Magical practices were part of every-day life in late antiquity. Magicians performed their craft for many practical purposes and for the benefit of both men and women. As magic was first and foremost a pragmatic technique, elements of magical expertise easily crossed ethnic as well as religious boundaries, especially in cases in which spells "proved successful". Moreover, magicians carefully controlled their exclusive knowledge. They transferred it orally or through written texts, even as they reshaped that knowledge according to the standards of the borrowing culture and assimilated it into their own distinct traditions. Professional interaction between Jewish and other experts of spells (Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians and pagans) generated a shared magical tradition beyond cultural differentiation.
Aramaic magic bowls, manufactured in Babylonia in the 5th-7th centuries C.E., exemplify one of the ways by which Jews established their own type of adjurations within the shared genre of anti-demonic practices. The Jewish origins of these incantations are evidenced by the biblical verses and mishnaic paragraphs they cite and by their references to Jewish mystical and liturgical traditions. At the same time they strongly suggest a give-and-take relationship between Jews and their neighbors in this realm of popular religion. On the one hand, Babylonian and Persian gods and other spiritual entities are invoked in some of these bowls (along with Jesus) in order to expel harmful demons and evil sorceries from the house and the body of the persons for whom the bowls were prepared. On the other hand, the names of these persons mentioned in the bowls testify to the fact that they were frequently non-Jews themselves.
It is thus clear that in late antiquity all over Babylonia Jewish experts of magic, literate and highly familiar with their ancestors' tradition, employed various sorts of "beneficial knowledge" both from Jewish and non-Jewish origins. The writing of charms on clay bowls was meant to heal and protect their clients from demons and harmful sorceries and served a community much broader than their own Jewish one.
