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CHAPTER 1

Wondrous Nature and Natural Wonders

Heir to all the fantastic notions concerning the universe that were current in the ancient world, with equal title to the wild and wonderful tales that swept medieval Europe, it is a source of surprise not that Jewish literature laid claim to these ideas and stories, but rather that it made so little of them. Compared with the intense popular interest that was focused upon the curious and weird phenomena of nature in the Europe they inhabited, the Jews may be said almost to have neglected the subject altogether—allowing for the circumstance that Jewish writings, with their juridical and exegetical orientation, did not fully reflect the state of popular credulity. Nonetheless, the “facts” that may be culled from them make strange reading enough.

—Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition

In his theological treatise Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u-Penimiyot (Pure Utterances Revealed and Hidden), Judah the Pious offers a fascinating argument for the plausibility of God’s existence: “If one places hot ash on hot excrement, it will cause harm to the one who produced [the excrement]. And although we cannot see any connection between the excrement and the person’s body, nonetheless the body will be harmed by the power of the excrement. Thus, there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see…. Just as [this connection] is real, even though it cannot be seen by the eye, so too our Creator, may his Name be blessed, is a real entity, whose power is in everything, even though we have never seen Him.”¹ In this passage, to which we return in detail below, Judah justifies a common Jewish doctrine—God’s existence and omnipotence—using a decidedly uncommon interpretive strategy. The ability to apply heat to and hence “weaponize” human excrement somehow lends credence to a seemingly unrelated theological tenet. Indeed, the invocation of excrement and its magical properties is of a piece with a broader tendency in Pietistic writings to engage intensively with a wide array of fantastic creatures, objects, and phenomena. In Pietistic works like Sefer Hasidim, for example, men turn into wolves, demons work mischief with impunity, magical spells are routinely, sometimes dangerously, effective, and wearing the proper amulet can mean the difference between life and death. If one focuses on these passages—and there are many of them—it is easy to understand why generations of scholars have sought to situate the Pietists exclusively within the “superstitious” worldview of medieval Germanic folk culture. Joshua Trachtenberg’s analysis of the “wonders of nature” in medieval Ashkenazic culture is typical in this regard. In the epigraph that begins this chapter, Trachtenberg diagnoses the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz as suffering from a double malady. First, their “juridical and exegetical orientation”—which later scholars would dub “talmudocentrism”²—prevented them from engaging with the workings and meaning of their natural surroundings. Second, to the limited extent that they did appreciate or seek to understand the natural world, they were boxed in by the “fantastical notions” and “wild and wonderful tales” that predominated in their northern European surroundings. The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, in this telling, labored under an ignorance compounded by isolation.

Trachtenberg’s generalization has been accepted, and extended, by an array of subsequent scholars who have contended that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were at best apathetic and at worst overtly hostile toward exploration of their natural surroundings. Joseph Dan, for instance, has contrasted the approach of Ashkenazic thinkers like the German Pietists with that of their Sephardic contemporaries:

[Medieval Jewish] rationalist thinkers presented their readers with the wonders of Creation as a testimony of God’s power and glory…. Kabbalists discovered in Creation reflections of divine forces, and saw its components as paralleling the structure and internal dynamics of the divine realm. This simple, understandable approach was inaccessible to R. Judah the Pious, because its fundamental assumption is that God created the world as an expression of His inner goodness, and that the laws of existence reflect God’s goodness, and His love of His creations…. Rabbi Judah the Pious and R. Eleazar of Worms developed a different teaching…. The laws of existence … are designed to create a situation that is difficult for human beings. That is to say, investigation of the laws of the cosmos does not bring man to recognition of God’s goodness, but on the contrary, reveals the ways in which God lays burdens on man, and makes things difficult for him.³

Nature, in this reading, is an intrinsically antagonistic force, concerning which the Pietists are uniformly pessimistic;⁴ Judah and Eleazar “thus distance the Creator from the world, and from the laws of nature that govern it—for they do not see nature as a reflection of God’s attributes.”⁵ Elliot Wolfson has argued in a similar vein that “the truly esoteric dimension of Rhineland Jewish pietistm … is … rooted in an essentially negative view about the physical world,”⁶ while Haym Soloveitchik has claimed that “the universe, in Hasidic thinking, is empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning. No image of God is to be found there, nor does it reflect His wisdom.”⁷

This chapter interrogates and ultimately seeks to dispel this general characterization. It argues that the German Pietists saw the natural world as profoundly imbued with theological meaning, and that they invested considerable energy in attempting to understand its workings. The Pietists manifested this preoccupation particularly through their exegesis of a single biblical verse: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders” (zekher asah le-nifle’otav—Ps. 111:4), a verse they marshal consistently, and somewhat formulaically, in an array of their writings. In their reading, this verse refers to observable phenomena that attest to theological truths about God and His attributes. The Pietists believed that the created world contains “remembrances” (objects and phenomena discernable to the careful observer) which shed light upon God’s “wonders” (namely, theological truths about His nature and attributes). Dan, who was the first to treat this doctrine of “remembrances” in his pioneering work on the German Pietists, understood it in light of his broader sense that the Pietists “do not see nature as a reflection of God’s attributes.” In a series of studies, he has argued that the only remembrances of interest to the Pietists were those that deviated from, and hence undermined the typical workings of the natural order:⁸ “The Creator has, in his kindness and goodness, implanted within reality wondrous and unnatural things that cannot be comprehended according to the laws of nature, in order to enable His pious followers to comprehend Him, and to learn about the wondrous, supernatural capabilities of the Creator Himself, which similarly cannot be understood according to the laws of nature…. The true nature of God can be discerned, in their view, only from the supernatural, from phenomena that are exceptions to the conventional laws of nature.”⁹ This sense that the Pietists prized “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural” has been widely adopted by scholars writing in Dan’s wake, who have agreed that, for the Pietists, “only in the marvelous and the anomalous does one find the Divinity reflected.”¹⁰ The claim has been further extended to Ashkenazic culture as a whole by scholars who have contended that “reliance on natural phenomena as a means of comprehending [theological matters] was an uncommon characteristic” in medieval Ashkenaz.¹¹

Now, it is true that discussions of “nature” are conspicuously lacking in Pietistic theological texts—but this is not due to a supposed Ashkenazic antipathy toward the natural world. Rather, it results from the fact that, as far as Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were concerned, “nature” as such did not exist—at least not lexically. The standard medieval Hebrew term for nature, teva, was a neologism coined in the mid-twelfth century by Samuel Ibn Tibbon in his Perush ha-Milot ha-Zarot (Explanation of Foreign Terms), a philosophical dictionary intended to supplement his Hebrew translations of Judeo-Arabic rationalist texts.¹² In earlier Jewish sources, teva was used to denote either the building blocks of which physical objects were composed—the four elements, for instance, or the four humors—or else, relatedly, the “natures,” or specific qualities of things.¹³ Ibn Tibbon used teva in his translations as a replacement for the Arabic words tab and tabi’a, to denote “nature” as a systematic and unified construct. The German Pietists did not have access to Ibn Tibbon’s translations or dictionary, and so their neglect of “nature” reflects not a principled theological opposition, but simply a lack of conceptual vocabulary. Ashkenazic Jews did have other, related terms at their disposal, such as hokhmat ha-toladot for “science,”¹⁴ and of course ma’aseh bereishit, which could mean both the process of creation and the created order as a whole. But whether these semantic terms approximated or differed from the Tibbonite teva in their meanings can only be discerned if Pietistic discussions of the workings of their physical surroundings are analyzed from the ground up.

The fact that the Pietists were exploring God’s “remembrances” at precisely the moment when Jewish (and, as we shall see, also Christian) conceptions of “nature” were being consolidated is of crucial importance. For Pietistic ruminations upon Psalms 111:4 in fact reveal a spectrum of attitudes toward the created world and natural order. On the one hand, the writings of Judah and Eleazar recurrently locate theological profundity specifically in the routine, mundane components of the natural order. In these instances, the Pietists seem to take for granted, and to derive spiritual meaning from, the stability and predictability of the laws of nature. Thus, while the “remembrances” that they see as meaningful do attest to God’s wondrous nature, they are often not themselves wondrous. Indeed, the prosaic quality of these “remembrances” is key to the very workings of the Pietists’ argumentation, revealing not only an awareness of and appreciation for the conventional workings of nature, but a theological dependence upon it. On the other hand, the Pietists not infrequently invoke Psalms 111:4 in their discussions of decidedly non-mundane phenomena—fantastic, extraordinary marvels such as the malevolent potentialities of excrement described above. In these cases, the “remembrances” highlighted are themselves “wondrous,” and would seem to destabilize the consistency that the Pietists at other times prized.

But while these divergent approaches seem contradictory at first glance, they are in fact of a piece with a broader tension in high medieval thought—how to make sense of apparently inexplicable phenomena, and integrate them into the broader natural order. This challenge was increasingly taken up by high medieval Christians and Jews alike—not only by the superstitious “folk” but by influential theologians and natural philosophers, who were both fascinated by and suspicious of the mirabilia that featured prominently in the literary texts, magical treatises, and travel narratives introduced into Europe over the course of the high Middle Ages. These thinkers arrived at diverse solutions to the tension between natural order and disorderly wonders of nature. But on the whole, their discourses of “science” and “nature” were far more capacious than modern, binary distinctions between nature and the supernatural would lead one to believe, and could include and account for the magical and marvelous alongside the mundane.

By analyzing Pietistic discussions of God’s “remembrances” both synchronically and diachronically, this chapter shows that the natural order was indeed a source of theological meaning for the German Pietists. Attention to this dimension of medieval Ashkenazic theology will also allow us to draw linkages between their esoteric works of elite theology and the more popular, outwardly directed genres that conveyed these ideas to a wider audience. Moreover, the very ways in which they conceived of the character and boundaries of the natural order drew upon developments in the Christian setting in which they lived, and with which they were varyingly and substantively engaged.¹⁵

“HE HAS CREATED A REMEMBRANCE OF HIS WONDERS”

The German Pietists were hardly the first readers of the Bible interested in identifying the precise “remembrances” and “wonders” alluded to in Psalms 111:4. This verse was the subject of a lengthy tradition of Jewish exegesis long before the Pietists came on the scene. The interpretation most common during the medieval period approached the verse from a historical perspective, identifying God’s “wonders” with His miraculous interventions in human history. The “remembrances” of these events could vary. One approach was to define the remembrances as the practices and rituals that the Jews were commanded to observe as a means of commemorating God’s wondrous deeds. Thus, the mid-twelfth century midrashic compilation Sekhel Tov jointly lists the prohibition of eating an animal’s sciatic nerve (gid ha-nasheh), the commandment of remembering the exodus from Egypt, the prohibition of eating leaven on Passover, and the commandment of dwelling in sukkot on the Feast of Tabernacles as “remembrances” of “wonders” that God performed for the biblical Israelites.¹⁶ Passive remembrance is here allied to specific ritual imperatives, since human beings bear the responsibility of maintaining the practices that commemorate God’s miracles and activities. A wide range of biblical exegetes—both predating and postdating the compilation of Sekhel Tov—read the verse similarly. The eleventh-century French exegete Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi), for instance, explains that the verse refers to “the Sabbath and holidays [which God] established for the Jews, about which it is written ‘and you shall remember (ve-zakharta) that you were in Egypt.’”¹⁷ The twelfth-century itinerant Spanish rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and the thirteenth-century rabbi Moses b. Nahman of Barcelona incorporate similar readings into their own biblical commentaries.¹⁸ The motif was utilized in other genres as well—a sermon attributed to the fifteenth-century halakhic authority Jacob Molin of Mainz (Maharil), for instance, consists of an expanded, homiletical rendering of Psalms 111:4 that takes the same historical-ritualistic approach.¹⁹

A related interpretation of this verse linked God’s historical “wonders” not with practices, but rather with objects that served as “remembrances.”²⁰ Thus, a variety of midrashim invoked Psalms 111:4 in their discussions of Lot’s wife’s metamorphosis into a pillar of salt in Genesis 19: “When Sodom and Gomorrah were overturned, it is written ‘And [Lot’s] wife looked back’ (Gen. 19:26), and she remains a pillar of salt to this day. Why? ‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders,’ so that the generations will recite the praises of the Holy One, blessed be He.”²¹ Other midrashim make a similar claim regarding Noah’s ark, which they claim was preserved as a sign, lest people forget God’s miraculous flooding of the earth.²²

“THE WORLD FOLLOWS ITS CUSTOMARY COURSE”

This focus on God’s role in human history, and the objects and rituals that serve to commemorate it, is dramatically different from the Pietists’ interpretive approach; indeed, their reading of the verse seems to be wholly sui generis, without precedent in earlier Jewish literature.²³ Psalms 111:4 is invoked dozens of times in the writings of Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Eleazar, in a variety of different contexts.²⁴ Generally speaking, the argumentation based on this verse is constructed in the following manner: first, a question about some theological proposition is laid out; next, a “remembrance,” an object or phenomenon found in the natural world, is presented and briefly described; finally, a correlation is drawn between the remembrance and the “wondrous” theological truth, thus answering the question presented in the first step.

In many instances, the remembrances described in the second stage of the argument are not rarities, or deviations from the natural order; rather, they are common, even mundane components of the physical world. For example, Judah argues that God’s omniscience is a tenable possibility in light of the fact that “man’s mind can think two thoughts at once, or see in one instant many different colors. He does not comprehend these things in succession, but rather simultaneously. Certainly the Creator, who sees and remembers all things [can do likewise]!”²⁵ This passage locates spiritual resonance in the routine and prosaic, not in some wondrous exception to the rules of nature. Just as it is empirically obvious that man can think two thoughts or see two colors simultaneously, Judah suggests, it should pose no problem to accept that God can exercise omniscience. A similar line of argument is used to justify belief in God’s all-pervasiveness: “The Creator is everywhere. And if one were to ask, “‘How can I believe that He is found everywhere, and that nothing is hidden from Him?’ … He has created a remembrance of His wonders. The glass that is in a window does not block out the lights…. How much more ought we to believe in the Creator of everything, that nothing blocks Him.”²⁶ Here, too, the mundane property of the transparency of glass is used to make sense of the fact that God can be ever-present, even if unseen by the naked eye. God’s pervasiveness can be demonstrated on the basis of other common phenomena as well. Thus, Eleazar explains that God’s supernal light can be shared among many divine beings simultaneously, “in the same manner that one can make both cheese and butter from milk, and one can boil milk and separate the curds from the whey.”²⁷ Judah, too, compares God’s pervasiveness in the universe to the way that a liquid which is placed in one part of a block of cheese will distribute itself equally throughout the entire block.²⁸

In other instances, the Pietists not only describe routine phenomena, but also take pains to give naturalistic explanations for why they occur: “If one were to ask: How can one believe that God exists in the world, given that no eye has ever seen Him? It is possible to respond that … in the winter, when one is indoors, or in a warm bathhouse, no one can see the breath that one exhales from his mouth and nostrils. Similarly, during the summer the warmth of one’s breath is not visible. For during the winter, man’s breath is warm and the air is cold, and when [these] two unlike things [meet] the warmth is visible; but warm air eliminates [the visibility of a person’s breath].”²⁹ Once again, the fact that something discernable in nature can be present even though it is invisible proves that an invisible God can exist as well. Both Judah and Eleazar use similar logic in explaining another natural phenomenon, namely that dust can be seen in a beam of light coming in through a window, while dust is invisible outdoors in broad daylight. In discussing this “remembrance,” they offer up a programmatic statement about the necessity of the careful investigation of nature: “Since [the outdoor dust] in invisible, should we deny, heaven forbid, that it exists? We must not say this but rather compare one situation to another until we discover the truth.”³⁰ Elsewhere, this same “remembrance” attests to a different theological truth, and is linked to another, equally common natural phenomenon: “I have heard concerning angels … that there are those who say they are invisible on account of the subtlety of their bodies. Behold, the fine dust that can be seen in a beam of light that enters a house through a window or crack cannot [otherwise] be seen, on account of its subtlety. Similarly, if one is far away from a spider web, one cannot see it—how much more so [angels], which are even more subtle. And [even] if a spider web is extremely large, when you gather it together it becomes very small—how much more so can spirits contract themselves and become small [as well].”³¹ Like the dust in a beam of light, a spider’s web is invoked not because it is wondrous, but precisely because it is not—its ubiquity allows the reader to appreciate that the existence of invisible beings is indeed a tenable proposition.

This location of theological meaning within the physical world is also evident in passages where the Pietists derive their information not from direct observation, but rather from earlier sources. In a number of contexts, the Pietists describe the visible signs that confirm the rabbinic teaching that God issued 613 commandments to the Jewish people:³² “‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders’—[the numerical value of] ‘of his wonders’ is 613, corresponding to the [365] positive and [248] negative commandments. The 365 tendons and the 248 limbs of the human body are a remembrance of this.”³³ According to gematriyah, the system of letter-number equivalency that was a mainstay of Pietistic hermeneutics, the 613 commandments are encoded in God’s “wonders” (nifle’otav)—a word whose own numerical value is 613.³⁴ And these “wonders” are literally “embodied” in the tendons and limbs of the human form: the physical constitution of the human body broadcasts a theological message to those who are attuned to it.³⁵ Although the link between the 248 limbs in the body and the 248 negative commandments derives from precedents in rabbinic literature,³⁶ the invocation of the 365 tendons in connection with the 365 positive commandments is apparently original to this Pietistic source.³⁷

A somewhat more complex use of this type of argumentation appears in Judah’s and Eleazar’s discussions of emotion and cognition. Eleazar, for instance, argues, “The Creator is in everything, and all things derive from Him. And should one’s heart say, ‘How can I believe that there is a God in the world, when no eye has seen Him?’ … The very intellect and thoughts in one’s heart—were one to dissect a person limb from limb, one could not find the intellect. How much more so does the Creator of all exist even though He cannot be seen. Similarly, how connected is a man’s heart when he sees a woman and desires her!”³⁸ The somewhat cryptic final line of this passage is explicable based on a parallel in the writings of Judah: “A man sees a woman from afar, and love is awakened in his heart, even though no ties of love connect her to his heart.”³⁹ Love and desire, the Pietists explain, are invisible forces, like the intellect; nonetheless, they can act at a distance, and still impact the human body physically: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders…. Thought alone can cause a person to fatten or to deteriorate, as it says, ‘Good news fattens one’s bones’ (Prov. 15:30), and depression weakens a person…. These [physical consequences] are dependent on thought, without evidence of any action.”⁴⁰ Other emotions, too, confirm that invisible forces can have powerfully visible effects: “Laughter and anger are dependent upon thought, and we never see any [physical] thing that brings one to anger or laughter—only thought and reflection and contemplation.”⁴¹

Perhaps the clearest articulation of the naturalistic worldview underlying the doctrine of zekher asah le-nifle’otav can be found in Judah’s and Eleazar’s repeated references to the regularity and consistency of phenomena such as the progression of the celestial bodies, or the duration of the reproductive process. Judah, for instance, argues,

He has created a remembrance of His wonders…. “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), so that man should never think that something occurs against God’s will, or that maybe a second [divine] power can abrogate the actions of the first one. It is for this reason that [God] set the time and duration of reproduction, each animal and plant species as is customary for it, and the times of planting and harvesting, each in its proper time. And He has never changed and never will change these customs…. This is in order that one not think that there is a second God who can contradict the first God. Thus, our sages have said, “The world follows its customary course” (olam ke-minhago noheg) in all matters.⁴²

The “supernatural” abrogation of the natural order, in this view, would threaten rather than reinforce knowledge of God’s “wonders.”

This privileging of the “customary course” which the world follows has surprising implications for the Pietistic conception of miracles, deviations from the natural order that overturn the regularity imposed by God on the physical world. With few exceptions,⁴³ Pietistic sources minimize both the frequency and theological significance of direct divine interventions in the functioning of the natural order. Thus, Sefer Hasidim cautions that “one should seek to avoid miracles,”⁴⁴ and that if one does experience a miracle, it should not be publicized to others.⁴⁵ Similarly, the Pietists express discomfort with apparently miraculous events described in the Bible, and seem more comfortable with figures like Joshua and Samuel, who rarely performed public miracles, than with prophets like Elijah and Elisha, who were constantly the cause or beneficiary of interventions in the natural order.⁴⁶ Indeed, in contrasting these figures with one another, Judah categorically asserts, “In times of great need, prophets may perform miracles, but only when the desired end cannot come about via non-miraculous means. When it is possible for it to come about by some other means, one must not perform a miracle. And when a minor miracle will suffice, one must not perform a great miracle.”⁴⁷ Eleazar sums up this approach with a programmatic assertion: “It is not the way of God to effectuate the decrees that He is constantly effectuating through open miracles. Rather, [He brings his decrees about] through guidance of the world.”⁴⁸

In cases where miracles do prove necessary, Judah emphasizes that God generally chooses to perform them in private, so as not to visibly interfere with the (spiritually resonant) typical workings of the natural order. The destruction of Dagon, the idolatrous god of the Philistines, recounted in I Samuel 5 takes place at night when no witnesses are present, as does the plague of the firstborns in Exodus 12. Even Elisha only resurrects the son of the Shunamite woman in II Kings 4 after first closing the door to his bedroom, ensuring that no one would observe the actual workings of the miraculous event. Judah interprets God’s criticism of Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 18 in this manner as well—laughing upon finding out that she would bear a son in her old age was her way of publicizing the miracle, which God in turn instructed her to avoid.⁴⁹ The angelic instruction to Lot’s wife not to look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an expression of the same desire to keep miracles hidden—her transformation into a pillar of salt was thus a punishment for her having violated the bounds of secrecy.⁵⁰ The contrast with non-Pietistic interpretations of Psalms 111:4 is here particularly stark—in earlier sources, the pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was transformed was precisely intended to commemorate and publicize God’s miraculous deeds.⁵¹ Discomfort with miraculous intervention also explains the Pietists’ conspicuous attempts to minimize the wondrousness of certain scriptural miracles. For example, the inexplicable blossoming of Aaron’s staff in the Tabernacle during Korah’s rebellion in Numbers 17 is described by the Pietists as rather mundane. In the context of a discussion of the rapidly blossoming trees of the Garden of Eden, Eleazar notes, “You should not be surprised—for Aaron’s staff produced fruit in a single night, without being planted. And truffles and mushrooms [grow] in a single day, without being planted or drawing [sustenance] from the ground. And cabbage produces sprouts, even when not [planted] in the ground.”⁵² Eleazar here takes an ostensibly miraculous occurrence and diminishes its significance by equating it with commonplace horticultural phenomena.

When it comes to prayer, too, miracles should neither be requested nor invoked as a means of praising God. According to Sefer Hasidim, one is prohibited from praying for miraculous interventions in the natural order⁵³ and should not praise God for performing miracles with impunity: “‘Rejoice, oh righteous, in the Lord’ (Ps. 33:1)—but not in other joys…. This verse does not explain—what ‘joy’ is [accurate with regard to] the Holy One, blessed be He? Truth—one should not speak lies, [such as], ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, makes the heavens into earth, or the earth into the heavens, turns water into wine or honey into wormwood or wormwood into honey.’ Anything that does not usually happen should not be used to praise God.”⁵⁴ In a similar passage elsewhere, Judah echoes this line of reasoning further, claiming that attributing wondrous miracles to God is not only unseemly, but also untrue. In other words, his commitment to the immutability of the natural order leads him to implicitly place limitations on God’s omnipotence. In addressing the talmudic prohibition on praising God in overly extravagant language,⁵⁵ he writes: “If one were to ask: Since God is omnipotent … let us praise Him with all manner [of praises]. It is possible to respond that we ought to praise Him for those things he regularly, visibly does for humanity…. For it would not do to say that God can do anything, lest one think of things which are illogical, and thereby blaspheme the Exalted One. For instance, one might think, ‘Since He is omnipotent, why can he not make today precede yesterday, or [tomorrow] precede today?’⁵⁶ For it is impossible for the past to follow the future [chronologically].”⁵⁷ It is clear from these passages that both Judah and Eleazar much prefer the regularity, and even constraint, imposed by consistency and predictability over a worldview in which miracles play a destabilizing role. This antipathy toward changing the natural created order is predicated on the belief that that order is hardly haphazard—much less maleficent or antagonistic—but that it rather reflects God’s wisdom and desires.

Indeed, this conception of a consistent natural order is evident not only from the specific phenomena that the Pietists cite—the transparency of glass, the steam of one’s breath, and dust visible in a ray of sunlight—but, more broadly, from the very rhetorical agenda that their invocations of Psalms 111:4 are intended to further. In their discussions of God’s “remembrances,” the Pietists were engaged in a pedagogic and exhortatory strategy aimed at a specific audience. Particularly in the sifrut ha-yihud, Psalms 111:4 is invoked in reference to an imagined interlocutor, who raises a succession of skeptical queries regarding the nature of God. “How can I believe that there is a God in the world, when no eye has seen Him?” “How can I believe that He is found everywhere, and that nothing is hidden from Him?” and so on. The goal of the Pietists’ exoteric writings—aimed at a “lay” audience rather than a select group of initiates—is to offer convincing answers to these questions precisely by listing examples of mundane substances that, though invisible, undoubtedly exist. That is, it is the very ordinariness of the objects and phenomena, their tendency to be taken for granted, that lends the argument its weight. Drawing linkages between, say, God’s invisibility and inexplicable, supernatural phenomena would not meet the needs of the consumers of the Pietists’ writings, who were interested in comprehending theological truths about God, not in begging the question through the marshaling of even more unbelievable phenomena.

The notion that the Pietists were concerned with the spiritual edification of those whose faith was less than perfect runs counter to the conventional depiction of the Hasidei Ashkenaz as elitist and withdrawn, closed off from the broader Jewish community and its manifold spiritual failings. Indeed, the possibility that there existed medieval Ashkenazic Jews who were capable of theological skepticism altogether belies the tendency to depict Ashkenazic Jewry as a “pious community,” unshakeable in their faith and religious commitment.⁵⁸ And yet, there is ample evidence in Pietistic sources that facts on the ground were considerably more fraught than the idealized Ashkenazic self-image would lead us to believe.⁵⁹ Sefer Hasidim, like the sifrut ha-yihud, is rife with discussions aimed at Jews doubtful about basic theological tenets, including God’s incorporeality,⁶⁰ theodicy,⁶¹ divine omniscience,⁶² providence,⁶³ and so on. As in the examples cited above, the dialogic structure is consistently marshaled in these discussions, suggesting that real conversations about these issues actually could, and did, take place. Hence the following programmatic statement: “People should not harbor doubts about their Creator. Rather, if they have any doubts about the Creator, they should speak with a sage (hakham) who is expert in theological matters … and who will give a wise and fitting answer to the doubter’s words.”⁶⁴ The Pietists also discuss skepticism explicitly in their writings on pedagogy. Thus Sefer Hasidim at one point counsels, “One must not reveal wondrous teachings to children, lest they say, ‘This is nonsense, and since this is false, so are the others [teachings of Judaism].’”⁶⁵ Elsewhere, the opposite approach is considered: “Children’s minds are like the minds of adults who are dreaming—they accept the truth of everything. So, too, children believe that everything they are told is true, until they are led astray by evil acquaintances.”⁶⁶ In any event, it is clear that doubts about theological teachings were by no means uncommon during this period, thus necessitating the kind of exoteric response contained especially in the sifrut ha-yihud.

In sum, it is crucial to examine not only the content, but also the context of Pietistic invocations of Psalms 111:4. The Pietists’ analyses of the relationship between God and the natural world were not abstract or theoretical—they were rather aimed at real-life skeptics, necessitating argumentation that was rhetorically compelling. This need could be met by linking apparently unbelievable claims about God’s capabilities with common, prosaic natural phenomena, like steam, the rising and setting of the sun, and so on. The world’s “customary course” was not, per Soloveitchik, “empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” Rather, as Eleazar puts it, God “created the world to reveal the power of His actions to His nation”⁶⁷—the spiritual resonance and theological profundity imbued within the created world can be uncovered via careful study and observation. Or, as Judah states categorically elsewhere, at Creation, “God said in his heart: ‘Let Me create the world, not because I have any need of it, but in order that my creations might rejoice when I reveal My wisdom to them.’”⁶⁸

EMPIRICISM AND ESOTERICISM

Significantly, the Pietists invoke empirical observations not only to confirm basic theological truths such as God’s existence, invisibility, and omniscience, but also to validate the more rarified teachings of the Jewish esoteric tradition. Beginning in late antiquity, Jewish texts identified the creation account in Genesis (ma’aseh bereishit) and Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot (ma’aseh merkavah) as two major loci of secret knowledge,⁶⁹ and the Pietists subject both of these categories to extensive commentary and interpretation—particularly in Sodei Razya (Secret of Secrets), Eleazar’s massive five-part compilation of esoteric traditions. Sodei Razya and related texts were aimed at an audience of initiates, elite disciples who could be entrusted with secret traditions whose transmission was strictly regulated. In these writings, too, the Pietists invoke and explore the routine workings of the natural order, marshaling an array of naturalistic “proofs” that render their esoteric teachings convincing or comprehensible. As such, the theology of nature they lay out in their exoteric teachings mirrors, and must be understood in light of, the approach to the natural world undergirding their more recondite doctrines.

In Sodei Razya, empirical proofs are often marshaled with reference to Sefer Yetsirah, a cryptic cosmological text that the Pietists cited from frequently and reverently.⁷⁰ Sefer Yetsirah focuses in part upon God’s creation of the universe, and details the precise sequence in which the primordial elements were formed—God first created air (ru’ah), derived water from air, and then fire and earth from water. Eleazar justifies this order using an array of confirmations from the natural world—what the Pietists elsewhere call “remembrances”—some original to his writings, others culled from a range of earlier sources:⁷¹ “There is an example in the world: If one breathes into the palm of his hand, it will become wet, and thus we know that water emerged from air. Fire emerged from water—for if water is heated in a clean glass vessel, and placed in the sun during the summer time, it can be used to light bits of flax. And stones [come from] fire [and water], for if you fill a pot [with water] and boil it for many days, the vessel will produce something like a piece of stone. All this is intellectually logical (sevarat ha-da’at).”⁷² Man can thus comprehend the order of God’s creation of the elements by being attentive to the moisture in one’s breath, the ability of a water-filled glass vessel to focus sunlight and kindle a fire, and the crystallization of minerals that have been boiled in water for an extended period.⁷³ Using such observable phenomena, as filtered through sevarat ha-da’at, as a way of making sense of the order of creation, clearly comports with the Pietists’ instructions to “compare one situation to another until we discover the truth.”⁷⁴ Eleazar similarly justifies the creation of water from air by invoking “the wet moisture of speech,” observable in the steam that comes from one’s mouth during the wintertime, “when the air is cold and the body is warm, and steam comes out of one’s mouth like smoke.”⁷⁵ The same “smoky” steam allows Eleazar to verify that God could indeed speak at Sinai “from within the fire” (Deut. 4:13), since “the steam [of one’s breath in winter] resembles thin pillars of smoke.”⁷⁶ That water originates in air is also proven by the fact that dew collects on the ground overnight, even when it does not rain.⁷⁷

Experimental data is marshaled in Pietistic sources not only to justify the creation process according to Sefer Yetsirah, but also to shed light on such scientific topics as the workings of meteorology and the structure of the cosmos. Thus Eleazar explains the way in which winds separate raindrops from one another by advising his reader to “take light feathers, and place them into a vessel, and blow into it, and the feathers will be separated from one another.”⁷⁸ Elsewhere, he describes a similar experiment, which can be marshaled to justify the fact that the earth is suspended in the center of the universe: “The earth is suspended in mid-air with the spheres rotating around it, and the earth does not move from its place. This is analogous to a wide glass vessel with a narrow opening, in which one places … dry leaves, or birds’ feathers, or garlic peels. [If] one places his mouth by the opening of the vessel, and blows forcefully till the entire vessel is full of his breath, then whatever is inside the vessel will rise to the middle of the air on account of the wind within—so too the earth is suspended in mid-air.”⁷⁹ An array of other meteorological phenomena are explained by analogy with everyday observations. Thus the appearance of lightning can be attributed to the “heavenly water jars” (following Job 38:37) striking one another, which produces lightning in the same manner that hitting rocks together creates sparks.⁸⁰ The origin of rain can be traced to the heavenly waters, which were separated by God from the lower waters on the second day of creation, and which are now in close proximity to the heat of the sun. That this contact causes rain to fall can be understood in light of “a man who brings a vessel full of water into a bathhouse—because of the heat, [the vessel] will start to sweat” and to drip due to condensation.⁸¹

The role of water in the Creation account is explored empirically elsewhere as well. Eleazar argues that the water that God initially created was fresh water, not salt water; the latter came into being only later, when “pure” water mixed with the “mountains of salt” that were made later in the process of Creation: “And anyone who wants to understand the truth, [which is] that the oceanic waters were initially sweet, and became salty on account of the mountains of salt, should construct a glass vessel, like those used by artisans to distill rosewater, and [use it to] separate out the sweet water, leaving the salt by itself. The moisture of the water rises within the vessel due to the heat of the fire, just as it rises upwards from the earth, leaving the salt behind in the bottom of the vessel.”⁸² Eleazar’s familiarity with the mechanics of distillation allows him to explicate—and in theory, to experimentally recreate—the workings of God’s creative activities.

Analyzing the process and workings of ma’aseh bereishit—the created world—by means of empirical proofs from the natural order seems fitting, and is in keeping with the theological value attributed to observable “remembrances” described above. But significantly, the Pietists harness natural phenomena even in their discussions of ma’aseh merkavah, the most recondite and transcendent contents of Jewish esotericism. As scholars have long noted, the Pietists transmitted (and perhaps even originated) the sod ha-egoz (“secret of the nut”), a cryptic motif in which the spatial structure of the divine chariot (merkavah) corresponds precisely to the anatomy of a walnut: the exterior shell and interior membranes and chambers are laid out in the same intricate configuration as the fire, electrum, and angels that Ezekiel observes in his famous vision.⁸³ In one passage attributed to Eleazar, this secret is explicitly linked to Psalms 111:4, again indicating that, for the Pietists, theological truths can be derived from routine objects and phenomena found in the natural world.⁸⁴

But structural analogies of this sort are complemented elsewhere by passages in which elements of the merkavah can be comprehended on the basis of experimental data. In Ezekiel’s prophecy, for example, the angelic “wheels” (ofanim) of God’s chariot are described as “crystalline” (ke-ein tarshish). Eleazar explains that this means that they are transparent, a conclusion he draws in light of empirical verification: “If you place crystals (even tarshish) in clear water in the sunlight during the summertime, the stone, which is [itself] clear and transparent, will not be visible.”⁸⁵ The nature of prophecy itself can be understood by analogy with yet another sensory observation: “The voice [heard by the prophets] is audible but not visible … and is similar to when a man walks through a valley in a mountainous area, where the mountains around him are jagged. When the man speaks, his words mix with the air in the crevices, and when he ceases speaking the mountains echo his words back to him. If he spoke in a loud voice, the echo is loud, and if [he spoke] quietly [the echo is] quiet. [This happens] even though there is nothing there but air—and this is similar to how a bat kol is heard.”⁸⁶ The workings of echoes thus shed light on the workings of divine aural revelation. Other natural phenomena are marshaled to identify the locations of sacred spaces. The fact that the Garden of Eden is in the east is demonstrable in light of the fact that “the sky is red in the [morning] due to the splendor of the flowers and fiery stones that are in Eden,” while Gehenna’s location in the west explains why “from the fiery flames, the sun is blood red when it is in the [west].”⁸⁷

Eleazar discusses other elements of the throne world by reference to artisanal knowledge, reminiscent of his discussion of distillation above. For example, in describing the intensity of the Dinur River, which is referred to in the book of Daniel and which, according to the Talmud, consists entirely of flowing fire,⁸⁸ Eleazar avers that “when gold is boiling in the melting pot, its fire is larger than a fire of [burning] wood. Know, that if one places lead into a fire, it will not melt quickly, but if you place it into boiling silver or boiling gold, it will melt instantaneously.”⁸⁹ Knowledge of metallurgy is also brought to bear in a cryptic discussion of what happens when different angelic legions go to war with one another. He explains: “If one were to ask: ‘Who can harm an angel in war, since they live eternally?’ … An example is iron which is being heated in a fire—when one hits it with a hammer, sparks fly [but the iron is not shattered]…. So too one angel cannot kill another.”⁹⁰ Here and elsewhere,⁹¹ metallurgical knowledge is invoked for theological ends, as are an array of empirical observations drawn from other artisanal crafts. These technological discussions indicate that the Pietists’ general interest in the natural order was complemented by at least some technical knowledge in those fields in which empirical observations regarding the workings of the natural were harnessed and applied.⁹²

A final example of the invocation of natural phenomena to lend credence to esoteric theological teachings can be found in Eleazar’s discussion of the angel Yorkmi, whom the Talmud had identified as the angel appointed over hail (sar ha-barad).⁹³ As Eleazar explains: “All angels are named after the mission to which they are appointed. For example, Yorkmi is the angel appointed over hail, for when sunlight strikes hail it appears to be green (yarok), as though green fire is being kindled within the hail. [Similarly,] moist tree-branches produce green fire [when they are burned], because of the mixture of water and smoke. Thus Yorkmi [is named on account of the] greenness of water (yorkei de-maya).”⁹⁴ The “greenness of water” is expanded upon in another context, where Eleazar invokes experimental knowledge in discussing the colors of plants: “You will never find buds [of plants] that are any color other than green, like the color of leeks, because water is the ‘master’ of the earth, and the earth desires it.⁹⁵ Thus it produces plants that are green, like [water]. For if you put rainwater in a stone vessel, and wait for many days, it will turn green. But during the summer the planets rule alongside the sun, and the rainbow, which has many different colors, is present during the summer, thus the buds turn into a variety of different colors.”⁹⁶ For Eleazar, the green algae that forms in standing water is taken to be the culmination of a process in which water’s true color reveals itself. This empirical confirmation of water’s “greenness” not only undergirds his efforts to understand plant botany, but even to shed light upon the nature of God’s angelic messengers. It also allows Eleazar to explore the nature of tohu (nothingness), the term used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the formlessness of the world prior to Creation. Rabbinic sources had cryptically defined tohu as “the green line (kav hayarok) which surrounds the entire world.”⁹⁷ In Sodei Razya, Eleazar explains that this green line is “like the green that is on the surface of the water.”⁹⁸ And in another, somewhat obscure passage, he seems to explain that tohu’s description as a green line links it to the horizon—if one wants to visually apprehend tohu, he says, one should go out to sea in a boat, wait to be lifted up by a wave, and then look around in all directions at the line where the land meets the sky.⁹⁹ The angel Yorkmi, the nature of tohu, and the biological workings of plants are all newly comprehensible once the fundamentally green nature of water is understood. The empirical observation of physical “remembrances” thus sheds light upon—and inextricably connects—the “natural” and ostensibly “supernatural” realms, in both the exoteric and esoteric writings of the German Pietists. Far from deriding natural causality or seeking to suspend its dictates, the Pietists prized the workings of the material world as a valid source of knowledge about God and His actions.

“THE POWER OF INCANTATIONS, AND THE POWER OF HERBS, AND THE POWER OF STONES”

And yet, the Pietists at times invoked Psalms 111:4 regarding “remembrances” that are anything but prosaic. Indeed, in his liturgical commentary Arugat ha-Bosem, Abraham b. Azriel—a student of Eleazar of Worms, and compiler of Ashkenazic and especially Pietistic traditions—offers a categorical description of the “remembrances” found in the world: “Everything the Holy one created in his world is a remembrance of His wonders; he created the power of all kinds of incantations, and the power of herbs, and the power of stones.”¹⁰⁰ Each of these subcategories is well represented in Pietistic writings, and is utilized in contexts that seem prima facie to undermine the notion of a stable, theologically resonant natural order.

The “power of incantations” refers to apparently inexplicable phenomena like the one with which this chapter began: “If one places hot ash on hot excrement, it will cause harm to the one who produced [the excrement].” This remembrance, which sheds light upon God’s wondrous invisibility, is accompanied in Pietistic texts by an array of remembrances that are themselves wondrous. For example: “If one were to ask: How can [God] be present everywhere, yet remain invisible to the eye? It is possible to respond that He created an example in His world…. If one’s nose is cut off [of his face], and he attaches another person’s nose [to his own face] using a potion, the nose will fall off when the man [who owned it originally] dies, for it smells the death of its [original] body. Some substance must have come in contact with [the nose], though it is too subtle to see.”¹⁰¹ Not only potions serve as wondrous remembrances, but also spells and adjurations: “If one were to ask: How are we to believe that [God] is omnipotent, since He cannot be seen? I will offer you an example: one can adjure a sword so that it will not cut him, or a piece of white-hot iron so that it will not burn him. And even though we see no boundary between the sword or the iron and the body, we know that there is something in the way, preventing the cutting or the burning, even though it is too subtle to see.”¹⁰² Or again, “if one places upon oneself a dead snake, and ties it as a belt around himself, no sword will [be able to] harm him.”¹⁰³ In a similar vein, Eleazar refers to certain varieties of charcoal which can serve as charms that will protect one from magical attacks.¹⁰⁴ The “power of herbs” is represented in these contexts as well. Judah discusses a type of grass which can cut iron, again suggesting that there is some force “too subtle to see” in operation, which in turn validate belief in an invisible God.¹⁰⁵

But the wondrous remembrance that is most frequently invoked is the “power of stones.” Judah and Eleazar describe an array of stones whose seemingly inexplicable properties point to an array of divine truths. For instance, Judah recurrently discusses the even tekumah (“preserving stone”), an amulet mentioned in rabbinic literature that was purported to prevent miscarriages.¹⁰⁶ According to Judah, its workings can be attributed to the power of scent: “The even tekumah … has a scent that enters a woman’s belly and [reaches] the fetus. The belly does not block the [scent of the] stone from the fetus, and the fetus remains in place until the woman’s pregnancy is complete. This is done through the power of the scent of the stone.” The even tekumah, like the more mundane phenomena traced above, sheds light upon God’s attributes: “Therefore, do not wonder at the actions of God (ha-tsur, lit., “the Rock”), for he does everything through His power even though we do not sense how he does them.”¹⁰⁷

The Pietists seem to have been particularly preoccupied by one stone in particular—the magnet or lodestone, which they varyingly identify by its Hebrew, Latin, and German names (even sho’evet, magnet, and Augstein, respectively). “God created an example in his world: a stone which attracts … iron to itself, known in German as a magnet or Augstein. We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.”¹⁰⁸ Like so many of the natural phenomena we have encountered thus far, Judah utilizes this object for theological ends: “The wondrous proof that God can cause the righteous to cleave to Him is the stone that attracts iron to itself, despite the fact that no one can see by what means it pulls it. It is intended to show that God knows those who trust in him—‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’”¹⁰⁹ The Pietists were interested in the practical applications of magnetism as well, and invested these, too, with spiritual significance. Judah provides a lengthy (if confused) description of the nautical compass in his discussion of how the souls of the dead “navigate” the next world:

Now if one were to ask, “How will [the souls of the dead] be transported immediately [to Heaven or Hell]?” The stone that attracts iron can demonstrate this, for it attracts a needle to itself in an instant. And the captain of a ship can even use it to discern in which direction his ship is traveling. He brings the magnet in a bowl of water, and places a needle next to it, and asks his fellow: “Where should the ship travel?” If he answers, “east,” and the ship is pointing west, the needle will travel round the magnet via a circular path … and if the ship is pointing east, [the needle] will remain straight. “He has created a remembrance of His wonders,” so that we may believe that in an instant the soul can cleave to Heaven or to Hell, via a straight or circular path.¹¹⁰

In addition to these stones, herbs, and magical incantations, Judah and Eleazar also located “remembrances” in the animal kingdom. At times, they recount the properties of mundane animals that they would have had occasion to encounter in daily life. For instance, “a dog can smell the footsteps of a thief, although we cannot see anything of the thief remaining in the place of his footsteps, and his footsteps are not marked in the ground. Nonetheless, there is some fine, invisible substance in the place of his footsteps, which the dog uses to recognize the thief.”¹¹¹ But often the animals in question manifest wondrous and apparently inexplicable qualities. Thus the salamander, “which is not ruled over (i.e., harmed) by fire,” proves that “God’s will and existence” should not be doubted despite the inability of human beings to perceive of them.¹¹² Elsewhere, in discussing God’s restorative powers, Eleazar argues similarly: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders: There is a certain kind of fish … which, if it is chopped into pieces and thrown into the water while it is still convulsing, will reattach its components to one another and live. The tail of a lizard does something similar. [The lizard] can remove its tail, and return later on and reattach it to itself.”¹¹³ An additional confirmation of the plausibility of resurrection, Eleazar asserts, can be derived from “the weasel, which resurrects its fellow using a certain plant.”¹¹⁴

Another invocation of wondrous phenomena in the animal kingdom appears in reference to the lion; in a yihud text, Judah argues:

‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’ … A lion can make a circle like this ○ and move on, and any animal that enters it is unable to leave the circle, till it dies. Behold, the lion can seal and unseal this circle, and allow an animal to leave it, for [the lion] understands every language, and if one goes and beseeches it, [the lion] will understand and indicate what its will is…. Behold this wonder…. Who taught [the lion] to draw a circle in the earth? Is [the lion] a magician?! Moreover, how is it that by drawing a circle animals become trapped within it? … And how does it know every language? Who created animals that are possessed of such wisdom? We cannot help but believe that “there is wisdom on high” (Ps. 73.11)—that ‘the Lord is a God of wisdom’ (I Samuel 2:3). The lion knows how to draw a circle and trap animals within it, even when he is not present—certainly the Master of All … even though he cannot be seen.¹¹⁵

Elsewhere in Pietistic writings, other wondrous animals, such as the phoenix and the barnacle goose, are invoked to similar effect.¹¹⁶

Finally, the Pietists recurrently locate wondrous remembrances in the written sources they had before them. One figure who features prominently in such citations is Alexander the Great, whose legendary exploits were recorded in an array of rabbinic texts.¹¹⁷ Several times, Eleazar invokes a talmudic story in which Alexander revived some salted fish by dipping them in water flowing from the Garden of Eden: “It says in Tractate Tamid [that] Alexander the Macedonian washed the [dead] fish [in the waters of the Garden of Eden] and they lived.”¹¹⁸ For Eleazar, this story proves the reasonableness of God’s ability to resurrect the dead. Another marvel described in the same talmudic sugya is mined for theological meaning as well, namely an eyeball that alternates between being extremely heavy and extremely light. Judah proves the theological notion that the entirety of Creation praises God¹¹⁹ by referring to a midrashic tale in which Alexander descends under the sea in a kind of proto-submarine, and hears the water singing God’s praises.¹²⁰ Alexander is also invoked in reference to other wondrous theological tenets, such as the location of the Garden of Eden and Gehenna.¹²¹

As I noted at the outset, scholars have focused on inexplicable “remembrances” of this sort in claiming that in medieval Ashkenaz “the universe [was] … empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” I have argued that such a claim is belied by the consistent tendency to invest natural causation, empirical observation, and prosaic objects and phenomena with spiritual profundity. But even the incantations and wondrous objects just surveyed should not be read as pointing to an exclusive concern for “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural.” In order to understand their manifest interest in the wondrous powers of incantations, herbs, and stones, it is necessary to briefly survey the intellectual landscape in which the Pietists, along with their high medieval neighbors, were operating.

NATURE BEFORE “NATURE”: NIFLA’OT AND MIRABILIA

The once common notion that mechanistic, comprehensible “nature” can be sharply distinguished from the arbitrary and inexplicable “supernatural” has not fared well in recent decades.¹²² Just as historians and philosophers of science have problematized the traditional opposition between “science” and “pseudoscience,”¹²³ an array of philosophers and critical theorists have demolished the edifice of an unchanging, essentialistic “nature,” instead emphasizing that conceptions of nature are historically contingent and culturally constructed. Thus post-structuralists, feminist and queer theorists, political ecologists, and others have noted that what gets defined as “natural” often has less to do with any intrinsic properties than it does with the specific power relations that are enacted through the very process of crafting definitions. Rather than conceptualize nature vaguely as a “jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks,”¹²⁴ these scholars are far more likely to interrogate the manner by which “nature” (and, concomitantly, “science”) are produced, and the agendas they further, than they are to unquestionably accept their transhistorical existence.¹²⁵ “Nature,” in this view, “is a meaningless term apart from our will to define it.”¹²⁶

Defining “nature” was no less fraught during the Middle Ages. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources lists twenty-five distinct meanings for natura (“nature”) and twenty-nine for naturalis (“natural”)—and this in British sources alone.¹²⁷ Arthur Lovejoy, for his part, famously identified sixty-six distinct definitions of nature.¹²⁸ There is no question that in the high Middle Ages, European theologians and philosophers, artists and poets, were increasingly preoccupied by the meaning and functioning of the phenomenal world—a process M. D. Chenu famously termed “the discovery of nature.”¹²⁹ But the precise category of “nature” underlying these pursuits was (like the phenomenal world itself) shifting and mutable: “The term nature could stand for the general order of all creation as a single, harmonious whole, whose study might lead to an understanding of the model on which this created world is formed. It could stand for the Platonic intermediary between the intelligible and material worlds; or for the divinely ordained power that presides over the continuity and preservation of whatever lives in the sublunary world; or for the creative principle directly subordinated to the mind and will of God.”¹³⁰ Such multifaceted approaches to nature were often personified in the goddess Natura, a character who took on increased centrality in an array of medieval literary texts. Natura was varyingly employed to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts, to represent theological hierarchies through her mediation between the divine and the physical, or to firm up (sometimes in the breach) social, sexual, and gender norms.¹³¹ When it came to the realm of morality, nature was sometimes taken to represent the intrinsically good (i.e., “natural law”), at other times characterized by amoral and even immoral carnality.¹³² It was against these still unstable meanings of “nature” that the very category of the “supernatural” was being oppositionally defined over the course of the high Middle Ages.¹³³

This fluid state of affairs can help us to make sense of the Pietists’ tendency to explore both the marvelous and the mundane in their theological writings. Like their Christian contemporaries, Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were struggling to impose order upon a wide array of theologically resonant physical phenomena, both those they observed empirically and those they read about in authoritative texts. When the Pietists’ engagement with wondrous “remembrances” is compared with that of their Christian contemporaries, it becomes apparent that the Pietistic approach toward the natural world paralleled broader currents in Christian theological discourse. A brief survey of some influential Christian approaches to the theological meaning of the natural world—and to the mirabilia that seemed to disrupt it—will illustrate how the interrogation of “nature” among twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern European Christians had much in common with that of their Pietistic neighbors.

Let us begin, as medieval Christian theologians often did, with Augustine of Hippo. One of the earliest and most influential treatments of the theological meaning of natural wonders can be found in book twenty-one of Augustine’s City of God, where he responds to skeptical critics who dispute “unreasonable” Christian teachings such as the resurrection of the dead or the miracles described in the Bible. Augustine’s strategy in responding to these critics is not to rationally justify these Christian doctrines, but rather to delegitimize reason itself as an infallible guide to what is and is not true. Augustine details some of the “marvelous” phenomena and objects that can be observed in the natural world—the magnet, for example—and claims that the majority of them are not subject to naturalistic explanations. These wondrous phenomena surely exist, even though, like the resurrection of the dead or the biblical miracles, they cannot be rationally accounted for. Augustine concludes that whether or not something is rationally comprehensible bears no relationship to whether it does or does not exist—God’s omnipotence alone is a sufficient justification for both marvelous phenomena and supernatural miracles. Far from subsuming “marvelous” natural phenomena within the natural order, Augustine uses marvels to undermine the very notion that there is a natural order in the first place. Committed Christians should not invest time and energy in investigating the natural causes of wondrous phenomena, but instead channel the emotional wonder that comes from observing something unexplained into their apprehension of and relationship with God.¹³⁴

Augustine’s perspective exercised a great deal of influence in the Latin West during the early medieval period.¹³⁵ Beginning in the twelfth century, however, a number of interrelated developments took place that served to undermine his approach. The first was an epistemological shift: for the increasingly naturalistically and scientifically minded theologians of the high Middle Ages, the Augustinian approach to wonders was no longer tenable.¹³⁶ “To appeal to the omnipotence of God is nothing but vain rhetoric; naked truth requires a little more sweat.”¹³⁷ The existence of marvelous and hence inexplicable objects and phenomena presented an implicit threat to the scholastics’ valorization of philosophical-theological synthesis. For these thinkers, the emotion of wonder that one feels when confronted with something unexplained could no longer be depicted in the Augustinian manner as a religiously positive value; rather, wonder was simply an expression of ignorance, a tacit admission that one had not managed to discern the rational workings of whatever one was observing. This reevaluation of the wondrous reflected, and furthered, a lowering of the boundaries between the everyday, mundane phenomena whose inner workings were understandable and the exotic, seemingly marvelous phenomena whose inner workings appeared to be hidden from view. Both were, at least in theory, subsumed within a unified natural order.¹³⁸

But ironically, at the same time that theologians and natural philosophers were revising the Augustinian conception of wonders, knowledge of and interest in the wondrous was dramatically on the rise. To begin with, the twelfth century saw the increased circulation of works of paradoxography, as the “renaissance of the twelfth century” spurred interest in classical texts (such as the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder) that catalogued hundreds of “natural wonders.”¹³⁹ Late antique animal lore also became increasingly available, as the Greek Physiologus was edited into numerous recensions of Bestiaries, which quickly achieved widespread popularity.¹⁴⁰ And ancient knowledge concerning the magical and medical properties of gemstones and certain herbs was spread in flourishing genres of lapidaries and herbals.¹⁴¹ At the same time that classical descriptions of natural wonders were becoming widespread, moreover, interest in contemporary marvels was being fed as well. The high Middle Ages saw a flourishing of travel writings, including the popular works of authors like Marco Polo and Gerald of Wales (and, eventually, the hugely popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville). In their descriptions of their journeys, these authors called attention to the wondrous natural phenomena that they observed or heard about in the course of their travels. Elements of these paradoxographic texts and travel narratives made their way into epic romances as well¹⁴²—the so-called “Alexander Romance” was particularly influential, and different versions incorporated elements of the flourishing paradoxographic discourse.¹⁴³ All of these developments ensured a wide audience for and interest in these exotic marvels.¹⁴⁴

Thus, just as the European interest in natural wonders was reaching its zenith, a number of influential European intellectuals were engaged in a battle to “‘de-wonder’ anomalies”¹⁴⁵—as the Pseudo-Albertine text De mirabilibus mundi put it, “The philosopher’s work is to make marvels cease.”¹⁴⁶ One common strategy seized upon by thinkers committed to the notion of a stable natural order was to insist that “wonders” are not contrary to the workings of nature, but merely to what we know of nature. The English canon lawyer Gervase of Tilbury, for instance, insisted that wonders are “perspectival,”¹⁴⁷ that is, only “wondrous” to those who are ignorant of their (wholly natural) workings. “We call things marvels that are beyond our understanding,” he explains, “even when they are natural.”¹⁴⁸ The recognition that the experience of wonder derived solely from one’s knowledge, or lack thereof, rather than from the ontological status of the wondrous object itself, similarly led the twelfth-century natural philosopher Adelard of Bath (whose Quaestiones naturales first imported much Arabic scientific knowledge to northwestern Europe) to deride his imagined interlocutor for his frequent expressions of amazement: “I do not wonder at your wonder, for the blind person speaks thus of sight.” Or elsewhere, more programmatically: “Why is it that you so wonder at this thing? Why are you amazed, why are you confused? … I know that the darkness that holds you, shrouds and leads into error all who are unsure about the order of things. For the soul, imbued with wonder and unfamiliarity, when it considers from afar, with horror, the effects of things without considering their’ causes, has never shaken off its confusion. Look more closely, consider the circumstances, propose causes, and you will not wonder at the effects.”¹⁴⁹ The desire to overcome wonder could thus serve as an impetus toward further investigation, and various scientific thinkers contributed to a growing corpus of texts treating wonders from a scientific perspective, culminating in the encyclopedic De causis mirabilium of the fourteenth-century scientist Nicholas Oresme.¹⁵⁰ Certain scholastics sought to distinguish the universal natura simpliciter (“unqualified nature”) from natura secundum quod (“qualified nature”); the former referred to a universal order governed by teleological causes, the latter to the particular exceptions and deviations that could nonetheless be explained in a rational fashion.

But despite “bending over backward to contain randomness itself within the ambit of a purposeful natural order,”¹⁵¹ the scholastics found that, despite their best efforts, there remained observable phenomena stubbornly impervious to rational inquiry.¹⁵² These thinkers arrived, by necessity, at a compromise position. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, posited the existence of a middle ground between the natural and the supernatural, which he called the “preternatural.”¹⁵³ In theory, preternatural objects and phenomena had natural qualities and operated in accordance with reason; but in practice, the scholastics admitted that they remained ignorant of the inner workings of these marvels. The invention of the category of the preternatural was to some extent a face-saving measure—it allowed the scholastics to remain committed to the proposition that everything had a rational explanation, while nonetheless admitting that there were phenomena that still needed to be more completely understood.

An object or phenomenon could fall into the category of the preternatural for a variety of reasons: for example, it might be subject to chance, to an unpredictable confluence of natural forces that cause it to behave as it does. The most common explanation, however, for why a preternatural phenomenon behaves as it does was the imputation to it of “occult qualities.” This designation, which continued to be invoked until well into the early modern period,¹⁵⁴ essentially meant that the reason an object behaved in a certain manner was natural but inexplicable according to the known laws of natural causation. Or, to use the more technical language of the scholastics themselves, an occult quality was the “specific form” of an object or phenomenon, which conferred its particulars upon it; this stood in contrast to the “manifest properties” of natural objects, which could be accounted for by reference to their elemental composition. Scholastic thinkers sought to account in this manner for the routine, predictable, yet mysterious workings of seemingly supernatural phenomena.¹⁵⁵

This sort of elite intellectual engagement with the wondrous and the occult had implications for the medieval conception of magic as well. Ever since the publication of Lynn Thorndike’s magisterial History of Magic and Experimental Science, scholars have increasingly come to recognize that magic was part and parcel of the medieval learned discourse over the workings of the natural order. Theologians, of course, were quick to condemn “necromancy,” magical praxis accomplished via the adjuration of demons, and magia could certainly be used as a term of opprobrium. But many theologians and natural philosophers alike tended to accept the validity and permissibility of so-called “natural magic,” which harnessed the occult properties of various objects in order to exploit natural “sympathies” and “antipathies” for concrete ends.¹⁵⁶ Thus, the lines between what we would today call “science” and “magic” were for medieval thinkers very blurry indeed: lapidaries and medical treatises contained detailed descriptions of the amulets that could be made from various precious stones,¹⁵⁷ and descriptions of materia medica in herbals were consulted by physicians and magicians alike.¹⁵⁸ Pursuits such as physiognomy and, of course, astrology were also firmly within the “scientific” mainstream during this time period.¹⁵⁹

Conceptually related to both occult “wonders” and natural magic was another discourse that flourished during this time period, but one which, at first glance, seems unrelated: technical, mechanical, and artisanal knowledge. In order to understand the linkage between these spheres, let us return briefly to occult properties. While the scholastics’ imputation of these hidden qualities to preternatural objects was intended to subsume those objects within the natural world, it also entailed a value judgment as to their status relative to other natural phenomena. For the scholastics, the theoretical, speculative via rationis (way of reason) was the favored intellectual approach; the via experimentalis (way of experiment), rooted in empiricism and induction, was far lower on the epistemological hierarchy. Preternatural objects and their occult workings could only be apprehended through empiricism—the attractive pull of the magnet could be seen, after all, but never derived from the known laws of nature. As such, writings about “marvelous” objects and phenomena were frequently grouped together with writings about other spheres of interest that were dependent upon observation of nature. The foremost example of this latter category was technical, artisanal crafts. After all, medieval artisans passed down their “trade secrets” from generation to generation, and developed new ones not via mathematical formulae or logical deduction, but through experimentation and careful observation. While discussions of casting spells, or of wondrous animals, might seem at first glance to have little to do with horticultural guidance or recipes for tanning solution, all of these contents were often grouped together in medieval writings on account of their shared epistemological foundations. Indeed, the curricular divisions of knowledge that can be found in works like William of Conches’s Philosophia mundi tend to subsume “magic” within the “mechanical arts” rather than in the Trivium or Quadrivium—attesting to the perceived linkages between empiricism, mechanical knowledge, and the occult.¹⁶⁰

In fact, this period saw the growth of an entire genre of literature devoted to precisely these subjects, namely the “books of secrets.”¹⁶¹ Along with discussions of “marvelous” natural objects and their uses, these collections also contained a mix of recipes for medicines, spells, and instructions on how to master a wide array of crafts. Despite (or perhaps because of) their purportedly esoteric nature, these books were extremely popular in the medieval period—even among the scholastics, many of whom devoted considerable attention to these texts and their contents.¹⁶² Certain especially popular books of secrets even achieved quasi-canonical status among the university students and scholars. The extremely influential Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), for instance, has survived in so many manuscripts that Thorndike declared it “the most popular book in the Middle Ages.”¹⁶³ This text, a “mirror for princes” supposedly composed by Aristotle for the use of his pupil Alexander the Great, combines basic political and moralistic guidance with medical, alchemical, and physiognomic contents and sundry magical spells. The very fact that it was attributed to Aristotle, and flourished among clerics and university scholars alike, attests to the fluid boundaries during this period between magic, science, and the occult.¹⁶⁴

Scholars of medieval and early modern Jewish culture have increasingly explored the fluidity between medieval Jewish “science” and “magic.” Today it is a commonplace, for example, that the rationalist philosopher Moses Maimonides’ famous condemnation of astrology as a pseudoscience was well beyond the mainstream of medieval Jewish scientific discourse, and that influential thinkers from Abraham Ibn Ezra to Abraham Bar Hiyya to Gersonides all considered astrology to be a—even the—valid approach to understanding the natural world, useful for scientific, medical, and theological purposes alike.¹⁶⁵ Occult properties—known as segulot—were seized upon by Jewish thinkers just as they were by their Christian contemporaries, and amulets and talismans were endorsed as medically effective and well within the contemporary definition of “rationality.”¹⁶⁶ For philosophically minded Sephardic thinkers, then, as for high medieval scholastics, the ostensibly “magical” and occult could be readily subsumed within a stable and comprehensible natural order.

Awareness of this cultural and intellectual backdrop casts the Pietists’ preoccupation with both routine and marvelous “remembrances” in new light. Like their Christian contemporaries, the Pietists assumed that the natural order was both amenable to analysis and theologically meaningful. And like their Christian contemporaries, they invoked a wide array of initially inexplicable phenomena—ranging from spells and amulets to artisanal “trade secrets”—which they utilized to think through the limits and meaning of the natural order. Closer attention to several of the categories of “remembrances” discussed above allow us to trace not only the conceptual parallels between Jewish and Christian conceptions of nature, and the role of wonders therein, but also the specific, shared textual genres they utilized in order to explore them.

OCCULT PROPERTIES AND “SUBTLE SUBSTANCES”

We have noted that “wondrous” stones such as the magnet and even tekumah featured prominently among the remembrances invoked by the Pietists, who claim that they lend credence to God’s invisible powers. But the Pietists do not simply assert that these stones function through supernatural channels. Rather, they attempt to the best of their abilities to account for the specific means by which the magnet functions: “We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.” The underlying strategy is not to validate God’s supernatural powers by equating God’s attributes with those of other supernatural phenomena. On the contrary, by positing the existence of an intermediary substance that attracts the iron to the magnet, and that is too “subtle” to be seen by human eyes, the Pietists are seeking to explain that magnetism works via innate and consistent, albeit hidden, means.¹⁶⁷ Just as the only way to account for the empirically observed phenomenon of magnetic attraction is to accept that invisible forces can function as part of nature, so, too, there is nothing unreasonable about accepting that God’s power is real, despite its invisibility.

A comparison between the Pietists’ approach to magnetism and that of some of their contemporaries lends credence to the notion that the Pietists understood magnetism to be a wholly “natural” remembrance. For in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, magnetism was frequently invoked in debates over the stability of the natural order—often by opponents of the increasingly naturalistic theological discourse. The thirteenth-century Spanish halakhist Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba), for instance, argued, “I find it surprising that [advocates of science and philosophy] agree that their investigations do not even grasp the truth of natural phenomena, for every object has properties that they cannot account for [rationally], such as the fact that a stone can attract iron…. Is there anything that is more supernatural than for one inanimate object to cause another one to move? … If Aristotle himself had described this, and it were not already well known, [these scientists and philosophers] would doubtlessly have repudiated him.”¹⁶⁸ The Pietists’ efforts, however limited, to explain the workings of magnetism are noteworthy when compared with this alternative approach. For Ibn Adret, the magnet proves that investigation of the natural world can never ultimately lead to truths about God, because He is fundamentally hidden from rational inquiry—notably, the same argument advanced by Augustine centuries earlier. Ibn Adret’s pupil R. Joshua Ibn Shueb echoes this approach:

How can one rely exclusively upon his intellect? For we see that the intellect is exhausted even by natural, physical things … among stones…. For we see that certain stones, which are inanimate and motionless, can attract iron … and induce motion in motionless objects…. [Thus,] the intellect is insufficient for grasping even sensible objects, much less hidden matters…. Rather, [the philosophers] claim that these stones have an attraction that causes them to become attached to these objects, while other [stones] have an antipathy [that causes them to be repulsed]…. And there are many other matters also which the scientists are unable to explain, and which, in light of their inabilities to offer explanations, they attribute to “occult properties” (segulot).¹⁶⁹

For Ibn Shueb, occult properties are not a means of situating natural but inexplicable phenomena within a stable, rational natural order. Rather, they are an intellectually dishonest attempt to mask the fact that the intellect is not a valid guide to understanding the natural world—much less “hidden matters” such as theology. For the Pietists, in contrast, it is precisely investigating the phenomenon of magnetism, and concluding that there must be some natural process through which it functions, that allows one to draw a link between the natural world and the theological truths it encodes.

Indeed, conceptual parallels to the Pietistic approach to magnetism can be found not among “anti-rationalists” like Ibn Adret, but precisely among the philosophical authors, both Jewish and Christian, whose insistence upon natural causation rendered the occult properties of the magnet potentially troubling. For instance, the Pietists’ contemporary William of Auvergne, a French philosopher and theologian steeped in Aristotelian science, invoked the mysterious workings of the lodestone—a magnet that can “magnetize” other metal objects—as a means of justifying various other philosophical propositions. William describes how one can link a series of metal pins to one another in a chain, so long as the first pin is attached to adamantine (a lodestone), which magnetizes each subsequent pin in contact with it:

For you will see that the first pin of those ordered in this way hangs from this stone which it touches; then that the second pin adheres to it by similar contact, and the third, the fourth, and so on with the others. Since, therefore, the power of the adamantine by which it makes the first pin to adhere to it is transferred to all the pins, why is it surprising if the vivifying or animal power of the first heaven is transferred to the second, and from the second to the third, and so on until it comes to the last of the mobile heavens, which is the heaven of the moon, even if there is not another bond or bonding between them than contiguity or contact, as is seen in the proposed example.¹⁷⁰

The argumentation here is nearly identical to that found in the Pietistic sifrut ha-yihud. The ability of the spheres to transfer their “vivifying force” sequentially, from the outermost reaches of the cosmos inward, cannot be apprehended visually, but the example of the lodestone grants credence to this abstract scientific notion.

Jewish rationalists, too, were content to explain magnetism in occult terms—without rejecting the broader construct of natural causality. Abraham Ibn Ezra,¹⁷¹ Maimonides,¹⁷² the fourteenth-century southern French philosopher Levi b. Gershon (Gersonides),¹⁷³ and many others discussed the workings of the magnet in their writings, and concluded that its occult workings can be subsumed within the routine natural order.¹⁷⁴ Magnetism should have been problematic for Maimonides and Gersonides in particular, since the Aristotelian natural philosophy to which they were committed held action at a distance to be impossible. Maimonides thus insisted that “even the magnet exerts an attraction upon iron at a distance through a force, spreading out from it in the air, which encounters the iron.”¹⁷⁵ Gersonides, who discussed magnetism several times in his philosophical opus Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord) and in his super-commentaries on Averroes, likewise concluded that “the intervening medium is affected,” and that some sort of physical contact between the mover and the moved object is taking place.¹⁷⁶ For Gersonides, who also uses the language of segulot, occult properties are not a strike against a rationally comprehensible natural order, as Ibn Adret or Ibn Shueb would have it. Rather, they are a means of privileging Aristotelian physics even in the face of potentially conflicting evidence. His account of the occult workings of magnetism, like Ibn Ezra’s and even Maimonides’, is thus functionally equivalent to the Pietists’ discussion of the “subtle substance that attracts [the iron to the magnet] which we cannot see.”

It must be noted that many of these parallels are of heuristic value only—while they were familiar with the writings of Ibn Ezra, the Pietists never had access to the Guide, and predated William by several decades and Gersonides by a century. But the similarities are suggestive nonetheless. For the Pietists and these philosophical thinkers alike, magnetism is a “wondrous” phenomenon, whose occult workings do not undermine natural causality but rather can be subsumed within it—and can even be invoked to shed light on comparable philosophical and theological doctrines. When we turn to the Pietists’ treatment of the uses of magnetism, however, we find parallels in Christian scientific sources that are far closer in time, and which suggest the possibility of direct exchanges and encounters.

As we have seen above, the Pietists extended their discussions of magnetism to the devices that worked via magnetic means, and hence they describe the nautical compass in a quite detailed manner. In their treatment of this device, the Pietists betray a familiarity with the state of the art of medieval technology—the compass was first introduced into medieval Europe during the late twelfth century and early thirteenth centuries, when it appeared in scientific and encyclopedic works like the De Naturis Rerum of Alexander Neckham, the Historia Orientalis seu Hierosolymitana of Jacques de Vitry, and the Liber Particularis of Michael Scot.¹⁷⁷ These early authors had a difficult time determining how the compass functioned—like the magnet itself, the workings of the compass were considered to be hidden, and it is not until later in the thirteenth century that figures like Thomas of Cantimpre, Albertus Magnus, and especially Peter Peregrinus authored more detailed accounts of the workings of magnetism. Nonetheless, Neckham, Jacques de Vitry, and others described the compass in a mechanistic manner, rather than attributing its workings to magic or the supernatural, indicating that they understood this object to function naturalistically despite its occult status.

Where did the Pietists come upon this knowledge? One possibility emerges from the passage in Arugat ha-Bosem cited above, in which Abraham b. Azriel invokes “the power of stones” (ko’ah avanim) as an archetypical “remembrance” of God’s wonders. As we have seen above, the notion that stones have intrinsic “powers” was a mainstay of contemporary lapidaries, which listed the properties and uses of various minerals and gems. Magnets features prominently in these collections—and, significantly for our purposes, the composition and translation of lapidaries were a site of intellectual exchange between medieval Jews and Christians.¹⁷⁸ The best known medieval lapidary, Marbode of Rennes’ eleventh-century Liber de lapidibus, was translated several times into Hebrew (notably by the twelfth-century French polymath Berakhiyah ha-Nakdan) and circulated in Ashkenaz during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁷⁹ Indeed, many of these lapidaries circulated under the generic title Sefer Ko’ah ha-Avanim—indicating that these scientific treatises on the occult properties of various gemstones were likely what Abraham had in mind when he invoked the ko’ah ha-avanim in his explication of Psalms 111:4 in Arugat ha-Bosem. Recently, Gad Freudenthal and Jean-Marc Mandosio have suggested that the Hebrew translations of Marbode’s lapidary achieved popularity in northern France and Germany due to the role they played in the rabbinic curriculum, helping biblical exegetes to understand passages in the Bible (such as the description of the High Priest’s breastplate in Exodus 28) based on the realia described in learned vernacular texts.¹⁸⁰ Moreover, these texts were at times “Judaized” in addition to being translated: at least one Hebrew lapidary from medieval Germany was modified so as to include elements that correspond to the writings of Judah and Eleazar.¹⁸¹ Significantly, that same text contains a detailed description of the use of magnets as nautical compasses, reminiscent of Judah’s own description cited above.¹⁸²

Judah’s repeated invocation of the therapeutic powers of the “preserving stone” similarly suggests that the Pietists treat wondrous gems not as supernatural phenomena, but rather as natural objects that function via occult means. After all, lapidaries consistently discuss the amulets that can be made from the various stones they treat, and numerous stones are described as being useful specifically for preventing miscarriages.¹⁸³ Indeed, the manner in which Judah describes the even tekumah itself indicates that he saw it not as a deviation from natural causality, but rather as an object whose workings could—and should—be accounted for rationally. As we saw above, Judah believes that this amulet is effective because it works in a physical manner—namely through scent. He takes pains to clarify this point over and over again in his writings. At one point, for instance, he explicitly asks how it is possible for an amulet to have a physical effect: “And if one were to ask: ‘How can a fetus benefit from the even tekumah?’ It is possible to respond that the fetus enjoys the smell of it, and does not leave its appointed place, and remains at rest. And if one were to ask: ‘What scent does a stone have?’ It is possible to respond that the beeswax we light on the Day of Atonement has no smell that we can discern, but the bees smell it. So too, even though we cannot smell it, the fetus smells [the even tekumah] and closes the womb, and does not leave until the stone is removed.”¹⁸⁴ Judah is clearly troubled here by the fact that the effectiveness of this object cannot be accounted for in any discernable way. He therefore attempts to explain it by reference to the beeswax candles lit by his community on the Day of Atonement—a “proof” of God’s existence that also recalls their invocation of dogs’ olfactory abilities discussed above.

The Pietists invoke scent in their discussions of other magical phenomena as well. A transplanted nose will fall off when its original owner dies because “it smells the death of its [original] body, since some substance reached it, even though it is too subtle to see.”¹⁸⁵ Indeed, just as in the case of magnetism, the existence of some “subtle” substance that can account for the physical workings of apparently magical practices is proposed over and over again. Thus in discussing the use of excrement to damage a person, Judah argues that “there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see.”¹⁸⁶ He draws a similar conclusion regarding various spells and charms which protect a person from being harmed by swords or fire—these result in “some barrier that prevents him from being cut or burned, even though it is too subtle to see.”¹⁸⁷ Once again, the strategy employed by the Pietists in making sense of these magical “remembrances” is functionally equivalent to the scholastics’ invention of “occult qualities.” In both instances, apparent deviations from natural causality are nevertheless subordinated to the natural world, through the positing of an innate, physical cause for phenomena whose workings are not understood. And just as there must be an invisible link that physically effectuates an array of magical processes, the Pietists argue, so too invisible spiritual entities can be said to exist. This argumentation is precisely the sort used by Christian practitioners of “natural magic,” who argued that their magical practices functioned not via maleficent means, but rather by exploiting the occult sympathies and antipathies intrinsic to the objects they utilized.

PIETISTS, “PHILOSOPHERS,” AND POLEMICISTS

There is reason to believe, moreover, that the Pietists came to this understanding of the workings of magic through contacts with practitioners in their surrounding culture. The Pietists refer throughout their writings to conversations with “the philosophers” (ha-filosofim). As Scholem long ago noted, the Pietists “[use] the term ‘philosophers’ in the same sense in which it is used in the medieval Latin writings on alchemy and occultism, i.e. as the designation of a scholar versed in these occult sciences.”¹⁸⁸ But it seems that their references to these philosophers reflect not merely a terminological parallel, but rather direct exposure on the part of the Pietists to the very same occultists Scholem mentioned. For the philosophers are invoked by the Pietists in reference to practices that were commonplace in the surrounding magical culture, both in scholastic universities and among priests who inhabited what Richard Kieckhefer has termed “the clerical underworld.”¹⁸⁹ For example, the Pietists frequently discuss a divinatory practice called sarei kos u-sarei bohen (“the divine beings of the cup and thumbnail”), which could reveal the whereabouts of a thief by asking a small child to interpret the images he sees reflected in a pool of oil poured into a vessel, or spread on his fingernails.¹⁹⁰ This magical practice was invested with great import by the Pietists, who invoke it repeatedly in their attempts to understand the mechanics of prophetic revelation (in which the prophet analogously sees ontologically blurred images that are “reflections” of the divine). Moreover, they repeatedly describe conversations with the “philosophers” about the workings of this phenomenon, conversations in which the Pietists and their non-Jewish contemporaries debate the workings of this practice, and its implications for comprehension of divine revelation. It is thus especially significant that the very same divinatory practices were common within the Pietists’ immediate milieu. Divination through interpretation of images on reflective surfaces (“captoptromancy”) was discussed in the abstract by such Christian thinkers as Michael Scot and William of Auvergne;¹⁹¹ others, like John of Salisbury, recorded their own firsthand experience with this practice:

During my boyhood I was placed under the direction of a priest, to teach me psalms. As he practiced the art of crystal gazing, it chanced that he after preliminary magical rites made use of me and a boy somewhat older, as we sat at his feet, for his sacrilegious art, in order that what he was seeking by means of finger nails moistened with some sort of sacred oil or crism, or of the smooth polished surface of a basin, might be made manifest to him by information imparted by us. And so after pronouncing names which by the horror they inspired seemed to me, child though I was, to belong to demons, and after administering oaths of which, at God’s instance, I know nothing, my companion asserted that he saw certain misty figures, but dimly, while I was so blind to all this that nothing appeared to me except the nails or basin and the other objects I had seen there before. As a consequence I was adjudged useless for such purposes, and, as though I impeded the sacrilegious practices, I was condemned to have nothing to do with such things, and as often as they decided to practice their art I was banished as if an obstacle to the whole procedure. So propitious was God to me even at that early age.¹⁹²

The Pietists might likewise have observed captoptromantic divination firsthand, but they could equally have been exposed to discussions of “natural magic” in the Hebrew translations of Christian scientific encyclopedias that circulated during their time period. Y. Tzvi Langermann, for example, has called attention to a Hebrew translation of William of Conches’s Summa Philosophica, fragments of which are still extant in two medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts.¹⁹³ Interestingly, the extant sections deal, among other topics, with “natural magic,” including various methods of divination and augury. While denigrating divination via demonic adjuration, what the Pietists would have called ov ve-yidoni, this text described matter-of-factly the mechanics of hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, and so on.¹⁹⁴ If the Pietists read texts like this one, they would have been exposed not only to specific magical techniques, but also to the same ethos of magic as a natural, though occult, sphere of inquiry that they manifest in their discussions of magical “remembrances.”

While the precise means by which the Pietists absorbed sarei kos u-bohen thus remains open to question, we are on firmer ground when it comes to their knowledge of another divinatory method. We have seen above that the Secretum secretorum, erroneously attributed to Aristotle (“the Philosopher”), was perhaps the most important medieval “book of secrets,” and that its magical contents were consumed by clerics and university teachers alongside more mainstream scientific and philosophical writings. Given the centrality of this text to the culture inhabited by the Pietists’ “philosophers,” it is thus noteworthy that the Pietists seem to have had direct access to the Secretum secretorum, and to have incorporated some of its contents into their own theological tracts. In a section of the Secretum secretorum dealing with the ways in which a ruler can be guaranteed success in battle, the author (“Aristotle”) counsels the addressee (“Alexander the Great”):

Know, Alexander, that this is the secret which I would perform for you whenever you went out to confront your enemies … and it is one of the divine secrets with which God has graced me. I have tested its truthfulness, and discovered its benefit, and succeeded on account of it…. [The secret is] that you should never go out to confront your enemies without first ensuring you will defeat them, by using this [method of] calculation. If the sum [you arrive at] does not favor you, calculate using your servants’ names, and send out against the [opposing] army whoever results in a winning calculation. You should calculate the name of your opponent and your own name using this system, and carefully guard the sum you arrive at for each [combatant]. Afterwards, divide the sum you have arrived at for each person by nine. Whatever remainder of less than nine is left over for each name should be … investigated according to the sums I have written for you.¹⁹⁵

The Secretum secretorum here provides a system for calculating the names of the combatants in a battle, and hence for predicting the outcome of that battle. The alphanumerical sums arrived at for each name should be divided by nine, and the remainders should be compared with one another. This passage is followed by an extensive chart that contains every possible permutation, revealing who will succeed if a person whose name generates a certain remainder confronts a person whose name generates a different remainder—thus “one and eight, the eight will defeat the one; one and seven, the one will defeat the seven,” and so on.

The Pietists betray their familiarity with this system several times in their oeuvre. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, for example, a discussion of the properties of the number nine leads Eleazar to the following aside:

Also, in the “sums of the philosophers” (heshbonot shel filosofim), they calculate by nines, and determine the future based on the remainder. When comparing two similar things, you follow the higher remainder, and when comparing two dissimilar things, you follow the lower one…. What is meant by two similar things? Like two Jews, who have the same faith and the same Torah, or two gentiles who have the same [religion]—when you calculate the name of one of them and divide by nine, and six remains, and [when you divide] the other [name] five remains, then if the two of them fight with one another, whichever fighter has a higher remainder will be victorious. But if a gentile fights with a Jew, the one with a remainder of five, that is, a lower one, will be victorious…. Thus claim the philosophers.¹⁹⁶

In Sefer Gematriyot, Judah utilizes the same system for determining the outcome of a different sort of battle—that between a husband and wife. When the numerical equivalents of the names of a man and woman are added together, then divided by nine, each possible remainder is equated with a certain astrological outcome, such that the future success or failure of the match can be determined in advance.¹⁹⁷

The “sums of the philosophers,” then, were adapted from the Secretum secretorum, a work attributed to “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), and one in vogue among contemporary “philosophers,” scholars learned in natural philosophy and occult sciences. Of course, the Pietists were enamored of gematriyah in general, and so a system that prognosticated on the basis of alphanumerical equivalences must have particularly piqued their interest. But the fact that in this instance, as in their use of sarei kos u-bohen, they sought out divinatory practices specifically from among “the philosophers” indicates that their predilection for gematriyah is not a sufficient explanation for the presence of this practice in their writings. Indeed, while the Secretum secretorum was translated into Hebrew during the medieval period (as Sod ha-Sodot), the earliest attestations of the latter are from the early to mid-fourteenth century,¹⁹⁸ while the manuscript of Sefer Gematriyot is likely from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth.¹⁹⁹ Thus, the citations from the Secretum secretorum in the Pietistic works may well be the earliest on record. Alternatively, the Pietists could have been exposed to the contents of Secretum secretorum even before it had been translated into Hebrew, or at least into the version that has survived. (Indeed, it is striking to note that Eleazar titled his own magnum opus Sodei Razya, the “Secret of Secrets.”)

While oral transmission of these contents seems most plausible, it is not impossible that the Pietists had access to, and could have read, Latin or vernacular texts of the Secretum secretorum—which, as we have seen above, were extremely widespread. After all, Sefer Hasidim is replete with tales of Jews who come into possession of grimoires, collections of magical spells,²⁰⁰ and there is some evidence that certain Ashkenazic Jews in the Pietists’ circles knew Latin and even read Christian texts. According to one exemplum in Sefer Hasidim: “A certain man told his friend, ‘I dressed like a priest and passed myself off as a gentile’ [during a period of persecution] so that they would think he was a priest and not hurt him. Another said, ‘I studied Christian books (sefer galhim),’ and when he was among the gentiles he would recite hymns in their language.”²⁰¹ Casual references to Pietistic knowledge of Latin, and of details of Christian belief and observance, appear in other passages as well. Thus, Judah is well aware of the fact that Christians recite Psalms in their liturgy and is troubled by the fact that “the book of Tehilim, which David composed for the sake of heaven, and transmitted to the Levites to sing over the sacrifices [in the Temple], are used by [Christian] priests, who recite them before their idolatry.”²⁰² Yet Judah himself unselfconsciously refers to mizmorim (chapters of Tehilim) as “Psalms”²⁰³ (שמלש). Further evidence from Sefer Hasidim indicates that Christian maidservants would sing Christian hymns (shir shel avodah zarah) as lullabies to the Jewish children in their care.²⁰⁴ Nor did exchanges of this sort take place only among marginal figures like servants and children: “One must not teach a Christian cleric (Hebrew?) letters, or play pleasant music in his presence, lest the cleric use that tune before his idolatry. And a tune used before idolatry must not be used by a Jew in praise of the Holy One, blessed be He.”²⁰⁵ Given a culture in which contacts between Jews and Christians took place so frequently, and in which Jews could be expected to know details of Christian practice,²⁰⁶ and, in some cases, to have access to Latin books, it should come as no surprise that encounters with Christian “philosophers” would yield knowledge of the kinds of natural magic that the Pietists incorporate into their own writings and texts.

Indeed, contacts of this sort may also account for the Pietists’ invocations of “wondrous” animals for theological ends. We have noted above that the twelfth century saw the rise of bestiaries, illustrated compendia that described the character and properties of numerous real and fantastic animals. These texts survive in many distinct recensions and consisted mainly of late antique animal lore, compiled from texts like the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, and the late antique Physiologus.²⁰⁷ The twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries contained much “scientific” data, and many of their contents were themselves incorporated into high medieval scientific encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, bestiaries were hardly intended to be abstract compilations of objective facts; rather, these texts were explicitly concerned with discerning the underlying spiritual meaning of the animals they described—the properties of various animals symbolized or shed light upon doctrines such as the Incarnation, Christ’s resurrection, and so on. Scientific (albeit wondrous) facts about animals are thus invoked not as ends in themselves, but rather for the light they shed on the theological and spiritual truths that they represent. This hermeneutical methodology is remarkably similar to that expressed by the Pietists. In both instances, the (sometimes fantastic) traits of animals are significant not in themselves, but primarily for the light they cast on ‘wondrous’ theological propositions—whether the powerful presence of an invisible God, or the ability of a divine being to become incarnate in a human womb.²⁰⁸

But the linkages between medieval bestiaries and the Pietists’ discussions of animals run deeper than just this conceptual parallel. As noted above, some of the animal properties known to the Pietists could have been observed empirically; others, like the fire resistance of the salamander, are alluded to in rabbinic writings.²⁰⁹ But many of the facts about animals that the Pietists blithely invoke do not appear in any known works by prior Jewish authors that the Pietists would have encountered. Here again, the bestiaries provide us with a solution to the question of the Pietists’ sources. For example, the notion that weasels are able to resurrect one another through the administration of a certain medicinal herb, which the Pietists invoke as a confirmation of God’s power to resurrect the dead, appears nowhere in prior rabbinic literature, but is widespread in the bestiary texts, where weasels are said to revive their children when they die by administering a herb (usually rue) (Figure 1).²¹⁰ This “fact” was popularized in narrative texts like Marie de Frace’s Eliduc,²¹¹ and was also included in subsequent scientific encyclopaedias, such as the popular De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, composed in early thirteenth-century Magdeburg.²¹² The notion that lions hunt by trapping their prey in magic circles appears in Bartholomew’s work too,²¹³ as well as in numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries.²¹⁴ The magic circle appears in these bestiaries’ illustrations as well (Figure 2).

Ashkenazic Jews would have had occasion to learn about bestiaries and their contents via oral transmission. After all, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the information about animals contained in bestiaries and encyclopaedias was hardly confined to written documents. Rather, information about the natural world and its theological implications was frequently fodder for Christian preaching. Works in the developing genre of Ars predicandi suggested that the properties of things in nature be invoked in sermons, leading preachers to marshal data culled from bestiaries, animal fables, and works of natural history for their moralistic and theological implications.²¹⁵ The thirteenth-century German text Proprietates rerum naturalium adaptate sermonibus de tempore per totius anni circulum, for instance, collected wondrous facts about animals and organized them so that they could be interspersed in sermons at the appropriate point in the liturgical year.²¹⁶ Indeed, medieval bestiaries were frequently combined together with sermons in medieval manuscripts—a fact that led one recent scholar to suggest that the medieval bestiary might have functioned less as a coherent, independent treatise than as a “summa of sermon material.”²¹⁷

Figure 1. A weasel resurrecting her cubs using “a certain herb” (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, fol. 96v)

Figure 2. A lion hunts using a magic circle (MS Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 3466, 8º, fol. 6v)

It is quite plausible that medieval Ashkenazic Jews could have encountered such preaching, since one of the most prominent ends for which animal data were marshaled was precisely anti-Jewish polemic. A wide array of “Jewish animals” was thought to anchor anti-Jewish beliefs and stereotypes firmly within the symbolic meaning of the natural order.²¹⁸ Thus the owl, for instance, was consistently equated with the Jews, since both of them “prefer darkness to light.”²¹⁹ Other animals, like the hyena, which feasts on corpses with its ferocious fangs, and the bonnacon, which attacks men using its dung as a projectile, were linked to Jews in equally unsubtle ways.²²⁰

These animals’ supposed properties, and their anti-Jewish implications, could easily have become known to Ashkenazic Jews in the course of polemical encounters. In his Topographia Hibernica, for example, Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223) homiletically invokes the wondrous natural properties of animals found in bestiary lore for anti-Jewish polemical ends:

Repent, unhappy Jew, recollect, though late, that man was first generated from clay without being procreated by male and female; nor will your veneration for the law allow you to deny that. In the second place, woman was generated of the man, without the intervention of the other sex. The third mode of generation only by male and female, as it is the ordinary one, obstinate as you are, you admit and approve. But the fourth, from which alone came salvation, namely, birth from a woman, without union with a man, you utterly reject with perverse obstinacy, to your own perdition. Blush, O wretched man, blush! At least, recur to nature, which, in confirmation of the faith for our best teaching, continually produces and gives birth to new animals, without union of male and female. The first creature was begotten of clay; this last is engendered of wood.²²¹

Gerald refers here to the wondrous properties of barnacle geese, animals that literally grow on trees. They are invoked in order to highlight the Jews’ blindness and stubbornness. After all, the Jews deny the possibility of Christ having been descended only from a woman, with no biological male input—but they should realize that nature itself attests that this is a tenable possibility, since barnacle geese exist despite having neither father nor mother.²²²

Significantly, Pietistic sources themselves describe encounters in which Jews and Christians debated the theological meaning of animals’ properties. According to Sefer Hasidim,

A gentile once brought a garment to a group of gentiles and said it was the garment of Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, “If you do not believe me, see what I can do with it.” He cast the garment into the fire, and it did not burn. The monks and priests said to the Jews, “See—there is holiness in this garment!” The sage replied, “Give it to me, and I will see what it contains.” He took some strong vinegar, and washed the garment before their eyes. He said, “Now cast it into the fire and test it.” They cast it into the fire, and it burned immediately. They asked [the sage], “Why did you think to wash it?” He replied, “Because it was coated in salamandra, and so I needed to wash the garment [to reveal its true nature].”²²³

Here, knowledge of the imperviousness of salamanders to fire becomes a weapon in the Jews’ polemical arsenal, as it allows them to combat an otherwise miraculous proof of the sanctity of a Christian relic. Two implications of this passage are worth emphasizing. First, it suggests that animals and their properties could be discussed in the course of actual encounters between Jews and Christians.²²⁴ Second, it reinforces the fact that “wondrous” animal properties were understood to be part and parcel of the natural order. Far from being an inexplicable, supernatural phenomenon, the imperviousness of the salamander to fire is here invoked precisely as a naturalistic explanation for what would otherwise be considered a miraculous occurrence. Other contemporaneous Ashkenazic texts similarly marshal “facts” about wondrous animals for avowedly “scientific” ends.²²⁵

The Pietists’ exposure to contemporary, polemically wielded bestiary lore can be confirmed by noting their adaptation of one final anti-Jewish motif. A number of bestiaries linked the “duplicitous” Jews to animals whose sexuality was ambiguous or threatening. Thus the hyena, mentioned above, was not only a corpse eater, but also a hermaphrodite; Jews were also linked to rabbits, whose gender supposedly alternated on a monthly basis, and to weasels, who were thought to copulate orally.²²⁶ This linkage between Jews and hermaphrodites—itself linked ideationally to the popular belief that Jewish men menstruated²²⁷—further served to equate Jews with “sodomites” in the minds of some Christian authors.²²⁸ It is quite possible that the Pietists’ knowledge of weasels and their powers of resurrection, discussed above, may have derived precisely from their exposure to such anti-Jewish barbs. In any case, the Pietists certainly did adopt, and invert, the bestiary’s position on dual-gendered rabbits. In a thirteenth-century exegetical text called Sefer Gematriyot, Judah betrays his knowledge of this motif and utilizes the supposedly dual-gendered nature of the rabbit to clear up a grammatical inconsistency in the Bible’s description of the arnevet (rabbit). According to Leviticus 11:6, because the rabbit “chews its cud, but its hooves are not split, it is impure”—not kosher. As Judah points out, “This [verse] is written both male and female”—that is to say, the verse in Leviticus refers to the rabbit using the female gender (ma’alat gerah hi … teme’ah hi lakhem), but the parallel verse in Deuteronomy 14:7 switches to the masculine in its description of the rabbit and hare (ma’aleh gerah hemah … teme’im hem lakhem). The conclusion Judah draws is that “one month [the rabbit] is male, and the next month it is female, and it menstruates like a woman.”²²⁹ This resolution of the textual difficulty clearly draws on the supposed physiology of rabbits, and reflects Jewish awareness, if not internalization, of this widespread Christian belief. Indeed, elsewhere in the Pietistic corpus, Christian priests are explicitly accused of habitually engaging in homosexual behaviour—suggesting that the same charges aimed at the Jews could be just as easily redirected.²³⁰ It is particularly noteworthy, too, that the animals whose theological and exegetical significance the Pietists chose to highlight here are precisely the same ones that were used against them as Christian polemical ammunition—and that, at least in the case of the rabbit, the Pietists level precisely the same charge against their Christian contemporaries, based on the same naturalistic argumentation, that they had themselves been faced with.²³¹

THE WANDERINGS OF A WONDERING JEW

In addition to lapidaries, grimoires, bestiaries, and “books of secrets,” the Pietists consumed and produced an additional genre that anchors them firmly within contemporary debates over the relationship between natural order and occult mirabilia: travel narratives, which reported on, and sought to make sense of, the wonders to be found in far-off lands. As we have seen, Christian interest in natural wonder was nourished by, and nourished in turn, an efflorescence of travel narratives describing the “wonders of the east,” especially the ubiquitous Alexander Romance, which, in its varying recensions, described the monsters and wondrous natural phenomena thought to exist at the far reaches of the known world. In the case of the Pietists, too, an interest in wondrous phenomena within the natural world left its mark on the Hebrew travel narratives that circulated among the Jews of Ashkenaz. One such narrative, Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi-Ratisbon (“The Circuit of R. Petahiyah of Regensburg”), was produced within Kalonymide circles and manifests the interplay between real life observation and literary reworking that impacted Jewish ideas about nature just as it did Christian ones.

Very little is known about Petahiyah: he was apparently the brother of the prominent Tosafist R. Isaac ha-Lavan of Prague, and he set out in the late twelfth century on a tour of the Crimea, Babylonia, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere—perhaps on pilgrimage, perhaps in search of economic opportunities,²³² perhaps in search of eschatologically meaningful portents.²³³ The Sivuv describes Petahiyah’s travels, records his observations regarding the Jews and non-Jews he encounters along the way, and is especially concerned with listing and describing the pilgrimage sites that Petahiyah visited during the course of his journey. But it also describes in detail the wondrous animals, objects, and social mores Petahiyah encountered during his travels—Petahiyah describes with manifest amazement his observation of elephants, mandrakes, and hybrid birds; the political power of the Exilarchate; Babylonian women who are learned in written and oral Torah; and so on. Moreover, the shrines and holy sites he tours are depicted as sites of magical activity so manifest that they are revered by Jews, Muslims, and other religious groups alike.

Though a critical edition of the Sivuv was published over a century ago,²³⁴ the existing scholarship on Petahiyah and his travelogue is relatively minimal—scholars have tended to dismiss the Sivuv as a useful historical source, given its fantastic and unverifiable contents, and have generally compared it unfavorably with the contemporaneous, more straightforward travelogue of the Spaniard Benjamin of Tudela.²³⁵ But more recent scholarship on medieval chronicle and travel writing should make us skeptical about dismissing a source merely on account of its fantastic or impossible contents. By focusing attention on the “social logic of the text” rather than on the discreet “facts” it purports to compile, scholars have demonstrated that a range of medieval Ashkenazic texts that “look like history” might be best approached from a literary or anthropological perspective rather than a positivistic one.²³⁶ Martin Jacobs’s recent work has applied these critical tools to medieval Jewish travel narratives to illuminating effect.²³⁷

Indeed, in the case of Petahiyah’s Sivuv, the specific circumstances of the text’s composition strongly suggest that it should be read as a literary artifact rather than as a collection of accurate and objective observations. First of all, Petahiyah did not himself compose the surviving accounts of his travels—rather, the Sivuv, which is extant in two main recensions, was compiled and composed by none other than Judah he-Hasid during the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, by which point he was already living in Regensburg. Now, Judah did not merely transcribe the account of Petahiyah’s travels—he edited it, at times with a heavy hand.²³⁸ As such, the surviving accounts of Petahiyah’s travels must not be seen as merely one man’s idiosyncratic recollections; rather, it is worth considering whether the Sivuv can be situated within the Pietists’ broader approach toward the investigation of nature, its workings, and its theological meaning. And indeed, the account contains no shortage of observations of natural phenomena, which Petahiyah (as channeled by Judah) recounts breathlessly. Thus in Baghdad, Petahiyah benefits from the healing properties of the waters of the Tigris River,²³⁹ observes an elephant for the first time,²⁴⁰ rides a “flying camel” that traverses a mile in just moments,²⁴¹ and spies mandrakes growing in a local garden,²⁴² all of which lead him to declare the region “strange and glorious” (meshuneh u-mefu’ar).²⁴³ Elsewhere, he observes new species of birds,²⁴⁴ snakes that behave in a marvelous manner,²⁴⁵ and weather conditions so unlike those of Europe that he declares, “Babylonia is truly a different world!”²⁴⁶ The observance of novel natural phenomena is a staple of travel accounts, and the notion that Petahiyah himself set out on his journey solely for the purpose of seeking out such natural wonders seems to me overstated.²⁴⁷ But Judah’s authorship of this description of Petahiyah’s travels may well have been motivated by such concerns—the Sivuv begins by claiming the work was written in order to record “all the novelties and miracles and wonders of God that he saw and heard,” and “to tell his nation, the Children of Israel, the power and might of God, Who performed miracles and wonders each day for him.”²⁴⁸

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.