Читать книгу "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe - Ivan G. Marcus - Страница 12

Chapter 2

Rewriting Jewish Pietist Traditions

Once published, S[efer] H[asidim]—without distinction between what Soloveitchik termed S[efer] H[asidim] I and the rest of the book—stood as an independent work of medieval rabbinic scholarship that carried the halo of German Jewish piety with it into the sixteenth century and beyond.

—Edward Fram

Sefer Hasidim was always a work in progress, an open text of a special kind, rather than a single fixed book. Over time, some fourteen different editions came into being, some topical, others made up of unrelated paragraph units; some of over a thousand paragraphs, others but a few passages strung together.

Besides Sefer Hasidim, Judah also produced different but related texts such as his Zava’ah (Commands) and Sefer ha-Kavod (Book on the Divine Glory). R. Eleazar of Worms, for his part, wrote many private penitentials and different but overlapping halakhic works, large compositions about theological matters, different commentaries on the prayer book, and dozens of piyyutim (see below and the bibliography). Because each author’s own compositions overlap, other writers can cite passages that appear in more than one work by referring to different titles. A comparison of the texts attributed to each author indicates not a set of unique, original, and distinct compositions but a fluid range of overlapping and multiple expressions of different though related texts all composed of small text units. After considering how Judah and Eleazar each wrote overlapping or fluid texts, I look at how one French Jewish author rewrote Sefer Hasidim.

Overlapping or Fluid Texts

Textual overlap or fluidity has long been noted about ancient rabbinic works and about heikhalot texts that unknown editors produced. Short sections of related texts circulated, and editors combined them in different works.¹ In many Ashkenazic books, an additional kind of fluidity exists: one rabbinic author might write more than one related text in short paragraph units on the same subject. This pattern of composition is different from an author revising a single work. Saadia Gaon recycled some of his earlier writings in later ones, and Maimonides revised parts of his Commentary on the Mishneh, as we know from drafts of early versions found in the Cairo Geniza. That is different from the fluidity we find in R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer Hasidim and his other pietistic writings or in some of R. Eleazar of Worms’s compositions.²

When an author writes multiple parallel versions of a single composition or names them differently or gives the same title to a single work and to a collection of related works, we need to rethink what we mean by a text. We would normally be inclined to try to sort out what appears to us as bibliographical confusion by assigning a unique title and author to each work, but we should not project our ideas of bibliography, derived from familiar single-authored unique compositions, back into medieval Ashkenaz where ideas about an author and a text were often more fluid.

Among examples of textual fluidity in R. Judah he-hasid’s writings is Sefer ha-Kavod, a composition he may have written more than once and that overlaps in some ways with Sefer Hasidim.³ Jacob Freimann showed that manuscripts of Sefer ‘Arugat ha-Bosem, written by R. Judah he-hasid’s student R. Abraham b. ‘Azriel, contain quotations from a Sefer ha-Kavod attributed to R. Judah he-hasid.⁴ Two Oxford manuscripts that contain a work called Sefer ha-Kavod and a truncated second discussion also about the Divine Glory (kavod) do not contain the passages quoted from “that work” in Sefer ‘Arugat ha-Bosem. The two Oxford manuscripts do, however, contain passages attributed to R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer ha-Kavod that are found in R. Moses Taqu’s Ketav Tamim, a work that polemicized with Judah’s writings.⁵

Joseph Dan presents as a dilemma having to decide either that one of the two medieval authors is wrong in attributing his quotations to Judah’s Sefer ha-Kavod or that Judah wrote two versions of Sefer ha-Kavod. He considers which possibility is “more reasonable” (sevirah yoter). Although he thinks choosing between the two possibilities is “somewhat arbitrary” (yesh bah middah shel sheriratiyut), he decides in favor of Moses Taqu’s reliability, with the result that the Oxford manuscripts containing the quotations R. Moses Taqu attributes to Sefer ha-Kavod is in fact Sefer ha-Kavod. However, in light of Ashkenazic book culture’s fluidity, Dan’s second hypothesis, that Judah wrote more than one Sefer ha-Kavod, is very probable.⁶ R. Abraham b. ‘Azriel had one version of Sefer ha-Kavod, possibly lost, and R. Moses Taqu had a different one, that which was found in the Oxford manuscripts.⁷ There was no author’s single original text of Sefer ha-Kavod any more than there was one of Sefer Hasidim.⁸

The multiple character of Hebrew book composition in medieval Europe also explains some apparent anomalies in the sources such as a reference to “Sefer Hasidim” in a paragraph in Sefer Hasidim.⁹ The author did not think of a title as belonging uniquely to only one edition of related passages that he strung together more than once.¹⁰

Aside from Sefer Hasidim and Sefer ha-Kavod each consisting of more than one edition, the two works themselves seem to overlap. We see this from quotations of Sefer ha-Kavod found in Sefer Hasidim. Sometimes the author of Sefer Hasidim refers the reader to Sefer ha-Kavod for a longer treatment of something he mentions briefly in Sefer Hasidim. This would mean that a version of Sefer ha-Kavod already existed before that part of Sefer Hasidim was written. But in other passages in Sefer Hasidim, Judah indicates that more will be written in Sefer ha-Kavod. Here it seems that at least parts of Sefer Hasidim are earlier than a version of Sefer ha-Kavod.¹¹

That such an overlapping relationship between Judah’s different writings exists is reflected in a comment R. Eleazar of Worms makes in his legal code Sefer ha-Roqeah. He says that he has taken passages on the topic of caring for the dead “from the notebook of R. Judah hasid,” but then he continues, “and you will find proof of his words in Sefer ha-Kavod” (mi-mahberet r. yehudah hasid u-ve-sefer ha-kavod timza re’ayah li-devarav).¹² These comments suggest that Judah was writing passages in one “book” with the other “book” in mind; or, we might even think of them as two forms of his short pietist writings that he incorporated into differently named works, some as paragraphs of Sefer Hasidim and the other as paragraphs of Sefer ha-Kavod. The evidence suggests that he wrote some passages more than once and put them into separate works that had different titles.

A third text attributed to R. Judah he-hasid can overlap with Sefer Hasidim or with Sefer ha-Kavod. R. Judah he-hasid’s list of Commands (Zava’ah) is preserved in scores of manuscripts in different combinations of up to seventy short paragraphs.¹³ The title is often mistranslated as an ethical “will,” but the term refers to a series of discrete religious demands. The text was very popular. In the first edition is an introduction that says Judah was writing his rules for three different audiences: his family, other Jews, and the whole world. The “will” includes: “If there are two weddings the same week, one will become poor or go into exile and die. As to gentiles, they should not make two knights (shenei parashim) on the same day, but don’t tell them or they will be careful to avoid doing it”!¹⁴

Sometimes the Zava’ah was copied into codices that also contain parts of Sefer Hasidim.¹⁵ The two texts were often cited interchangeably, especially paragraphs of the Zava’ah as “Sefer Hasidim.”¹⁶ For example, in MS New York, JTS Mic. 5252 f. 93r: “I found in writing (something) copied from Sefer ha-Hasidim from the Commands of Rabbeinu Juda he-hasid, may his memory be for a blessing, and they are seventy commands” (mazati katuv ve-hu mu‘ataq mi-sefer ha-hasidim mi-zava’avot (?) rabbeinu yehuda [alef at end] hehasid…ve-hem shiv‘im zivuyyim).”¹⁷ Both texts have the same attributed author. Both are written in numbered paragraphs and command pietistic behavior. And both were often copied in the same manuscript codex or printed together.

There is also overlap between Sefer ha-Kavod and Judah’s Zava’ah. R. Jacob b. Moses Ha-Levi Mölln (Maharil) refers to seeing Sefer ha-Kavod, and that it included Rabbi Judah’s Zava’ah.¹⁸ Consider again the passage on mourning customs that is found in R. Eleazar of Worms’s Sefer ha-Roqeah (par. 316, end) that begins: “Copied from Sefer ha-Kavod written by the great man, R. Judah Hasid m[ay] the m[emory] of the r[ighteous man] (be for a blessing)” (ne’etaq mi-sefer ha-kavod she-yasad he-ish ha-gadol r. yehudah hasid zz” l). The text quoted is a very close version of the first nine paragraphs of Judah he-hasid’s Zava’ah even though it refers to the text as “Sefer ha-Kavod.”¹⁹

Apart from the compositions that R. Judah he-hasid wrote more than once, he also wrote multiple versions of short texts on the Divine Unity (shirei ha-yihud), and he wrote more than one commentary on the prayer book.²⁰ Other parallel passages are to be found in other compositions that Judah wrote, such as his writings about nature, Zekher ‘asah le-nifleotav.²¹

R. Eleazar of Worms’s Fluid Writings

R. Eleazar of Worms also produced more than one edition of some of his many different writings. He wrote several short penitential texts about how to atone for one’s sins, not just one that he revised. This act of recomposing resulted in related penitential texts with different names such as two versions called Hilekhot Teshuvah, and others called Moreh Hata’im, Yoreh Hata’im, and ‘Isqei Teshuvot. They all contain overlapping parallel passages in different sequences as well as unique ones. One composition cannot be reduced to the others as the product of the author’s revision of an original text or of scribal errors. The textual evidence argues for Eleazar of Worms’s composing each of them.²²

Overlap also exists in Eleazar’s halakhic writings. He composed a specific halakhic work that he called “Sefer ha-Roqeah,”²³ but that title can also refer to a different halakhic text whose modern editor named it “Ma‘aseh Roqeah” (the Work of Roqeah), but medieval authors cited that text simply as “Roqeah.” Eleazar wrote a third legal text that is also sometimes referred to as “Roqeah.”²⁴ Thus, when medieval authors refer to “Sefer ha-Roqeah” or “Roqeah” and the quoted passage is not in “our” Sefer ha-Roqeah, it is not because these authors had passages from a larger Sefer ha-Roqeah in the author’s original unique composition that did not survive, but because the title was applied to related, overlapping, but different texts that the same author composed from hundreds of short text units that he wrote.²⁵

In the case of R. Eleazar of Worms, the title “roqeah” also denotes the author’s name, “Eleazar,” since he explains in the introduction to his Sefer ha-Roqeah that he called the book “Roqeah” after his name “Eleazar,” a numerical equivalent. Each Hebrew word adds up to 308. By doing this, Eleazar in effect equated his name as author with the title or titles of his books. As a result, several books written by the same author could be called by his name-title, regardless of what other titles they might have.

Eleazar’s speculative writings that include Sefer ha-Shem (Book of the [Divine] Name), on God’s mystical names, or his Peirush ‘al Sefer Yezirah (Commentary on the Book of Creation), have those titles, but they are also part of a larger work that Eleazar called Sodei Razayya (Hidden Mysteries). The title “Sode Razayya,” in turn, can refer to a specific work by that name, but it also can refer to the collection of five related works including Sefer ha-Shem and the Peirush ‘al Sefer Yezirah.

Like R. Judah he-hasid, Eleazar also wrote different versions of a commentary on the standard prayer book that includes many Psalms, and he also wrote a commentary on the Book of Psalms. Passages from each “work” were copied into the other. He also wrote over fifty piyyutim.²⁶

Adapting the Works of Others in Ashkenaz and the French Sefer Hasidim

Continuous adaptation was a characteristic feature of Jewish subcultures in medieval Europe, and a northern French Jewish rewriting of Sefer Hasidim can be viewed as part of a broad process of Jewish cultural migration and adaptation. From time to time, a feature of one subculture was brought to another that absorbed and modified it. For example, Ashkenaz imported Iberian quantitative Hebrew poetic meter, and writers such as R. Jacob b. Meir, known as Rabbeinu Tam (d. 1171), adapted it.²⁷ Later, R. Meir b. Barukh (Maharam) of Rothenberg (d. 1293) used it when he wrote his lament on the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 and combined it with the genre Judah Halevi had used in his “Odes to Zion” (Shirei Ziyyon).²⁸ A prose example is the early modern Iberian story cycle in Solomon Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah) that was transformed into a Yiddish version with an Ashkenazic point of view.²⁹

In addition to Ashkenazic authors adapting Iberian Jewish cultural features, some French Ashkenazic texts show the influence of German Hebrew works. An example of such a text is Huqqei ha-Torah (Rules of the Torah) that describes a Jewish study community or yeshivah-like boarding school. Jewish males are described as studying there during the week and older ones go home to their wives for the Sabbath. The provenance of the text has been proposed in southern France or further north as in the Evreux brothers’ community in Normandy or in Paris.³⁰

Regardless of its social context, some of the ideas found in the text remind us of Sefer Hasidim and some recommended patterns of study found in it. It may be an example of German pietist influence on a French Jewish thinker, even if there was no implementation of its recommended practices, a conclusion that may also be drawn about the utopian and sectarian world of Sefer Hasidim itself. Although the social program envisioned in Sefer Hasidim did not get implemented as a utopian society, the regimen of fasting, atonement, and related practices it advocated did became widespread as part and parcel of East European “common Judaism”³¹ or of East European Jewish “piety.”

Despite the influence of hasidei ashkenaz modes of atonement, not everyone agreed with this approach, as we see in the northern French adaptation of Sefer Hasidim traditions. This text appears as the first part of the printed edition, preceding Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah that begins with paragraph SHB 153. It is not found in SHP (or its adaptation in former JTS Boesky 45). This text circulated in three manuscripts as an independent composition. In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 340 (Neubauer 875), dated 1299, it is called “Sefer ha-Hasidut (ShH).” It is also found in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, X.111 sup. and in Moscow, Russian State Library, Günzburg 103.³²

Sefer ha-Hasidut also became the first 152 numbered paragraphs of Cambridge Add. 379 and the shorter related manuscript Oxford Add. Fol. 34 (Neubauer 641). Two other manuscripts, Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984), are fragments of either that text or of it combined with a version of SHB I and SHP II. Since one cannot determine if Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984) contained more than ShH or ShH alone, neither can be counted as a manuscript just of ShH.

This particular text is unusual because it is very stable. Unlike the pairs of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim discussed in Chapter 1 that have most parallel paragraphs in the same sequence but have different single paragraphs missing, the several witnesses of Sefer ha-Hasidut tend to agree with each other. Only the Oxford text is defective, apparently because a page or two was lost, and the text is missing for pars. 102 (middle)-117.³³ In all of the other full versions, these paragraphs as well as all of the other parallels are found. This difference suggests that the French Sefer Hasidim was composed once and copied, not written more than once, as was the case with many German Pietist and other Ashkenazic Hebrew works. It circulated by itself or was combined with other blocks of text, but either way its 152 paragraphs circulated without much variation and this makes it unusual.

Following Haim Yosef David Azulai and Leopold Zunz, Jacob Reifmann, Solomon Wertheimer, and Jacob Freimann studied Sefer ha-Hasidut and observed that the first part of SHB contains unattributed Maimonidean passages on piety and repentance and lacks the ascetic penances found in the published Sefer Hasidim and in R. Eleazar of Worms’s penitential compositions.³⁴

In addition to the presence of passages from Maimonides, all the le‘azim (vernacular expressions) found in this text are French.³⁵ From Hebrew transliterations of medieval French words and phrases, the Hebrew text seems to come from an area to the west of Paris, between eastern Normandy and the Ile de la Cité.³⁶ In the rest of SHB or SHP the vernacular terms are mostly in German, although a few French words also appear there as they continue to do in German-Jewish compositions in German Ashkenaz.³⁷ For this reason, it is sometimes called the “French Sefer Hasidim.”

Other than the passages from Maimonides and the dominance of French le‘azim in this text, little else sets Sefer ha-Hasidut apart from the printed versions of Sefer Hasidim or from the majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, and its importance should not be exaggerated. For example, references to “the will of the Creator” (rezon ha-borei), one of several formulations of an underlying concept of an enlarged hidden divine will, not “the most distinctive element of Sefer Hasidim,”³⁸ are not frequently found in any of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim. In all of SHB and SHP, for example, it and similar phrases appear or are elaborated but a few times, so it is not significant if the phrase is not found often in Sefer ha-Hasidut either.³⁹ Similarly, although exegesis by use of numerology is very common in R. Eleazar of Worms’s esoteric writings, it is not the case that gematria are “ubiquitous in Sefer Hasidim” in the printed Sefer Hasidim editions or in the manuscripts, and Sefer ha-Hasidut is no different.⁴⁰

The absence of religious stories (ma‘asim) in Sefer ha-Hasidut,⁴¹ also true of many of the shorter manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, correlates with the absence of a program of social criticism in those texts. The majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, like Sefer ha-Hasidut, focus on the individual’s relationship to God and not on society. For that reason, they do not contain stories that illustrate social relationships. There are also hardly any stories in Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah at the beginning of SHP, or in SHB 153–162, and there are none in Eleazar’s Hilekhot Hasidut. Both Samuel and Eleazar obviously are German pietist authors but their pietistic writings do not contain either social criticism or stories, both of which are found in only some of Judah’s writings.

One difference between the longest editions of Sefer Hasidim and Sefer ha-Hasidut suggests a historical context for each that has not been considered. Although SHP, and the closely related former JTS Boesky 45, and SHB do not seem to refer to the rabbinic idea of ancestral merit (zekhut avot), that is, an appeal to biblical and other ancient figures’ merit to mitigate later generations’ deserved punishment, they do refer to the merit of the pietists’ own families going back three or four generations.⁴² This theme correlates with their awareness of family traditions that they sometimes refer to as “minhag avoteinu,” but Sefer ha-Hasidut does not have any awareness of time.⁴³ Instead, its focus is on the individual pietist’s sins and merits alone as the basis of one’s reward or punishment.

This difference points to a possible historical link between the martyrs and Jews who survived as forced converts in 1096, the anti-Jewish riots in the Rhineland that accompanied the First Crusade, and R. Judah he-hasid’s vision of an ideal society. In Germany, the trauma of the anti-Jewish riots in 1096 was real, and there are other signs that the memory of 1096, including survivor guilt but not contemporary persecution, underlies Sefer Hasidim’s world. When someone rewrote Sefer Hasidim in northern France, a region that did not experience or remember the converts and martyrs of 1096, it is understandable that he would not invoke the ancestral merit of four generations earlier, that is, of the martyrs of 1096. The Jews of northern France also did not need the same penitential system for the same reasons, assuming for the moment that conversion guilt was a factor in generating some of the need for ascetic penances. In point of fact, the penitentials focus much more on sins of pride, anxieties over women, money, and violence carried out between Jews than with apostasy.⁴⁴ In stark contrast to these social concerns but like Huqqei ha-Torah, Sefer ha-Hasidut floats in social space. That text does not contain the imagined utopian pietist society that one finds everywhere in the longest manuscripts of R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer Hasidim.

The most significant difference between Sefer ha-Hasidut and some of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and other German pietist writings is the absence of penances and the theory of teshuvat ha-mishqal (suffering proportional to pleasure) and reliance instead on Maimonidean repentance, following Saadia’s approach already quoted in SHP.⁴⁵ Such repentance requires a change of will, avoidance of sin, and confession of sins, but not public or even private acts of atonement or penances as the three German pietist authors stipulate. The innovation of Sefer ha-Hasidut was not in adding to ascetic penances a different form of atonement based on Maimonides, but in replacing the former by the latter. However, since the ascetic penitentials, even in confessing one’s sins to another Jew, as in Sefer Hasidim, were practiced by some in later Judaism (see below), one could argue that the author of Sefer ha-Hasidut failed to neutralize the influence of hasidei ashkenaz penitential atonement with the Maimonidean substitute. Regarding penitential practice, at least, it is misleading to claim that “SH I [Sefer ha-Hasidut] had a diffusion far greater than that of Sefer Hasidim itself.”⁴⁶ Unless one insists on arbitrarily defining Sefer Hasidim as being only the long manuscripts that contain Judah’s social critique, there are some twenty manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim in fourteen editions; of Sefer ha-Hasidut, there are but three manuscripts that circulated with that text alone.

Penitential Practice in Later Ashkenaz Reconsidered

Athough Judah he-hasid’s sectarian vision did not take hold in medieval German towns, Sefer Hasidim’s model of confession to another Jew continued in Ashkenaz for centuries after the death of Judah he-hasid in 1217. Several Ashkenazic Jews either confessed sins in person to another Jew or wrote to a rabbi to request penances, and this practice continued well into early modern times. Although R. Eleazar of Worms justified writing his several private penitential manuals on the grounds that some Jews were too embarrassed to confess their sins to another Jew and receive penances, confession to a sage or to a rabbi continued in medieval Ashkenaz side by side with the use of R. Eleazar of Worms’s private penitential manuals. Thus, German pietist modes of atonement were influential not only through Eleazar’s penitential handbooks, but also from the inspiration of confession to a sage as described originally in Sefer Hasidim.⁴⁷

The idea of confession to a sage (hakham) is found in a fourteenth-century text written by R. Moses b. Eleazar ha-Kohen, who refers to “a story about a man who committed many sins his whole life … and went to a sage” (ma‘aseh be-adam ehad she-‘asah ‘aveirot harbeh kol yamav … ba ezel hakham ehad).⁴⁸ This story pictures a Jew confessing his sins to a “sage” and receiving a penance from him to atone for all of his sins, just as we find scores of times in Sefer Hasidim itself.⁴⁹

Encouraging confession to an important Jew is a theme in a penitential sermon that has been recently published. The unknown German pietist author places great emphasis on the value of the sinner embarrassing himself by confessing his sins to an important person, the very issue that R. Eleazar of Worms mentions as a problem for some.⁵⁰ In addition to the anonymously composed sermon that advocates sage-like confession, R. Eleazar of Worms himself composed a series of rhymed Hebrew penances that complement the prose private penitentials that he wrote.⁵¹ Apparently there was a lively disagreement about confession of sins to another Jew since we find new works encouraging it as well as Eleazar’s penitentials that are written to replace it.

There are several indications that the pro-confession camp won some followers. For example, in a collection of German Jewish traditions written down in Italy, we find a description of a penance administered for a violation of the Sabbath.⁵² In an oft-cited case, a Jewish father writes to R. Meir b. Barukh (Maharam) of Rothenburg (d. 1293). He was afraid that “the enemies” (ha-oyevim) would kill his family and so he killed his family himself. But before he could take his own life, he was rescued, and he asks R. Meir of Rothenburg if he sinned and requires a penance or if he did the right thing.⁵³ R. Meir’s response is that no penance is needed since administering one now would imply that Jews who had acted the same way in the past had sinned.⁵⁴

The same R. Meir of Rothenburg tells a Jew who publically insulted a respected member of the Jewish community to do penance by fasting, self-flagellation, and giving charity.⁵⁵ Two rabbis, R. Jonah and R. Shemaryah, ask one R. Isaac b. Mordecai, a contemporary of R. Meir of Rothenburg, about revealing crimes that Jews had confessed to him. The questioner mentions Christian confession to monks and their vows of secrecy.⁵⁶

The late thirteenth-century, anonymously written French Hebrew work, Sefer ha-Neyar, refers to a woman’s confession to a R. Haim Barukh. She angered her husband and the rabbi imposed on her a fast of three days.⁵⁷ In the fifteenth century, R. Joseph b. Moses Hahn, a student of R. Israel Isserlein, lists cases of confession and penances in his “Laws of Atonement” (Hilekhot Teshuvah).⁵⁸ From around the same time, the niece of R. Jacob b. Moses ha-Levi Mölln (Maharil) forgot to light Friday candles and she is given a penance.⁵⁹

Given the cases of Jewish confession to another Jew, Eleazar’s introductions to his written handbooks should no longer be interpreted as a sign that confession to a sage or rabbi disappeared and was replaced by written penitentials. Rather, Eleazar added them for those Jews who resisted such confession, while others were doing this very thing.⁶⁰ It is also important to realize that hagiographical stories in Hebrew and Yiddish that portray Jews’ and Christians’ confessions to Judah he-hasid and asking him for penances show that he was remembered for his role as dispensing penances. None of the hagiographical stories in Hebrew or Yiddish about Samuel or Judah picture a Jew using a written penitential. Some Jews continued to follow Judah he-hasid’s form of penitence long after he was gone.⁶¹

Sefer Hasidim, Sefer ha-Hasidut, and the Historical Impact of German Pietism

We should note that Ashkenazic book culture was strong enough to withstand Maimonides’ presence there from the thirteenth century on. Although Sefer ha-Hasidut and then Sefer Mizvot Gadol and Sefer Mizvot Qatan took on Maimonidean content, Ashkenazic book culture did not emulate the Sephardic book form that Maimonides’ works embodied. Ashkenazic authors who incorporated Maimonides into their works continued to write segmented, Lego-like compositions. They did not imitate the form of Maimonides’ Sefer ha-Madda‘.⁶²

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

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

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