While scholars of medieval Jews have participated in this trend, as exemplified by the work of Shlomo Dov Goitein on the Cairo Genizah,52 the articulation of a Jewish social history, especially in medieval Ashkenaz, has been far from straightforward. How do we embark on such an endeavor when the sources at our disposal were composed by the ruling elite (almost without exception) and represent their values? Furthermore, these writings, predominantly religious commentaries and compilations, lend themselves most naturally to intellectual analysis rather than social history.
Previous scholarship includes a number of remarkable works on the lives of Jews in medieval Ashkenaz, such as writings of Adolf (Abraham) Berliner, Moritz Güdemann, and Israel Abrahams in late nineteenth-century Germany, Austria, and England, respectively.53 Without a doubt, Salo Baron’s multi-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews54 attempted to veer away from legal and intellectual history by describing how Jews actually lived. Baron notes that the contrast between “Jews” and “Judaism” is theoretical rather than real, and his work endeavors to strike a balance between the experiences of the community as a whole and the individuals within it.55
Jacob Katz, another pioneer in social history, aimed first and foremost to map the models of Jewish society by examining their breakdown with the advent of modernity.56 Of particular interest for this study, Katz also devoted attention to the field of Jewish-Christian relations, noting that the distinctions between Jews and their neighbors were not always as robust as historians were wont to believe.57 Katz’s work, which remains paradigmatic, concentrates on what the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the habitus, a set of dispositions that generate practices and perceptions, rather than the lives of actual persons.58 An element that Katz’s work shares with Baron’s is a near exclusive focus on adult males as societal representatives.59
Following Katz, a generation of scholars, especially in Israel and North America, has sought to delineate the social and cultural lives of medieval Jews. Robert Bonfil’s work on medieval and Renaissance Italy outlines structures rather than everyday practice. Bonfil and Ivan Marcus have introduced anthropological theory into medieval Jewish historiography and numerous scholars have followed their lead.60 Studies of defined groups, such as children and women, have become more common.61
Popular Piety
Despite these studies, most research on Jewish communities in medieval Ashkenaz has investigated halakhah and its development; that is to say, most scholars have assumed that halakhah shaped Jewish life without reflecting at length on how the realities of Jewish life shaped halakhah.62 This is especially evident in discussions of piety and religious practice, which are most typically examined in the context of legal requirements and rulings, rather than as components of daily practice that might not necessarily conform to prescriptive rules or that were the product of imitation and not the product of book learning.63
Medieval piety has generally been presented within the history of halakhah, the domain of the learned male elite, reasoning that, if piety is defined as devotion to God that exceeds the letter of the law, then a requisite level of halakhic familiarity is necessary preparation for pious action. Indeed, knowledge of Torah and Jewish law has been seen as a sign of piety, in and of itself. One of the most important recent studies on this topic is Ephraim Kanarfogel’s Peering through the Lattices, where the author applies a broad definition of piety—“self-denial and humility”—and examines the use of notarikon and gematriyah in his investigation of intellectual trends and evidence of pious and, especially, mystical ideas. As a result, his study combines and often fuses piety with mysticism and magic.64 Kanarfogel’s book is highly relevant to the present study because he convincingly demonstrates how widespread such pious practices were, albeit among elite males. However, in his search for the internal stimuli of piety, Kanarfogel emphasizes the intellectual motivations for select practices rather than their practical aspects.65
As noted above, the definition of piety that I propose steers away from privileging elite circles of learned men by examining the field that scholars of other religions refer to as “lay piety” or “popular religion.”66 Moreover, I prioritize praxis, and only then do I turn to beliefs and ideas. These interrelated choices are informed by the methodology presented in studies of lay piety in Christianity and Islam. In the context of medieval Christianity, for example, André Vauchez presents three definitions of Christian lay piety: folkloric customs, which have been treated as the lot of the uneducated; extreme piety (such as flagellants and Crusaders); and pious acts related to everyday religious beliefs and performed throughout society, irrespective of the practitioner’s status. This third category forms the core of this study.67 Although lay piety has often been seen as a grab bag of superstitions and magic, per Vauchez’s category of “folkloric customs,”68 this area has recently been recognized as a useful lens for understanding past societies. I follow scholars who have narrowed the distance between “high culture” and “popular culture,” by arguing that, in terms of religious customs, fewer differences divided the elite from the less educated than has often been posited. Furthermore, for a member of the elite to be acknowledged as pious, wide social recognition was needed. As a result, even acknowledgment of the piety of distinguished individuals was dependent on their social context. Thus, although I do not claim that elite practices represented society as a whole, when sources refer to the pious acts of community members in general, I presume that they were often performed by the privileged as well.69 This societal trend seems logical, especially given that this study is based on textual sources written by the educated elite.70
With this definition of piety as my guide for focusing on practice, I have tried to uncover the religious lives of Jews who were not part of the intellectual echelon by examining how their behaviors were reflected and molded by those who wrote authoritative texts. One approach to searching for popular piety that I ultimately rejected was to seek out deviance as an opposition point that could assist in the identification of pious practice. Numerous studies use deviance (or heresy) as a guide for locating the norm.71 While this approach lends itself to the demarcation of boundaries between who belongs and who does not, whether socially, religiously, ideologically, or otherwise, it serves to identify perceived outsiders rather than insiders who might hold any of a range of conventions. As a result, the use of deviance in this search would not have strengthened my ability to access piety; and, in some cases, it would have hindered my effort, since deviance may help to uncover accepted standards, but it is not the inverse of piety. While both deviant and pious observances depart from the norm, they do not necessarily occupy the same axis or receive the same treatment.72
Furthermore, defining a practice as deviant if it diverged from common conduct presumes that rituals were regularly performed as prescribed within medieval books and manuals, and that anyone who acted otherwise was considered a sinner. In this study, I try to discern how medieval Jews observed the law while going beyond their perceived call of duty; I have not attempted to write a history of how the learned elite believed religious customs should have been carried out. As we shall see, those considered pious were at times ridiculed for practices that exceeded halakhic mandates.
Despite these drawbacks, scholarship on deviance has provided a perspective that I find useful in the search for piety. Scholars of deviance have asked questions that inform my research, such as the following: Who holds the social power to label a practice as deviant? Why are certain labels used? What are the criteria for a given definition? And, how did this categorization function socially? Stated differently, labeling and classification come from the collective audience rather than the individual, regardless of whether one is being defined within or beyond a specific category.73
Following these insights, the relationship between the collective and the individual is central in this study. On the whole, the practices examined in this book were publicly performed, although the definition of the public sphere varies slightly for each ritual.74 Many of these practices could have been easily discerned, and could have been learned