Texts like Sefer Hasidim depict the Hasidei Ashkenaz as an insular and idiosyncratic “sect,” whose members were despised and even persecuted by the broader Ashkenazic community. Generations of scholars accepted this self-image at face value and assumed that their “extreme patterns of behavior”15 and “pungent and acrimonious” rhetoric16 set the Pietists apart from their more moderate coreligionists, who considered them “saintly pests, or worse yet, reprehensible snobs.”17 But it is increasingly apparent that the contents of Pietistic writings represent not the communal fringes, but rather central spiritual and devotional trends in Ashkenazic culture as a whole. Recent studies by Joseph Dan and Ivan Marcus have persuasively argued that there never existed socially or institutionally discrete Pietistic groups—the Pietists’ social marginality and communal distinctiveness was a literary conceit rather than a reflection of lived reality.18 Ephraim Kanarfogel, meanwhile, has shown that elements of supposedly “Pietistic thought” in fact pervaded the writings of contemporary Ashkenazic authors; even the Tosafists—traditionally conceived of as bitter rivals of the Hasidei Ashkenaz—knew of and often embraced the asceticism, mysticism, and magic typically associated with the German Pietists.19 Thus, although circumscribed Pietistic communities were never present within Jewish society, characteristically Pietistic ideas were omnipresent.20 Such widespread influence might account for the traces of Pietistic doctrines that scholars have located within an array of Ashkenazic literary and artistic texts,21 and helps explain why Pietistic figures like Judah and his father, Samuel b. Judah he-Hasid, subsequently emerged as archetypal folk heroes in Ashkenazic legends and exempla.22
And indeed, ideas associated with the German Pietists took root far beyond the towns of Speyer, Worms, and Regensburg. Prominent disciples and devotees of Judah and Eleazar included Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Abraham b. Azriel of Bohemia, Moses of Coucy, Jonah Gerondi, and many others, and Pietistic ideas may have taken root as far east as Russia.23 By the mid- to late thirteenth century, the fame of Judah the Pious and Eleazar of Worms extended into southern France and across the Pyrenees into Castile.24 As such, religious thinkers like Judah and Eleazar were not spokesmen for a discrete, sectarian “Ashkenazi Pietism”—rather, they were a subset of pious Ashkenazim, influential authors and religious leaders whose thought is representative of a mainstream spiritual orientation within the Jewish culture of Germany and northern France.25
But even though the “sectarian” view of German Pietism as an insular social movement has been rendered untenable, this does not mean that the group had no distinctive identity whatsoever. Indeed, the term Hasidei Ashkenaz was in use as early as the thirteenth century to refer to authors whose writings were, while not outside the mainstream, nonetheless marked by distinctive, identifiable contents and methodologies.26 As such, I use the term “Pietists” and Hasidei Ashkenaz throughout the book as a shorthand way of referring to the school of Judah, Eleazar, and the anonymous disciples who composed many of their otherwise unattributed works. It is important to note that determining the precise authorship and dating of those works has at times proven problematic. Over the past several decades, scholars have come to recognize that so-called “Pietistic texts” were in fact composed by various figures, known and unknown, whose chronological and geographic proximity to one another is very difficult to definitively reconstruct. Today, scholars distinguish between the “Kalonymide Circle” of Judah and Eleazar27 (both of whom were scions of the distinguished Kalonymus family),28 the “Unique Cherub Circle,” the “Circle of Sefer ha-Hayyim,” the “Circle of R. Nehemiah b. Solomon,” and so on.29 Much energy has been channeled into the textual and philological spadework necessary to distinguish between the writings of each of these groups, an effort that is still in its preliminary phases.30 This study focuses primarily on the texts that can be confidently attributed to the Kalonymide circle, whose members’ biographies and major texts have been more thoroughly vetted. Works from other circles, however, are frequently invoked for supplementary or comparative purposes.
HOW MUCH GREEK IN JEWISH GERMANY?
Ashkenazic Jewry’s reputation for superstition and obscurantism developed early and has proven difficult to shed. During the period of intra-communal controversy over the study of “Greek wisdom” in the 1230s, certain northern French rabbis banned the study of Maimonides’ philosophical writings and inveighed against the application of rationalist philosophy to Jewish tradition on both theological and hermeneutical grounds.31 To some observers, this antipathy toward rationalism signaled a deficiency in Ashkenazic culture as a whole. Later in the thirteenth century, for example, Isaac of Acre derided “the rabbis of France and of Germany, and those who are like them … [who refuse to examine] a rational argument or to accept it. Rather, they call one to whom God has given the ability to understand rational principles … a heretic and non-believer … because they do not have the spirit needed to understand a rational principle.”32 Late medieval and early modern Ashkenazic Jews had a more ambivalent perspective on rationalist philosophy,33 but by the nineteenth century, German Jewish historians associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement embraced the caricatured depiction of their premodern forebears, and operationalized it for political and apologetic ends. Like many of their maskilic predecessors, wissenschaftlich scholars traced their own intellectual pedigrees and curricular interests back to medieval Sepharad, which they imagined to have been religiously enlightened, culturally open, and aesthetically sophisticated. The Jews of Sepharad served these scholars as models for the positive contribution Jews had made to European culture—and might still make, if only they were emancipated and allowed to integrate into the European social and intellectual spheres. The Prussian historian Salomon Munk, for example, argued that European culture would never have achieved its potential absent the decisive impact of medieval Sephardic Jews, who “unquestionably shared with Arabs the distinction of having preserved and disseminated the science of philosophy during the centuries of barbarism, and thereby having exercised on Europe for a long time a civilizing influence.”34 Munk’s contemporary, the Lutheran Hebraist Franz Delitzsch, similarly contrasted the “golden age” of Spanish Jewish culture with a stereotyped portrait of Ashkenazic backwardness: “Without civic freedom, without secure domicile, facing an ignorant, fanatic papal and monastic world, excluded from all public, useful activities and forced into the most menial and mindless occupations, Jews of the German Empire vegetated within the four ells of the halakhah or the talmudic study halls, and took refuge in the secret and mystical recesses of the Kabbalah…. Thus the Jewish literature of the time, in comparison with that across the Pyrenees … bears the character of dark seclusion, of sorrowful and esoteric impenetrability.”35
This so-called “myth of Sephardic supremacy” exercised a decisive impact upon modern Jewish scholarship, and singled out engagement with science and philosophy as key markers distinguishing medieval Ashkenazic from medieval Sephardic cultural models.36 The British historian Israel Abrahams highlighted the modernizing agenda of this scholarship in his 1896 description of the German Pietists: “R. Judah Chassid, who at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, was responsible … for a deplorable accretion of superstitions,