"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe. Ivan G. Marcus

was not enacted, the penitential system and many pietistic customs and practices did persist into modern times. The three manuscripts of Sefer ha-Hasidut did nothing to prevent the success of the penitential regime that outlasted the harsh social criticism of Judah’s utopian program. The substitution of Maimonides’ view of repentance in Sefer ha-Hasidut instead of penances of atonement failed to change anything. Even confession to another Jew, as portrayed in Sefer Hasidim, persisted here and there, as we have seen. Sefer Hasidim was printed and quoted robustly dozens of times, so much so that the impact of the book could be the subject of a separate study.⁶³

      Far from being a radical rewriting of Sefer Hasidim, Sefer ha-Hasidut was so similar to the rest of German Hasidism that scholars as well as readers of the printed editions could not tell them apart. In 1976, one scholar did not distinguish between SHB 1–152 and the rest of SHB or SHP and referred to the first twenty paragraphs of SHB—that is, Sefer ha-Hasidut—as “something that is akin to a presentation of the principles of the movement [1–20].”⁶⁴ How could one expect earlier readers to have thought otherwise?

      The German Ashkenazic editions of Sefer Hasidim, especially the topical arrangements that we find in several long manuscripts and three times in SHB, go back to R. Judah he-hasid himself. Although the social context of his work has been debated over the years, a historical investigation of sources about his life offers a new way to settle the question about the historical setting of the German pietists.

      Chapter 3

      Judah he-Hasid’s Life and Legends

      And I heard from the mouth of R. J[udah] he-hasid zz”l …

      —R. Isaac b. Moses of Vienna