In this reading, it is not only the Pietists’ approach to the natural world that mirrors that of their Christian contemporaries, but also the genre through which this approach was manifested: firsthand accounts of travels to the East. Seen from this perspective, it becomes highly significant that elements of Petahiyah’s Sivuv are directly modeled upon the Alexander Romance, Hebrew versions of which were spreading in Ashkenaz just as Latin and vernacular versions were becoming increasingly ubiquitous. We have noted above that the Pietists repeatedly reference the narratives about Alexander found in rabbinic writings, and that they incorporated elements of the Secretum secretorum, addressed to Alexander, into their esoteric writings. In the Sivuv, too, rabbinic passages about Alexander are invoked—but implicitly, masked as Petahiyah’s firsthand observations. For instance, Petahiyah is said to have encountered messengers headed toward the land of Gog, which is past the “mountains of darkness,” whose location Petahiyah then describes in detail. The reference to these mountains in the context of an eschatological discussion, however, originates in a talmudic narrative about Alexander and his adventures in the East—the same passage in which we encountered the salted fish reanimated by the waters of the Garden of Eden. As we have seen, these fish were invoked by Judah and Eleazar as one of the “remembrances” of God’s power to resurrect the dead, confirming that this passage may well have been on Judah’s mind when he recorded Petahiyah’s travels in the region of the “mountains of darkness.”
In other instances, the wonders Petahiyah is described as having encountered during the course of his travels are adapted not from rabbinic legends about Alexander, but specifically from Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romances that were in circulation during this time period. For example, Judah at one point describes Petahiyah’s experiences at Mt. Ararat: “[Mount Ararat] is full of thorns and herbs, and when the dew falls upon them, manna falls there as well…. One takes the manna together with the thorns and herbs, and chops them up, since they are very hard…. The thorns and herbs are extremely bitter, [yet] when they are combined with the manna they become sweeter than honey or any other sweetness. And if one were to prepare [the manna] that falls on the mountain without the thorns, one’s limbs would come apart from the excessive sweetness.”249 While these observations are attributed to Petahiyah’s direct experience, they are in fact adapted almost verbatim from an Alexander Romance that circulated in Ashkenaz during this approximate time period.250 In the so-called Toldot Alexander ha-Gadol, we read:
[Alexander] came to the land of Sidon and there found very high mountains. On the tops of the mountains there was something that looked like white snow. The king and his warriors climbed to the top of a mountain and there found something similar to manna. The king tasted it, and vomited it out because it was so sweet.
While the king was on top of the mountain, a man … approached him, and said to the king: “Why did you respond in this way to the manna?” The king said, “I was sickened by the excessive sweetness of the manna.” The old man said to him, “There is a certain herb next to the manna which is extremely bitter. Had you mixed the herb with the manna you would not have become ill.”
The king did this, and placed [the herb] in his mouth, and it was as bitter as honey is sweet. The king and his warriors gathered some manna and some herbs and brought them to the army and they ate it.251
Judah’s familiarity with this text252 can account for another strange passage in the Sivuv as well. In Shushan, Petahiyah is said to have come across a local river, which is home to “fish with rings of gold in their ears”—an obscure description (not least of all because fish do not have ears). In the same Alexander narrative, however, the protagonist “came to a very wide river. In the river, they found fish with golden rings in their ears.”253 Here again, Judah apparently interpolated contents from the Alexander narrative he knew well into his account of Petahiyah’s travels in the east.
A separate, more detailed study is needed in order to work through the textual relationship between Petahiyah’s Sivuv and contemporaneous Alexander literature.254 For our purposes, however, it is surely significant that two of the literary genres that loomed large in the high medieval European fascination with wonders—travel writings and the Alexander Romance—manifested themselves in medieval Ashkenaz as well, and provided the Pietists with data concerning the workings of the natural world and particularly of its occult elements—data the Pietists could then marshal in the course of their theological and exhortatory writings.
This chapter has argued that the Pietists’ frequent ruminations on the “remembrances” of God’s wonders, manifested in their recurrent citations and explications of Psalms 111:4, reflect a determined effort to extract spiritual meaning from a theologically resonant natural world. Rather than privileging the “supernatural” at the expense of “nature,” Judah and Eleazar were keen observers of their natural surroundings, and described and perhaps even engaged in experiments intended to shed light on nature’s workings. The attempt to derive theological meaning from the natural world was of a piece with some of the dominant intellectual currents of their surrounding culture—and like their Christian neighbors, the Pietists did not limit themselves to routine, prosaic natural phenomena, but also sought to understand and instrumentalize the wonders of nature that were of growing interest and anxiety to Christian theologians and natural philosophers, as well as to producers and consumers of magical, mechanical, and literary texts. The Pietists expressed their theological take on nature and its meaning by citing and interpreting texts from within the Jewish tradition—but they also engaged with the same texts and genres being utilized in Christian discourses on nature and its meanings, such as lapidaries, “books of secrets,” travel narratives, and literary accounts of the wonders of the east. Such materials could have been transmitted via both written and oral means, and attest to the constructive role of polemic and preaching as a means to conveying ideas within and between competing cultures.
CHAPTER 2
The World Made Flesh
Why all the fuss about the body?
—Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?”
To medieval Jewish theologians, the body was well worth fussing over—specifically, God’s body, and, more specifically, the question of whether He had one. Rationalist thinkers, heirs to a philosophical tradition that privileged form over matter, took pains to distance God from any hint of corporeality, explaining away the Bible’s anthropomorphic language in favor of a wholly abstract and radically transcendent deity.1 Kabbalists, whose literary heritage included the unself-consciously anthropomorphic Shi’ur Komah—a work that painstakingly measures the length of God’s appendages and facial features—constructed a spiritualized divine body out of the ten sefirot, one whose “limbs” and “organs” represented divine hypostases rather than physical realities.2 Scribes and artists, meanwhile, tiptoed around the physical representation of God, arriving at varied solutions to the question of whether the Bible’s prohibition on pictorial depictions of God extended to the drawing of human figures altogether.3 Caroline Bynum, in her now-classic article on medieval understandings of embodiment, could take for granted that the body had intrinsic meaning for Christian theologians, committed as they were to the notion that, at a key moment in salvation history, “the Word was made flesh and lived among us.”4 For medieval Jews, ostensibly removed from the incarnational worldview presupposed by so much of Christian theology, the spiritual status of the body was far from obvious, and subject to almost constant questioning.
When we turn to the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, we find reflections, and refractions, of each of these theological trends. From the philosophical works of the tenth-century theologian Saadia Gaon, Ashkenazic theologians imbibed a strict belief in God’s incorporeality—even as they used floridly anthropomorphic language and imagery in their theological and liturgical writings.5 They showed little awareness of the kabbalists’ sefirotic divine body but enthusiastically cited from Shi’ur Komah,6 and may even have conceived of God as comprising