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Introduction

Might it be that Judaism and nature are at odds?

—Steven Schwarzschild, “The Unnatural Jew”

The Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were economically industrious and religiously devoted. They served at the courts of emperors and bishops, where they were prized for their commercial and financial acumen.¹ They pored over the Bible, subjecting it to careful and critical literary scrutiny; engaged in intricate and highly abstract talmudic dialectics; and composed stirring and elaborately structured works of poetic verse.² The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were also obsessed with vampires, werewolves, and zombies. They dabbled in demonology and magical adjurations and used runic incantations to animate quasi-human Golems out of mud and clay. They dreamed of monstrous races, fought with dragons, and rode flying camels.³

This bifurcated perception of Ashkenazic Jewry—as simultaneously learned and benighted, critical and credulous—has generated a paradoxical historical image. Some scholars have extensively mined Ashkenazic Jews’ sophisticated legal and exegetical compositions while dismissing ostensibly superstitious beliefs and practices as mere incursions of contemporary folklore. Others have identified magic and mysticism as the very core of Ashkenazic culture, describing a mystical theology that pervaded Jewish society, and that was prized alongside—and sometimes above—the more mundane realms of religious ritual and law.

But despite their differing emphases, these opposing depictions have converged on the question of medieval Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world. Whether because they were exclusively engaged in rabbinic pursuits, or because of their preference for the mystical and occult, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, it is assumed, had no interest in the rational or empirical exploration of their physical surroundings. Indeed, the Ashkenazic neglect of science and natural philosophy has long served as one of the linchpins of the dominant historical narrative about Jewish life in the European Middle Ages. Unlike the cultured, cosmopolitan Jews of Sepharad, who were deeply integrated into the Islamic and Christian cultures of Iberia and Languedoc, and who adapted regnant scientific and philosophical currents for their own Jewish theological ends, the Jews of northern France and Germany are thought to have been socially and culturally isolated, preoccupied by the otherworldly and supernatural, and ignorant of the intellectual developments in their surrounding culture. This isolation, it is often assumed, was born of persecution, and in turn bred fundamentalism—hence the famed Ashkenazic propensity for harsh asceticism, eagerness to embrace martyrdom, and extreme punctiliousness in observance of Jewish law. While their Christian neighbors were in the midst of the “twelfth-century renaissance,”⁴ with its attendant “discovery of nature,”⁵ the Jews of Ashkenaz were hunkered down in a defensive posture—ready to polemicize against contemporary culture but unwilling to adapt to it.

Recent scholarship has done much to refine and revise these overarching paradigms. Historians have effaced the sharp boundaries between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, showing that Ashkenazic Jews were hardly uniformly pious, that Sephardic Jews embraced martyrdom just like their Ashkenazic coreligionists, and that people and texts migrated frequently between northern and southern Europe.⁶ At the same time, an abundance of research has revealed the profound embeddedness of medieval Ashkenazic Jews within their surrounding Christian context. Far from being isolated and oblivious, the Jews of northern France and Germany lived in close proximity to their Christian neighbors and interacted regularly in both the social and economic spheres; the periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the Middle Ages were the exception, not the rule.⁷ Recent studies of Jewish family and communal life, devotional practices, and artistic and literary production have convincingly illustrated that Ashkenazic Jews were consistently in dialogue with—and were at times indistinguishable from—their Christian contemporaries.⁸ Even anti-Jewish violence—seemingly the most ringing manifestation of the “otherness” with which these communities treated one another—could paradoxically serve to anchor the Jewish minority within their majority surroundings,⁹ and at times served as a conduit through which Jews and Christians learned about one another’s practices and traditions.¹⁰

And yet, it is still taken for granted that “mystical” Ashkenazic theology drew exclusively upon an autonomous, internal tradition that developed in isolation from its Christian setting. For reasons I survey below, the presumption remains that Ashkenazic Jews were nearly untouched by the intellectual and institutional culture of “the long twelfth century,” and particularly by the scientific and philosophical advances reshaping the worldviews of Christians and Sephardic Jews alike. Oblivious, if not hostile, to the systematic exploration of the natural world, the Jews of Ashkenaz instead fixated upon the wondrous, miraculous, monstrous, and occult—what scholars of medieval Ashkenaz have generalized under the rubric of “the supernatural.”

The present book seeks to revise this entrenched paradigm, and argues that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz understood the physical world to be deeply imbued with spiritual meaning. A Remembrance of His Wonders uncovers and analyzes a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, and shows that investigation of the workings of nature and the body was a core value and consistent preoccupation of Ashkenazic theologians. While it is true that wonders, magic, and occult forces were central to Ashkenazic thought, these supposedly “supernatural” elements do not signify apathy or antipathy toward the natural world, but rather a determined effort to understand its innermost workings and outermost limits. Phenomena that modern scholars have sometimes labeled “supernatural” or “superstitious” were, during the high Middle Ages, anything but; after all, it was only over the course of the high Middle Ages that sharp distinctions between the natural and supernatural realms were being gradually formulated in the first place. When medieval Jews’ writings are analyzed inductively, rather than squashed by the retrojection of anachronistic terminology, it emerges that Ashkenazic interest in werewolves, adjurations, divination, and so on should be seen as markers of intellectual sophistication, and of integration into a broader European culture that was investing unprecedented energy into investigating the scientific workings and spiritual meaning of its natural surroundings. By integrating scientific, magical, and mystical currents into their exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz consumed and contributed to the naturalistic and scientific discourses of the twelfth-century renaissance.

This book also seeks to shed new light upon the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval northern Europe. Ashkenazic Jews’ attempts to derive spiritual meaning from the natural world and human body paralleled those of their Christian contemporaries—but these similarities were not merely analogous responses to some broader, external Zeitgeist. On the contrary, Jewish texts contain detailed knowledge of medieval Christian ideas and doctrines, knowledge that could only have resulted from direct exposure to, and overt incorporation of, the developing Christian “incarnational” worldview that sought theological and devotional meaning in the material, embodied world. These instances of doctrinal diffusion force us to reconsider the truism that Ashkenazic Jews engaged in polemics and disputations with Christian interlocutors, but had neither interest in nor facility to pursue contemporary Christian theology.¹¹ Indeed, many direct linkages between Jewish and Christian theological developments can be accounted for precisely in light of polemical encounters. After all, in medieval Europe, explorations of the workings of embodiment and the natural world were inseparable from interreligious polemic. Christian sermons, theological tracts, and works of natural philosophy glided effortlessly between discussions of nature and the body on the one hand, and denunciations of “unnatural” Jews or “Carnal Israel” on the other.¹² Jewish authors responded in kind, invoking anatomical data and empirical observations in order to dispute and disparage Christian views. Such polemical battles were not solely expressions of mutual estrangement and hostility (though they were that too); they also served as channels for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Religious disputes, no matter how impassioned or vituperative, paradoxically broke down confessional boundaries rather than reifying them. Supposedly “internal” currents of medieval Jewish thought can thus only be fully understood once they are read in light of the prevailing social and cultural currents on which they drew, and to which they responded.

“ASHKENAZI PIETISTS” OR PIOUS ASHKENAZIM?

A Remembrance of His Wonders draws on a wide array of high medieval Ashkenazic writings, but it focuses in particular on the German Pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz), a school of moralists and speculative theologians who flourished in the Rhineland and in Regensburg during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹³ This group is best known for producing Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), a wide-ranging halakhic (legal), moralistic, and narrative compilation that has been widely studied, and that exercised considerable influence on subsequent generations of Jewish authors.¹⁴ But the most prominent Pietists, particularly Judah b. Samuel he-Hasid (“the Pious”; d. 1217) and his disciple Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. before 1234), also composed a vast array of other texts: moralistic tracts, biblical and liturgical commentaries, halakhic (legal) writings, exempla and sermons, travel narratives, magical and visionary texts, treatises on cosmology and human psychology, and so on. These texts have often been studied in isolation from one another (when they have been studied at all), but they are in fact united by common underlying themes and concerns that render them an important corpus of analysis.

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, was in the latter direction entirely opposed to the spirit of contemporary Judaism.”³⁷ More than a century later, historians far removed from the apologetic agendas of the nineteenth century have maintained the binary opposition between Ashkenaz and Sepharad. Thus the eminent historian of medieval science Gad Freudenthal prefaced a recent survey of medieval Jewish scientific activity with the categorical assertion that “the Jews of northern France and Ashkenaz remained thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy, and will be left out of consideration.”³⁸ Haym Soloveitchik has gone so far as to argue that opposition to natural philosophy and other extra-rabbinic pursuits constituted the very raison d’être of Ashkenazic culture, and that much of the cultural ethos of Ashkenaz originally developed as an oppositional response to Babylonian Jewry’s embrace of contemporary rationalism.³⁹

Conceptually, the broad, apparently self-evident claim that Ashkenazic Jews were “thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy” rests in part upon the implicit assumption that medieval “science” was monolithic, and identical to the Aristotelian, so-called “Greek wisdom” whose impact upon Sephardic culture was indeed profound. For example, in the proceedings of a 2008 conference on the role of science and philosophy in medieval Ashkenazic culture, article after article proves the case that Sephardic scientific texts and modes of thought had a negligible impact upon medieval Ashkenazic thinkers and ideas.⁴⁰ Gad Freudenthal, the volume’s editor, rightly cautions that “when asking whether there was interest in science and philosophy in Ashkenaz and Tsarfat, we should not reduce this question to one about the attitude toward science and philosophy in the rationalistic, that is Greco-Arabic tradition. The absence of reception of the rationalist tradition does not imply a lack of interest in nature and its workings.”⁴¹ Yet having demonstrated that the kind of science that appealed to Maimonides or Gersonides did not appeal to Ashkenazic thinkers, the contributors to this volume seem uninterested in exploring what kinds of attitudes toward nature did appeal to them.⁴² Were there perhaps writings on the natural world that reflect a different approach, which sets Ashkenazic culture (or even “Ashkenazic science”) apart from that of Sepharad? In focusing on a single exclusive approach to the natural world, and using it as the sole standard of attitudes toward “science” and “nature,” these scholars demonstrate convincingly what medieval Ashkenazic thinkers were not, but miss an opportunity to explore what they were.⁴³

The notion that the Greek wisdom that appealed to Sephardic thinkers should lay exclusive claim to the label “medieval science” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that it was only relatively recently that historians of science deigned to acknowledge that there was such a thing as “medieval science” altogether.⁴⁴ It was only with the “revolt of the medievalists” that historians like Charles Homer Haskins and Lynn Thorndike rejected periodizations that sharply distinguished the credulous and casuistic medieval scholastics from their more rational and “modern” descendants. Thus, the history of science has transitioned in recent decades from a field rooted in positivistic, teleological assumptions, concerned exclusively with “discoveries and discoverers,”⁴⁵ to one that has “[abandoned] altogether the preoccupation with positive discoveries, and [instead] examine[s] the theoretical webs of beliefs of a given society, quite irrespective of whether or not these beliefs happened to give rise to noteworthy discoveries.”⁴⁶ Rather than narrowly focusing on the precursors of the present-day scientific worldview, scholars are considering the broader question of “the place which science, taken as a set of beliefs and practices, occupies in a given society.”⁴⁷ Thus, as the historiography of medieval science has grown, scholars have shown that scientific acumen, technological advancement, and sophisticated, critical thinking about the natural world were by no means lacking among medieval thinkers. Recent scholars of ancient and late antique Judaism have similarly emphasized that Jewish engagement with “science” long predated their exposure to rationalist philosophy during the Geonic period.⁴⁸ The same approach might be applied to thinkers in medieval Ashkenaz, who hardly neglected the natural world, even if they showed little interest in contemporary “rationalist” scientific and philosophical inquiry. The decisive impact of a priori definitions is particularly apparent when it comes to the subjects of scientific exploration: “nature” in general, and “the body” in particular. Just as “whiggish” metanarratives of the history of science have been dismantled in recent years, so too have essentialist, transhistorical conceptions of nature and the body. Each of these constructs, and their roles in medieval Jewish thought in Ashkenaz and beyond, will be examined in detail in the chapters that follow.

“JEWS ACT JUST LIKE CHRISTIANS”

If overly restrictive definitions of “science” and “nature” have prevented scholars from analyzing Ashkenazic engagement with the natural world, so too have overly exacting interpretive requirements stymied attempts to situate Ashkenazic thought in its Christian setting. In spite of the now widespread acknowledgment that medieval Ashkenazic norms and ideals developed in dialogue with medieval Christianity, Jewish theology is believed to have been sacrosanct—particularly the mystical writings of the German Pietists. Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Dan noted that

the dimension in which the investigation of Christian influence upon the writings of the German Pietists is most important is the dimension of speculative theology…. Almost nothing has been done in this area by scholars, and the possibilities and questions are numerous. It is difficult to dispute that many important ideas in the realm of astrology, natural philosophy, the structure of the celestial worlds, and even actual theological doctrines entered the thought of the German Pietists from the Christian environment—whether from the Christian theological literature and the scientific writings associated with it, or whether via oral transmission…. However, since no comprehensive research has been conducted yet, and the Christian sources of this period have not been investigated in careful comparison with the writings of the Pietists, it is currently impossible to draw any definitive conclusions regarding these questions.⁴⁹

Yet in the interim, little progress has been made.⁵⁰ For instance, while a plethora of recent scholarship has analyzed Pietistic involvement in the contentious medieval Ashkenazic debates over whether God has a physical body, these debates have rarely been situated in the context of medieval Christian debates over the Incarnation—a comparison that would appear to be heuristically useful at the very least.⁵¹ Ephraim E. Urbach’s half-century-old suggestion that the Tosafist enterprise be analyzed in light of the contemporaneous rise of scholasticism, a notion that generated no small amount of controversy at the time, also has yet to be studied in any comprehensive manner.⁵² The chapters that follow demonstrate that numerous other dimensions of medieval Ashkenazic theology profit from such comparative treatment.

In part, the neglect of comparative attention to Ashkenazic theology is due to the very high evidentiary bar that scholars have needed to clear in order to demonstrate that Christians “influenced” Jews. For instance, after noting a detail of Pietistic theology that seemed to parallel a concept found in John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Elliot Wolfson dismissed such a comparison, deeming it “highly unlikely that the Haside Ashkenaz had direct access to or had the facility to utilize the aforementioned philosophical text.”⁵³ The few scholars who (decades ago) explicitly argued for the cooption of Christian theology by medieval Ashkenazic authors operated under the same methodological assumptions. Yitzhak Baer could confidently point to Christian influences upon German Pietism because he had no doubts that the Pietists read Christian theological works in the original Latin;⁵⁴ the same belief informed Georges Vajda’s work on Elhanan b. Yakar of London.⁵⁵ This assumption that linguistic facility and access to written texts is the sine qua non for the transfer of theological ideas is based in part on an implicit comparison between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultural models. Jews in southern Europe spoke and read the dominant elite languages (Arabic, and to a lesser extent Latin), and had unfettered access to influential scientific and philosophical texts in their broader culture.⁵⁶ Because the same cannot be said for Ashkenazic Jews, who were by and large not conversant in Latin, it is assumed that, at best, they were impacted by the orally transmitted “folk culture” endemic to the unlearned classes of northern European. This ascription of ignorance and provincialism has seemed particularly appropriate with regard to the German Pietists, whose writings are rife with “superstitious” discussions of werewolves and vampires, incantation and conjurations, demons and occult forces.⁵⁷

But this binary distinction between “folk” and “elite” cultures has been destabilized in recent years by scholars who have argued for a far more integrated and reciprocal relationship between learned and unlearned strata of society. Eamon Duffy, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Brown, and a host of others have pushed back against the so-called “two tier model,” arguing that medieval “low” cultural production shaped, and was shaped by, “high” intellectual discourse.⁵⁸ Recognition of this fluidity may well obviate the need for restrictive models of intra-cultural interaction, and recent scholarship has increasingly jettisoned the linear “influence” model, which “is largely predicated upon a view of Jewish culture as foreign to its local environment.”⁵⁹ As Peter Schäfer has put it, “To regard direct textual evidence as the only conceivable proof for any kind of religious exchange between Christians and Jews” is “as positivistic as it is naïve”: “The Jews certainly did not convene in their synagogues or schools to hatch out ideas that they had heard from their Christian neighbors, which they liked so much that they set out to imitate them consciously and purposefully. This is quite a naïve model of cultural interaction. But Jews and Christians did live in the same world, rather than in two separate worlds rigorously sealed off one from the other. Jews could not avoid seeing and hearing their Christian fellow-countrymen, and even if they did not report to us what they saw and heard, we can assume that they did see and hear a lot of what was happening on both sides.”⁶⁰ Thus Ivan Marcus has accounted for similarities in religious rituals through a model of “inward acculturation”;⁶¹ Sarah Stroumsa has used the symbol of a “whirlpool” to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which ideas circulate within and between cultures;⁶² and Steven Wasserstrom has unpacked and nuanced the model of interreligious “symbiosis,” subtly distinguishing it from both “influence” and “borrowing.”⁶³ Most recently, Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman has outlined a “specular-relational model,” based on the work of Rina Drory, Robert Bonfil, and others, that situates Jews within their surrounding culture on the structural, holistic level, and argues that aspects of medieval life could be “specifically Jewish” without necessarily being “exclusively Jewish.”⁶⁴ Scholars of late antique Jewry have also developed a rich scholarship on Jewish-Christian (and Jewish-Roman, and Jewish-Zoroastrian) relations that supersedes the “influence model.”⁶⁵

Given these more nuanced methods of locating points of contact between Jews and the hegemonic cultures within which they lived, we need not limit ourselves to a search for Jews sitting down to read Christian theological treatises (though I agree with Baer and Vajda that this was not entirely out of the question).⁶⁶ Indeed, in Sefer Hasidim Judah the Pious himself articulated the seamless way in which Jews were both distinct from and inseparably part of their broader culture: “When [Jews] look around for a place in which to live, they should take stock of the residents of that town—how chaste are the Christians there? Know that if Jews live in that town, their children and grandchildren will also behave just as the Christians do. For in every town … Jews act just like Christians.”⁶⁷ Judah’s forthright acknowledgment of the unavoidable nature of interreligious entanglement is striking. Aware that Christian townspeople might exercise a bad influence on Jewish inhabitants, he does not instruct his readers to avoid contact with their neighbors, much less to live in isolated segregation. Rather, he advises that they pick righteous Christians to live among, in order to ensure that the ineluctable interactions yield positive spiritual results. Judah’s own nonchalance on the subject makes it all the more surprising that so many scholars have been loath to apply a comparative analytical lens to Judah’s own theology.⁶⁸

WERE THE GERMAN PIETISTS “JEWISH MYSTICS”?

One final factor that has surely precluded research into Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world centers on the German Pietists specifically—namely, the tendency to view the group as a single link (or a “major trend”) in a self-contained chain of “Jewish mysticism.”⁶⁹ Medieval Jewish natural philosophers and kabbalists have traditionally been depicted as locked in perpetual battle with one another, and so it should come as no surprise if we tend to assume that “mystics” were opposed to scientists and philosophers, and vice versa. Moreover, while the early Jewish taxonomies of esoteric knowledge singled out for attention both ma’aseh bereishit (“the act of creation [of the natural world]”) and ma’aseh merkavah (“the act of the [divine] chariot”),⁷⁰ the former tended to be neglected in favor of the latter by those we tend to think of as Jewish “mystics.”⁷¹ Indeed, the kabbalistic tradition has come to be associated not with engagement with nature, but with the desire to transcend or spiritualize it. For medieval kabbalists, argues Elliot Wolfson, “nature is not adored as a goddess; it is treated as that which must be conquered and subdued, not in the sense of abusing nature but in the sense of transforming the corporeality of nature and elevating it to the higher, spiritual level.”⁷² In the view of Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, this lack of interest in nature among medieval kabbalists has been internalized by those who study them in the modern period: “To my knowledge there is no study of the esoteric theology of German Pietism in relation to ecological thinking, because the scholars of German Pietism (all of whom are historians of Jewish mysticism) are not interested in ecology.”⁷³ Yet scholars of medieval and early modern Christian thought have increasingly come to realize that mysticism and esotericism were often inseparable from scientific engagement with the natural world;⁷⁴ in the Jewish sphere, too, historians have shown that many early modern “scientists” were simultaneously “mystics,” and vice versa.⁷⁵ Medievalists have begun to incorporate these insights into work on medieval Jewish thought as well, showing the fluidity between such seemingly rigid categories as “magic,” “science,” and “mysticism.”⁷⁶

The categorization of the Pietists as “mystics” has not merely associated them with disdain for the natural world—it has served to preclude synchronic analysis of German Pietism altogether. Scholars of Jewish mysticism have often treated their subject transhistorically, or “phenomenologically,” comparing mystical texts from widely divergent periods and regions in search of an underlying “universal mystical experience.”⁷⁷ It is common for contemporary scholars of Kabbalah to read earlier movements in light of later ones, positing the existence of “subterranean currents” that silently transmit doctrines over the course of centuries.⁷⁸ No wonder, then, that when the Pietists state emphatically that their ideas have descended to them through an unbroken chain of transmission, originating in Babylonia and transmitted via their forebears in Italy,⁷⁹ many scholars have been content to take them at their word. In fact, much of the recent research on the German Pietists has come either from scholars of merkavah mysticism interested in the medieval “afterlife” of late antique heikhalot texts,⁸⁰ or from scholars of late thirteenth-century Kabbalah searching for precursors to theological developments that were first articulated decades later.⁸¹ To be sure, such diachronic research is intrinsically valuable—but conceiving of the Pietists as solely a segment of a unified, relatively homogeneous whole makes it all the more difficult to engage in the kind of comparative analysis that I am advocating, and hence to recognize that their distinctive approach to the natural world is indeed something new and worthy of attention.

While the phenomenological approach to the study of Jewish mysticism remains extremely influential, challenges to its methodological groundings have emerged in recent years. In fact, a growing cadre of scholars has expressed doubt as to the usefulness of the analytic term “Jewish mysticism” altogether. Joseph Dan (who embraces the term) has long acknowledged that “mysticism” is an anachronistic label, which the Pietists themselves would not have understood: “Hebrew … does not have a word equivalent even partially to the Latin-Christian term ‘mysticism.’ Any identification of a certain Jewish religious phenomenon as ‘mystical’ is a modern scholarly decision, which relies on the modern scholar’s understanding of the term: there is no intrinsic demand in the texts themselves for such a usage.”⁸² But more recently, scholars like Boaz Huss have gone even further, claiming that the study of “mysticism” is not only anachronistic from the perspective of the Jewish Middle Ages, but is methodologically inappropriate even for modern scholars. Huss has been especially critical of the prevailing phenomenological approach, which he argues “is based on a theological assumption concerning the universality of the mystical experience”:⁸³ “Not only does research into ‘Jewish mysticism’ artificially link phenomena that are in reality unrelated, it also serves to wrench these phenomena from the actual contexts within which they originated and developed. Most scholars of mysticism agree that so-called “mystical” phenomena existed in specific sociohistorical frameworks; but the claims that these phenomena are expressions of a universal mystical experience, and that they are best analyzed through comparative and phenomenological methods, leads to a disjuncture between these phenomena and their historical contexts, and to a blurring of their social and political characters.”⁸⁴ Annette Reed has noted the same problem in her study of the connections between Enochic, Apocalyptic, and Heikhalot sources: “It is indeed tempting to believe that we need only to label a text ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ to be exempted from the burden of proof normally required in reconstructions of social, literary, and religious history. Likewise, a surprising number of scholars accept that an appeal to ‘mystical experience’ suffices to support otherwise ungrounded speculations about Jewish movements, beliefs, and practices stretching back to time immemorial, even though scholarship on better attested mystical movements has shown mystical practice to be anything but an ahistorical phenomenon.”⁸⁵ Most recently, Peter Schäfer has lamented that the phenomenological approach “runs the risk of dehistoricizing the phenomena it is looking at and establishing an ahistorical, ideal, and essentialist construct…. Methodologically it presents a breathtakingly ahistorical hodgepodge of this and that, quotations from many different periods and literatures pressed into scholarly sounding categories.”⁸⁶ By “re-historicizing” texts and figures whose writings have been studied predominantly from an internalist, diachronic perspective, the present book seeks to put Huss’s, Reed’s, and Schäfer’s methodological appeals into practice.

TRIGGER WARNING: “COHERENCE,” “ECLECTICISM,” OR “COMPLEXITY”?

The argument presented in this book is based on a wide array of medieval Ashkenazic writings, which are read against both the diachronic backdrop of prior Jewish traditions and the synchronic backdrop of contemporaneous northern European culture. By focusing on Pietistic writings in particular, the book draws on a representative sampling of most of the genres that were most widespread in Ashkenazic culture—the German Pietists were extremely prolific, and this book ranges widely across their moralistic tracts, biblical and liturgical commentaries, halakhic (legal) writings and responsa literature, exempla and sermons, travel narratives, magical and visionary texts, and treatises on cosmology and human psychology.

In analyzing such a wide range of texts, however, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that a single underlying theology or coherent set of doctrines united all Pietistic writings, much less all of medieval Ashkenazic spiritual life. One of the recurring difficulties in studying Pietistic writings is what Haym Soloveitchik has called “the congenital inability of the Hasidey Ashkenaz to adhere to any fixed scheme or terminology”;⁸⁷ or, as Elliot Wolfson has somewhat more diplomatically stated, “consistency is rarely the measure of human creativity, and it is surely not so in the case of Judah the Pious, Eleazar of Worms, and other colleagues or disciples who belonged to their circle.”⁸⁸ Gershom Scholem’s formulation in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism has remained quite influential; gesturing toward the many, often conflicting texts and traditions upon which the Pietists drew, he suggested the following: “All these elements are intermingled in the richly varied literature of Hasidism, but rather in the form of an amorphous whole than as elements of a system. Its authors … showed themselves unable to develop these elements of thought or to produce anything like a synthesis; possibly they were not even conscious of the manifold inconsistencies among the various traditions, all of which were treated by them with the same reverence.”⁸⁹ Subsequent scholars have sought to impose order on this textual “amorphousness,” and have sought and found an array of interpretive “keys” that, via comparison, reconstruction, and reconciliation, unlocked the “esoteric doctrines” of the German Pietists. In this view, the Hasidei Ashkenaz did have underlying, esoteric “theological” commitments—they simply need to be carefully rescued from within the sea of extraneous or unrelated surrounding material.⁹⁰ Thus Joseph Dan has highlighted particularly the philosophical dimensions of Pietistic writings,⁹¹ while Elliot Wolfson has argued that the Pietists embraced the eroticized, imaginal theosophy characteristic of the later school of Spanish kabbalists.⁹²

But in a recent impassioned, programmatic essay, Moshe Idel has subjected much of this scholarship to withering criticism, arguing that the search for an underlying, unified Pietistic “theology” has not only been unsuccessful, but methodologically ill conceived. The writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, he argues, are simply rife with inconsistencies, and the efforts to impose order on them reflect the commitments of contemporary scholars rather than those of their historical subjects. The Kalonymides stood at the crossroads of incompatible textual currents—piyyutim and midrashim, magical and theurgical texts, philosophical and rationalist sources—and no amount of analysis or harmonization will reconcile these fundamentally incompatible traditions. And yet, Idel cautions that a lack of coherence is not the same as the kind of incoherent “amorphousness” or “eclecticism” described by Scholem. Rather, he suggests that Pietistic thought is best characterized as “an encounter between different theoretical and religious movements, each possessing a depth of its own. The encounter between them creates complexity (murkavut).”⁹³ Idel never explains precisely what distinguishes “complexity” from “eclecticism,” nor what kinds of generalizations are possible when dealing with authors who did not engage in the kind of systematic writing (not to say thinking) that rewards the search for consistency. In the present book, I attempt to tread a fine line between reductive harmonization on the one hand and a despairing acknowledgment of incoherence on the other. The approach I take is a thematic one, which is predicated on the search for “triggers.” What issues, or concepts, or anxieties provoke the Hasidei Ashkenaz to write (voluminously and sometimes inconsistently) throughout their corpus?⁹⁴ What specific words or verses or symbols trigger their characteristic outpourings of exegetical and numerological and moralistic reflection? Wide and deep reading in an array of neglected and unknown sources reveals that the theological statuses of the natural world and of the human body are two such triggers, analysis of which allow us to discern an overarching Pietistic worldview, which can in turn be situated within the social and cultural milieu in which it was crafted.

In surveying the varied genres of Pietistic writing, Joseph Dan and Ivan Marcus have noted that they can be roughly divided on the basis of their presumed reading audiences. Texts Dan labeled sifrut ha-yihud (texts on “God’s unity”) were intended to be “exoteric”—geared for mass consumption, and often focused on basic, foundational theological tenets and accessible moral instruction. Esoteric writings, in contrast, expressed the secret doctrines that the group never intended to widely circulate.⁹⁵ This book treats both the Pietists’ exoteric writings, such as Sefer Hasidim and the sifrut ha-yihud, and esoteric works like Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razya. Indeed, by seeking out thematic “triggers” rather than doctrinal coherence, this book destabilizes the very boundaries between restricted, elite theological discourses and outwardly directed popular teachings. The questions and interpretive strategies that the Pietists utilize in their exploration of the theological meaning of the natural world are quite similar, if not identical, across the genres in which they write. Elisheva Baumgarten has recently called for scholars of medieval Ashkenaz to move beyond the prescriptive, rarified texts composed by rabbinic elites, and to reconstruct descriptively the “everyday observances” of pious laypeople who did not leave behind written records of their pious practices.⁹⁶ Such renewed attention to medieval Ashkenazic “lay piety” can be complemented by this book’s attempt to interrogate how ostensibly naïve “folk” beliefs functioned within the broader theological discourse, in which the boundaries separating elite theology from, say, popular preaching were far less restrictive than the typical focus on Pietistic “esotericism” might suggest.

The main body of the present book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is structured around an extended case study of the Pietists’ interpretation of Psalms 111:4 (“He has created a remembrance of His wonders”), a verse they return to obsessively throughout their esoteric and exoteric writings. This chapter argues that the Pietists prized, and saw theological meaning in, the workings of the natural world—both the marvelous and the mundane. In both their popularizing and esoteric theological writings, the Pietists explored the empirical workings of the predictable, consistent natural order, while simultaneously ruminating upon the meaning and causes of ostensibly “wondrous” exceptions to natural causation. The Pietists’ attempts to explore the meaning and limits of the natural world were in keeping with the scientific and theological interests of their Christian neighbors—interests they were aware of in part due to the polemical uses for which they were not infrequently marshaled.

Chapter 2 links the Pietists’ general engagement with the natural world to their specific preoccupation with the meaning and workings of human embodiment. It argues that the Pietists understood the human body to be a microcosm of the created order in its entirety, and that their liturgical, embryological, and even physiognomic writings appropriate medieval scientific notions about the human body in the service of their overarching theological agenda. Like their Christian contemporaries, whose incarnational theological commitments increasingly privileged the human body as a site of spiritual meaning, the Pietists understood the body to be key to human identity—a view that helps explain their novel attempts to create Golems, microcosmic human bodies animated via theurgic means. Chapter 3 explores the role of the human soul within this microcosmic worldview, and shows that the Pietists saw the human person as essentially a psychosomatic unity—which led them to conceive of the soul itself as having some fundamentally corporeal qualities. Their simultaneous focus on the embodiedness of the soul and on the spiritualization of the body sheds new light upon Pietistic penitential theology, which has often been understood to reflect a disdain for or flight from the body.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore Pietistic understanding of human physiology, in particular the body’s outer limits and eventual breakdown. Chapter 4 looks at Pietistic discussions of lycanthropy (werewolves) and argues that Jews appropriated contemporary Christian notions of monstrosity in an effort to engage with the theological meaning of corporeal mutability. Some Pietistic authors linked monsters with demons, and this chapter shows that discourses of demonology provided the Pietists with another means of thinking about the limits and possibilities of the physical body. Chapter 5 reconstructs the Pietists’ anxieties over the decomposition and future resurrection of the body by investigating their surprisingly extensive writings on human excrement. “Waste treatment” was a pervasive topic in Sefer Hasidim and many other Pietistic texts, and this chapter shows that lowly excrement was invested with lofty theological significance in eschatological and polemical contexts. The book’s conclusion selectively surveys the reception of medieval Ashkenazic ideas about nature and the body in the later Middle Ages, and suggests some directions for future research.