and control that comes with having a scapegoat.
It feels good when you can blame those big systematic problems that you can't really do anything about on a person or a group of people, especially if that group of people is comfortably Other. It means you don't have to look at how you might be complicit in those big societal problems, as well as victimized by them, and it means you know who to hate. It means that you are striking a blow for justice and for your people when hurt the group you have designated are to blame, even if nothing ever changes, and the only thing you did was cause other people pain. Yes, those habits of mind sure are comfortable, and Christians have been killing us over them for as long as they've had institutional power. You can imagine that most Jews are not stoked to see a new group take them on and play them out.
And it's only within this framework, this conspiratorial antisemitic framework, that the idea that the Jews are lying about a figure from Jewish folklore, for whom that folklore is the only source, makes any sense at all, and it's only within this framework that Gentiles taking that figure, divorcing her completely from her folkloric roots, and then worshiping her as a goddess, would even be appealing. It's for this reason that the prominence of Lilith worship in the witchy and neopagan communities, deeply troubles me.
