One scholar recently compared the short, disjunctive style of such Hebrew book composition to Lego, the colored plastic bricks manufactured by the Danish toy company whose CEO recently said about his product that it “acts as if it was glued and yet you can easily take it apart.”25 That is an apt way of looking at the modular or disjunctively constructed Hebrew compositions many medieval Ashkenazic authors produced.
Authorial composition of texts in short, disjunctive paragraphs should also be distinguished from the contribution of activist scribes. Although scribes contributed to the appearance on the page of these disjunctive texts, they did not create them. True, in the transmission of ancient rabbinic texts or of the early mystical heikhalot (Palace) manuscripts, for example, learned scribes in Ashkenaz, unlike rote copyists, did not hesitate to modify or even add their own comments into the text they were copying. This scribal activism implies a collective or collaborative view of authorship.26
Nor are we dealing with editors compiling anthologies or miscellanies by cutting and pasting works that already existed but of a form of authorial composition in discrete, relatively short textual units.27 The authors themselves produced the types of books that Sefer Hasidim resembles and they did so in segmented paragraphs that they combined into parallel editions.
Selective Inward Acculturation and Persistence
Why were these compositions written in Lego-like segments, more openended and fluid compared to the familiar single-authored “book” that we find more in Jewish Muslim culture than in Ashkenaz? Jewish culture in medieval Ashkenaz was an extension and development of ancient rabbinic culture that itself had resisted allowing the influence of Greco-Roman civilization to reshape it into the latter’s literary forms and genres. Sefer Hasidim and many other Ashkenazic Hebrew books are not written in the same form as was ancient rabbinic culture, but they are one of its extensions and developments. Like ancient rabbinic culture, the form of Ashkenazic Hebrew books exhibits selective inward acculturation. Rabbinic authors in Roman Palestine knew Greek in many cases but selectively appropriated only the Greco-Roman lexicon, not the literature, in their cultural world. They also did not write some books in the widespread classical Greco-Roman form of a single-authored work.
Even the ancient rabbis’ introduction of thousands of Greek words and terms into the works they wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic was done selectively: when it came to writing liturgy, they insisted on using a pure Hebrew vocabulary, despite all the Greek they were comfortable using in their studies of Scripture or in legal compilations.28 However, in inscriptions such as those on surviving tombstones, Greek and Latin with a minimal use of Hebrew was common in late antiquity and in early medieval Italy and northern France.
But from the eighth century, things changed, and European Jewish funerary inscriptions were written only in Hebrew.29 The rabbis in northern Europe refused to read, let alone write, Roman letters and instead developed their indigenous traditions in Hebrew, even when they were open to adapting and internalizing Christian cultural forms and themes.30
The Ashkenazic Hebrew book is also part of Jewish cultural persistence and self-definition in medieval Christian Europe, an aspect of Jewish self-fashioning that has not been studied as a defining feature of medieval Jewish culture. It is not enough to note that some aspects of Christian culture were adapted in Jewish circles.31 We also need to ask why others were not. Had Jews been willing to read Christian authors in Latin, we would know it. They would have cited Latin authors or at least alluded to them. And unlike the ancient rabbis, but like their Christian contemporaries, medieval Ashkenazic rabbis would have written Hebrew books that look like Latin books. They did not.
The form of many Ashkenazic books, then, is an important part of the new Jewish cultural studies that emphasize the openness of Jewish writers to their Christian surroundings and their appropriation or adaptation into Jewish culture. In the case of text composition, as opposed to physical book production, Jews developed a world of their own, resisting how Latin or vernacular books were composed, even when they shared codicological features and even paleographical pen strokes in Hebrew influenced by Gothic verticality typical of contemporary Latin book hands. The medium was shared but the “medium of the message,” the way the text itself was composed, remained Jewish.32
It is beyond the scope of this study to explore when Ashkenazic Jews began to write books in the Geonic-Sephardic style of a work divided into chapters that progress from start to finish. Is this change linked to the well-known influence in Central or Eastern European Jewish circles of the Sephardic Hebrew book or of the book written in Latin or vernacular Western languages that Jews now began to read? If so, we need to ask when northern European Jews began to read Roman letters and add works written in those languages to the exclusive Hebrew library and language that had been their reading and writing medium for hundreds of years—but this needs to be worked out.33
For now, there is no comprehensive study of the form of Ashkenazic book composition. By raising these questions in the process of studying Sefer Hasidim in depth, I hope that others will research this important topic and also explore further the cultural filter through which medieval Jews took over some features of Christian Europe or just experienced them in common, whereas they ignored others. These issues suggest how the study of the forms in which Hebrew books were composed can shed light on comparative cultural issues in European Jewish history.
The Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe
What, then, is an Ashkenazic “book” in medieval Europe? The present study sets out to raise this question for future research by focusing on the case study of Sefer Hasidim, one of the most enigmatically written exemplars of segmented book writing in medieval German lands and northern France. The chapters that follow present new conclusions about Sefer Hasidim that have implications for understanding some of the other segmented Hebrew books Jews wrote in medieval Europe.
Chapter 1 discusses Sefer Hasidim as an “open text” in the specific sense of a work written in small, disjunctive units, arranged differently in several parallel editions that cannot be reduced to an author’s single original composition. Sefer Hasidim is preserved in over twenty manuscripts. The fourteen manuscript and early print editions of Sefer Hasidim (see Chapter 1) are each made up of unique sequences of short text passages that need to be studied together as Sefer Hasidim. There is no evidence that Sefer Hasidim can be described as a single original authored text, with a defined structure, that the author or others revised one or more times, as Ta-Shma argued about Maimonides’ and a few other Jewish authors’ works and that Yisrael Peles refers to as a work of “multiple editions” (merubeh ‘arikhot), which the author himself composed and reedited more than once.34
Chapter 2 looks at different aspects of rewriting in German Pietist (hasidei ashkenaz) culture in the circle of the principal pietist authors. The composition of Sefer Hasidim traditions is placed in the broader context of the other works that R. Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (d. 1217) and his student R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. ca. 1230) wrote as overlapping or fluid compositions. Their works are a series of rewritings of short paragraph-length texts. A different kind of rewriting resulted in the so-called “French Sefer Hasidim,” the first 152 paragraphs of the first edition, Bologna, 1538. Despite its unique features, that text is but one of several rewritings of Sefer Hasidim traditions.
Biographical and hagiographical sources about the traditional author of Sefer Hasidim, R. Judah he-hasid, are discussed with a close look at genre and historical methodology in Chapter 3. From comments his students and his son, R. Moses Zaltman, made about him and from local Hebrew and Yiddish story cycles, including sources that resemble some of the traditions in Sefer Hasidim that are mainly about anonymous pietists, we can try to sketch out what