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Introduction

My purpose is always to write history.

—Erich Auerbach

For some time, scholars have been studying the history of the book as a way to understand a culture.¹ This book is a reassessment of the classical Hebrew text known since the thirteenth century as Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), written anonymously but attributed to Rabbi Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (the pietist) of Regensburg (d. 1217).² It presents a case study of the history of the Ashkenazic Hebrew book that offers a new approach to the medieval Jewish subculture in Germany, northern France, and England, known as Ashkenaz.³ In exploring Sefer Hasidim, unexpected areas of research have emerged about the library of Hebrew books Jews produced in medieval Christian Europe. In comparison with other post-classical Jewish books, the form of Hebrew books from medieval Ashkenaz demonstrates the limits of Jewish acculturation.

In some respects, Sefer Hasidim is unusual compared to other books Jews wrote in medieval Ashkenaz. This book has been called a “strange work”⁴ and “a book that is different from any other in our literature.”⁵ It is “strange” but rather than being “different,” Sefer Hasidim turns out to be similar to other Ashkenazic Hebrew books. In turn, many of the other Hebrew books written in Ashkenaz resemble Sefer Hasidim more than has been realized.

Although Moritz Güdemann remarked in 1880 that Sefer Hasidim is a book that was little studied, it was widely read.⁶ Two dozen manuscripts contain versions of it, and almost sixty printed editions appeared, most of them in the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe.⁷ After a long period of scholarly neglect, Sefer Hasidim has recently become an important subject of research. In the last thirty-five years alone a flurry of studies have made use of this strange Hebrew book from medieval Germany. In Piety and Society (1981), I included a bibliographical essay on works about Sefer Hasidim from the eighteenth century down to the late 1970s that discussed some thirty of almost sixty publications on this book listed in the bibliography, nearly all of them written in Hebrew. Since then, over a hundred and fifty more articles and a few books have been published, more than half of them written in languages other than Hebrew.⁸

Unlike most Jewish books written in northern France or Germany in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Sefer Hasidim is not a commentary on another book, nor is it primarily devoted to Jewish law or the liturgy. It contains thousands of interpretations of biblical verses, but it is not a new biblical commentary nor is it an anthology of earlier ones. A book of religious instruction, it contains hundreds of stories that mirror situations in everyday medieval social living unparalleled in Hebrew literature or in most contemporary Christian sources, but it is not an anthology of Hebrew stories.

Sefer Hasidim as an Inverted Pyramid

To date, scholars have addressed different religious and social questions and selectively quoted from Sefer Hasidim or anthologized it. They have written about its ascetic ideals and penitential practices; its egalitarian views about society; the production of the medieval codex as a physical object; women in business and family life; and Jewish-Christian relations, among many other topics. In each case, scholars selected passages from some versions of Sefer Hasidim for evidence about the subject that interested them as historians or folklorists or students of halakhah (Jewish law). The working assumption behind these studies is that Sefer Hasidim is an important source about the everyday life of the Jewish world of thirteenth-century Germany. And it is.

But it is not the contents alone that make Sefer Hasidim important. Although Sefer Hasidim and other medieval Hebrew books have long been studied critically over the last two centuries for their contents—the message—and in the last few decades for their properties as physical objects—the medium—only recently have they also been examined for their literary form—the medium of the message.⁹ By this I refer not to the shapes of the letters (paleography) or to the properties of the material on which a text is written (codicology) or to the design of the page (mise-en-page), but to how units of text were composed and put together.¹⁰

Few studies have been devoted to the form of the text of Sefer Hasidim that survived in several manuscripts since the thirteenth century. Early on, scholars observed that Sefer Hasidim exists in two editions or versions. One was published in Bologna in 1538 (SHB), based on a manuscript that no longer exists. It consists of 1,176 paragraphs that are defectively numbered so that it concludes with paragraph 1,178 (see Catalog). A version of this text was reissued some sixty more times in the ensuing years, down to 1924 and 1957, when Reuven Margoliot published his two annotated editions, based on Bologna, still in print (SHM 1 and SHM 2).

A much longer version appeared in Berlin in 1891 based on an undated Ashkenazic Hebrew manuscript from around 1300, now located in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Italy (SHP). It, too, is based on a manuscript that is now lost. It was annotated by Jehuda Wistinetzki and reissued with a new scholarly introduction by Jacob Freimann in 1924 in Frankfurt am Main. It consists of 1,999 paragraphs but because of errors in the numbering it ends with number 1,983.¹¹ These are sometimes referred to in the scholarly literature as Bologna or Parma, or as the short or the long text, since Parma is about twice as long as Bologna.

Charts of the paragraph numbers from the Parma manuscript to parallel passages in the familiar Bologna edition appeared in Wistinetzki’s edition of Parma in 1891. Freimann produced a reverse table of paragraph numbers in his “mavo” (introduction) in 1924 so that readers of Bologna could find parallels, when they existed, in the longer new edition of MS Parma.¹² Scholars now could find parallel passages that existed in both directions.

But no one asked why Sefer Hasidim was written in such a way that tables of parallel passages were needed in the first place. They were needed because the parallel paragraphs are not in the same sequence in the two versions.¹³

Generally, we assume that an author composed a book and that it is preserved in one or more manuscripts. Scholars examine the manuscripts, divide them into families, based on copying errors, create a stemma or map of resemblances among them, and ultimately try to reconstruct an author’s original version or lost urtext. This model of a book may be compared to a pyramid with the author’s unique original version at the top and various manuscript witnesses of it at the broad base. This is true of most Western classical books, of the Latin and Arabic traditions in the Middle Ages, and of the Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic books Jews produced in the Muslim world.¹⁴

It is not true, however, of Sefer Hasidim or, it turns out, of many Hebrew books that Jews wrote in early Ashkenazic Europe. Authors there composed books in small-paragraph units and then combined them into different editions in the form of an inverted pyramid. At the broad top are the multiple acts of an author’s composition preserved as single paragraphs that make up the particular work. The author (or sometimes a student or relative) combined these short units of text into different parallel editions of Sefer Hasidim and of some other Ashkenazic Hebrew books. We can think of these parallel editions as the narrower bottom of the inverted pyramid. Sefer Hasidim never was written as the author’s single, original composed work that others copied.

A good way to think of Sefer Hasidim and many Hebrew books produced in medieval Ashkenaz is as an “open text” or “open book.” Umberto Eco introduced the concept of “open text” in 1962 and meant by it the multiple readings that a reader brings to a work or the way some modern artists require the reader or performer to complete a work left semi-finished.¹⁵ Israel Ta-Shma used the term “open book” in 1993, without reference to Eco, to mean an author like Maimonides who writes a version of his Commentary on the Mishneh and then revises it himself, as demonstrated by surviving drafts from the Cairo Geniza, for example.¹⁶ Others did it as well, even in Ashkenaz.¹⁷ Had the passages in both editions of Sefer Hasidim been arranged in the same sequence, even with additions or deletions, this might point to an original book that an author revised, the kind of composition that Israel Ta-Shma referred to as an “open book.”

The meaning I am giving to “open book” in the case of Sefer Hasidim and of many other Ashkenaic books refers to an author:

• composing a work in short text units that he sometimes rewrites;

• combining them disjunctively (without linear coherence); and

• producing more than one parallel edition, as opposed to composing one edition that the author or someone else revises one or more times. The term “open book” here refers to writing parallel editions of a book so that there never was only one original edition from which the others are derived.¹⁸

A good example from classical literature of an open book created in parallel editions is discussed in David Konstan’s study of the Latin Romance of Alexander. He refers to it as “a special kind of text, which I shall call an open text.”¹⁹ That term refers to “the way in which a certain kind of literary work is produced.”²⁰ For example, the Greek Life of Aesop “is composed in segmented fashion” and “the textual history of the Alexander Romance confirms the impression that the text presents of its segmentary composition, which may accrue or lose elements without damage to its structure.”²¹

The implications about this episodic form of composition and variability in the transmission of these texts means that there never was an urtext: “In the case of what I am calling open texts, such as the Alexander Romance, the History of Apollonius King of Tyre, or the Life of Aesop, however, the effort to retrieve an original form is not only futile but detrimental. For such a procedure would generate a text less authentic than any of the diverse recensions transmitted by the manuscript tradition—a work that in fact no one had ever read or written.”²² He concludes that “an editor’s responsibility is to present one or more of the existing versions as independent texts. … The mistake, however, is to suppose that the various existing versions are false or inferior forms. … Open texts, then, are by nature multiple”;²³ “they are authentic instantiations of a work that is not subject to limitation or closure by way of appeal to an original.” The Alexander Romance “is an agglutinative work, remarkably susceptible to additions, subtractions, and transpositions of passages and episodes.”²⁴ The same can be said about Sefer Hasidim and about many of the best-known Hebrew texts produced in medieval Germany and northern France in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.

The overwhelming evidence of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and of many other Ashenazic books does not support the possibility that an author wrote a single composition once and revised it one or more times. Unlike the type of open book that Ta-Shma discusses, Sefer Hasidim is made up of small, independently written passages that the author arranged in different sequences in more than one parallel edition. These editions are all original versions of the same book and are “open” in the sense of being written in parallel editions. There was no single original book and so no single edition is the “real” Sefer Hasidim. All of them are.

Until now, scholars have analyzed Sefer Hasidim according to the standard model of a book by assuming that even though it was written anonymously, the manuscripts and printed versions of Sefer Hasidim were remnants of an author’s single original version (urtext) that was now lost. But the form of the two printed editions of Sefer Hasidim points to it as an open book in the sense of being written in multiple parallel editions. And it turns out that many other Hebrew books that authors wrote in medieval northern France and Germany resemble the book form of Sefer Hasidim in several significant respects.

In Muslim lands, Jews wrote Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic books mainly in continuous, lengthy, multi-page passages divided into chapters or other relatively long parts. Sometimes they wrote one version of a book and revised it. In Ashkenaz, on the other hand, Jewish writers tended to compose Hebrew works as independent paragraph passages, assembled them disjunctively, often without literary continuity, and combined them into large units of text. Often they produced parallel editions of the same book.

In the former type of book, if a passage is omitted, a semantic gap is created that interrupts the flow of the composition, and one realizes that something is wrong. In the latter type, like Sefer Hasidim, and some other Hebrew books produced in medieval Ashkenaz, it is often possible to remove a passage without the reader sensing that something is missing. The passages are disjunctive; they are independent text units, not parts of a continuing exposition.

One scholar recently compared the short, disjunctive style of such Hebrew book composition to Lego, the colored plastic bricks manufactured by the Danish toy company whose CEO recently said about his product that it “acts as if it was glued and yet you can easily take it apart.”²⁵ That is an apt way of looking at the modular or disjunctively constructed Hebrew compositions many medieval Ashkenazic authors produced.

Authorial composition of texts in short, disjunctive paragraphs should also be distinguished from the contribution of activist scribes. Although scribes contributed to the appearance on the page of these disjunctive texts, they did not create them. True, in the transmission of ancient rabbinic texts or of the early mystical heikhalot (Palace) manuscripts, for example, learned scribes in Ashkenaz, unlike rote copyists, did not hesitate to modify or even add their own comments into the text they were copying. This scribal activism implies a collective or collaborative view of authorship.²⁶

Nor are we dealing with editors compiling anthologies or miscellanies by cutting and pasting works that already existed but of a form of authorial composition in discrete, relatively short textual units.²⁷ The authors themselves produced the types of books that Sefer Hasidim resembles and they did so in segmented paragraphs that they combined into parallel editions.

Selective Inward Acculturation and Persistence

Why were these compositions written in Lego-like segments, more openended and fluid compared to the familiar single-authored “book” that we find more in Jewish Muslim culture than in Ashkenaz? Jewish culture in medieval Ashkenaz was an extension and development of ancient rabbinic culture that itself had resisted allowing the influence of Greco-Roman civilization to reshape it into the latter’s literary forms and genres. Sefer Hasidim and many other Ashkenazic Hebrew books are not written in the same form as was ancient rabbinic culture, but they are one of its extensions and developments. Like ancient rabbinic culture, the form of Ashkenazic Hebrew books exhibits selective inward acculturation. Rabbinic authors in Roman Palestine knew Greek in many cases but selectively appropriated only the Greco-Roman lexicon, not the literature, in their cultural world. They also did not write some books in the widespread classical Greco-Roman form of a single-authored work.

Even the ancient rabbis’ introduction of thousands of Greek words and terms into the works they wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic was done selectively: when it came to writing liturgy, they insisted on using a pure Hebrew vocabulary, despite all the Greek they were comfortable using in their studies of Scripture or in legal compilations.²⁸ However, in inscriptions such as those on surviving tombstones, Greek and Latin with a minimal use of Hebrew was common in late antiquity and in early medieval Italy and northern France.

But from the eighth century, things changed, and European Jewish funerary inscriptions were written only in Hebrew.²⁹ The rabbis in northern Europe refused to read, let alone write, Roman letters and instead developed their indigenous traditions in Hebrew, even when they were open to adapting and internalizing Christian cultural forms and themes.³⁰

The Ashkenazic Hebrew book is also part of Jewish cultural persistence and self-definition in medieval Christian Europe, an aspect of Jewish self-fashioning that has not been studied as a defining feature of medieval Jewish culture. It is not enough to note that some aspects of Christian culture were adapted in Jewish circles.³¹ We also need to ask why others were not. Had Jews been willing to read Christian authors in Latin, we would know it. They would have cited Latin authors or at least alluded to them. And unlike the ancient rabbis, but like their Christian contemporaries, medieval Ashkenazic rabbis would have written Hebrew books that look like Latin books. They did not.

The form of many Ashkenazic books, then, is an important part of the new Jewish cultural studies that emphasize the openness of Jewish writers to their Christian surroundings and their appropriation or adaptation into Jewish culture. In the case of text composition, as opposed to physical book production, Jews developed a world of their own, resisting how Latin or vernacular books were composed, even when they shared codicological features and even paleographical pen strokes in Hebrew influenced by Gothic verticality typical of contemporary Latin book hands. The medium was shared but the “medium of the message,” the way the text itself was composed, remained Jewish.³²

It is beyond the scope of this study to explore when Ashkenazic Jews began to write books in the Geonic-Sephardic style of a work divided into chapters that progress from start to finish. Is this change linked to the well-known influence in Central or Eastern European Jewish circles of the Sephardic Hebrew book or of the book written in Latin or vernacular Western languages that Jews now began to read? If so, we need to ask when northern European Jews began to read Roman letters and add works written in those languages to the exclusive Hebrew library and language that had been their reading and writing medium for hundreds of years—but this needs to be worked out.³³

For now, there is no comprehensive study of the form of Ashkenazic book composition. By raising these questions in the process of studying Sefer Hasidim in depth, I hope that others will research this important topic and also explore further the cultural filter through which medieval Jews took over some features of Christian Europe or just experienced them in common, whereas they ignored others. These issues suggest how the study of the forms in which Hebrew books were composed can shed light on comparative cultural issues in European Jewish history.

The Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe

What, then, is an Ashkenazic “book” in medieval Europe? The present study sets out to raise this question for future research by focusing on the case study of Sefer Hasidim, one of the most enigmatically written exemplars of segmented book writing in medieval German lands and northern France. The chapters that follow present new conclusions about Sefer Hasidim that have implications for understanding some of the other segmented Hebrew books Jews wrote in medieval Europe.

Chapter 1 discusses Sefer Hasidim as an “open text” in the specific sense of a work written in small, disjunctive units, arranged differently in several parallel editions that cannot be reduced to an author’s single original composition. Sefer Hasidim is preserved in over twenty manuscripts. The fourteen manuscript and early print editions of Sefer Hasidim (see Chapter 1) are each made up of unique sequences of short text passages that need to be studied together as Sefer Hasidim. There is no evidence that Sefer Hasidim can be described as a single original authored text, with a defined structure, that the author or others revised one or more times, as Ta-Shma argued about Maimonides’ and a few other Jewish authors’ works and that Yisrael Peles refers to as a work of “multiple editions” (merubeh ‘arikhot), which the author himself composed and reedited more than once.³⁴

Chapter 2 looks at different aspects of rewriting in German Pietist (hasidei ashkenaz) culture in the circle of the principal pietist authors. The composition of Sefer Hasidim traditions is placed in the broader context of the other works that R. Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (d. 1217) and his student R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. ca. 1230) wrote as overlapping or fluid compositions. Their works are a series of rewritings of short paragraph-length texts. A different kind of rewriting resulted in the so-called “French Sefer Hasidim,” the first 152 paragraphs of the first edition, Bologna, 1538. Despite its unique features, that text is but one of several rewritings of Sefer Hasidim traditions.

Biographical and hagiographical sources about the traditional author of Sefer Hasidim, R. Judah he-hasid, are discussed with a close look at genre and historical methodology in Chapter 3. From comments his students and his son, R. Moses Zaltman, made about him and from local Hebrew and Yiddish story cycles, including sources that resemble some of the traditions in Sefer Hasidim that are mainly about anonymous pietists, we can try to sketch out what we know about R. Judah he-hasid and other pietist Jews who formed around him a small circle of students and family members, not a movement.

Moreover, these pietists lived in one or more of four German towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Speyer, Regensburg, Worms, and Mainz. This chapter looks into this “tale of four cities” in an attempt to illuminate better the traditions preserved about one or more of the pietist authors: Judah’s father R. Samuel ben Qalonimos the Elder of Speyer; Judah himself, who grew up in Speyer but spent the last two decades of his life in the medieval boom town of Regensburg on the Danube, today in the German State of Bavaria; Judah’s cousin, R. Eleazar of Worms, who studied with his father in Mainz, and with others including R. Judah he-hasid in Speyer and Regensburg, and then moved on to be a leading rabbinical figure in Worms.

In some ways, Speyer displaced Mainz, the earliest of the Rhineland towns, weakened by anti-Jewish riots there in 1096. The pietists flourished first in Speyer, most of whose Jews survived 1096, but it was to Regensburg, another town of Jewish survivors, that Judah emigrated. Worms, like Mainz, also suffered in 1096, but it remained a center of Jewish legal scholarship where Eleazar combined German pietism with Jewish law, as Judah did to some extent in Regensburg.³⁵ An examination of how the Rhineland towns of Mainz, Worms, and especially Speyer are related to Regensburg, the West to the East, offers a way to map changes in the cultural geography of this group of Jewish thinkers.

Chapter 4 places the peculiar form of Ashkenazic Hebrew book writing into another historical context by briefly comparing it to earlier Jewish book production as well as to classical Greco-Roman, medieval Muslim and Christian book writing. In surveying the structures of several major Hebrew works written in medieval Ashkenaz it becomes clear that many of them are similar in their segmented paragraph text units and multiple parallel editions to the way Sefer Hasidim was written. A few are examples of Ta-Shma’s “open book” composition of an early edition that the author himself revised into a later edition of the same book.

The book concludes with two new research tools. The first is an annotated catalog of the manuscripts and printed editions of Sefer Hasidim. From the printing history of Sefer Hasidim, it is clear that it was popular especially where East European Hasidism expanded during the nineteenth century. In contrast to the many editions of Sefer Hasidim that appeared in areas of Hasidic populations, only one modern edition was published in Lithuania (Vilna, 1819, in Yiddish), the base of anti-Hasidic activity. The twenty manuscripts and sixty editions of Sefer Hasidim suggest that the book had a significant impact on Jewish cultural history. The abundant passages from the book found in early modern Hebrew books and the relationship of the stories in Sefer Hasidim to modern Hebrew literature, for example, have barely been explored.³⁶

The multi-tiered Select Bibliography is divided into several sections of primary sources, followed by secondary sources on Sefer Hasidim and German pietism. It is clear that over the last thirty-five years, the study of Sefer Hasidim has become a central subject of scholarly research. It is my hope that this book will offer a new comprehensive treatment from which to move forward.