One of the most frightening monsters in the Jewish imagination is the shayd, a shapeshifting demon that assumes the form of a living person. It can transform every part of its body except for its feet, which always retain their original form: a chicken’s claws. The Talmud includes a story about the king of the shaydim (a mountain-dwelling demon named Ashmedai) impersonating the king of the Jews (a castle-dwelling lady-lover named Solomon). The sages of the Sanhedrin determined the impostor’s true identity by asking his queens what the king’s feet looked like when he visited the harem. Their ominous answer: “He never takes off his shoes.” Nearly 2,000 years later, some claimed that Hitler refused to remove a certain pair of boots, especially in his last years, proof that he might have been a shayd. The Talmud explains elsewhere that the shayd’s natural enemy is flour, since the most common way to find out if shaydim are on the haunt is to spread some near the disturbed area. If the marks of chicken feet appear overnight, it means that shaydim are afoot and you better hoof it.
