it serves to identify perceived outsiders rather than insiders who might hold any of a range of conventions. As a result, the use of deviance in this search would not have strengthened my ability to access piety; and, in some cases, it would have hindered my effort, since deviance may help to uncover accepted standards, but it is not the inverse of piety. While both deviant and pious observances depart from the norm, they do not necessarily occupy the same axis or receive the same treatment.72
Furthermore, defining a practice as deviant if it diverged from common conduct presumes that rituals were regularly performed as prescribed within medieval books and manuals, and that anyone who acted otherwise was considered a sinner. In this study, I try to discern how medieval Jews observed the law while going beyond their perceived call of duty; I have not attempted to write a history of how the learned elite believed religious customs should have been carried out. As we shall see, those considered pious were at times ridiculed for practices that exceeded halakhic mandates.
Despite these drawbacks, scholarship on deviance has provided a perspective that I find useful in the search for piety. Scholars of deviance have asked questions that inform my research, such as the following: Who holds the social power to label a practice as deviant? Why are certain labels used? What are the criteria for a given definition? And, how did this categorization function socially? Stated differently, labeling and classification come from the collective audience rather than the individual, regardless of whether one is being defined within or beyond a specific category.73
Following these insights, the relationship between the collective and the individual is central in this study. On the whole, the practices examined in this book were publicly performed, although the definition of the public sphere varies slightly for each ritual.74 Many of these practices could have been easily discerned, and could have been learned on the street or in the synagogue without elaborate explanation. I have tried to straddle the individual and the communal realms by focusing on rituals that were performed by individuals yet were also seen as reflections of corporate religious identity.75
German Pietism
One subject that exemplifies some of the definitions and distinctions that I have outlined and that is worthy of particular attention is the Ashkenazic pietist group from the Rhineland known as Hasidei Ashkenaz, or German Pietists.76 This appellation has been used to describe Samuel b. Judah (twelfth century) and two of his disciples, his son Judah (known as Judah the Pious, d. 1217) and Judah’s student, Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. before 1232), along with their assumed followers.77 These rabbis composed influential works—Sefer Hasidim and Sefer haRokeah among them—in which they present their ideas for conducting pious lives, in constant fear and awe of God.78 Some scholars have described their philosophy and outlook on life as “sect-like” and too radical to be widely influential, others as consonant with the Christian practices of their time, and still others as theoretical rather than practical.79 Many scholars have studied these texts for the mystical worldviews and the theological principles set forth in them. Without distracting from their importance for the history of mysticism, my reading of them concentrates on the evidence of practice reflected in them.80 These guidebooks outline behavior for their contemporaries who wished to raise the level of piety in their lives; therefore, they serve as important sources for this study. One of the questions I ask when examining materials that originate with Hasidei Ashkenaz (whose leaders first lived in Speyer and Worms, then in Regensburg) is to what extent the pious practices that they recommended were already widely known; or, in other words, how innovative were these teachings in their immediate vicinity and in northern France?81 That is, were these zealous versions of the practices that other Jews performed less stringently?
These questions are related to a key issue that has been raised in research on Hasidei Ashkenaz: should they be called “Pietists” as a defined group rather than “pious,” without any specifics to indicate their unique position in medieval Jewish society?82 The claim that Hasidei Ashkenaz should be denoted as “Pietists” has been promoted by Ivan Marcus, Haym Soloveitchik, and others, in studies that have been instrumental for those seeking to delineate the intellectual and doctrinal contours of pietistic thought over and above its social framework. Haym Soloveitchik has studied a number of pietisms, German and otherwise, in an effort to articulate the distinctions between them.83 In contrast to Soloveitchik and Marcus, I am not seeking to distinguish between the pious and the Pietists. Rather, I am investigating the rituals that were performed by Jews who wished to fulfill their religious obligations; thus, I use the term “pietistic” to characterize the attitudes of leaders such as Judah and Samuel, who occupy the far end of the religious spectrum. In some cases, these “pietists” are presented as virtuosi, stellar examples of ardent belief and ascetic practice. However, my main interest lies in how pious practice was promoted, diffused, and explained within the medieval world, not the intellectual biographies or thought processes of the rabbis and individuals whose praxis characterize them as extreme rather than representative.84 Much as the word hasid (pious) conveyed different meanings and inflections in medieval texts, so it is in this study, where it can carry prescriptive and descriptive senses that allow a more nuanced understanding of Jewish society in medieval Ashkenaz.85
Piety and Gender
Gender serves as a critical prism for examining piety in this study, which is motivated by the desire to include community members who are rendered nearly invisible in medieval accounts but who surely composed a considerable segment of the medieval Jewish population. Adult men who were not especially learned represent one such category, since most male members of medieval Jewish communities were neither halakhic authorities nor learned scholars, yet information on them is especially sparse. Another significant group within the community’s fabric were women. Children, too, constituted a meaningful cohort of the community to whom I refer throughout this book.
The piety of medieval Ashkenazic women, like that of the entire community, has most prominently been noted in descriptions of their deaths, by the Crusaders or by their own hands.86 Women’s piety has further been remarked upon in the context of religious rituals, especially those defined as “positive time-bound commandments,” such as precepts related to the holidays and the obligations of tefillin and tzitzit.87 As feminism and gender theory have increasingly influenced Jewish studies in the past two decades, research on medieval Jewish women has flourished. Of special note is the work of Judith Baskin, who was one of the first scholars to address these issues in the Ashkenazi context.88 Avraham Grossman has provided the most comprehensive overview of medieval Jewish women thus far in his comparison of Jewish life in Europe and Islamic lands, which includes the status of Jewish women in their environs. Grossman’s work dedicates one full chapter plus occasional references to aspects of daily religious practice among medieval Jewish women.89 Most recently, Bitha Har-Shefi wrote her dissertation on select halakhic developments pertaining to women in Ashkenaz during the Middle Ages.90 While I concentrate throughout this volume on the comparison between Jewish and Christian piety in northern Europe, I occasionally reference examples from Jewish life in Christian Spain and Muslim lands.
Practicing Piety seeks to move scholarly discourse on medieval Jewish women a step further by studying the pious practices of Jewish women and men, separately and together. In some instances, women serve as representative examples of the less educated members of the community, leading to comparisons of men’s and women’s observance. At other times, I examine how women’s piety was defined in contrast to men’s practices, generally and from specific angles,91 by asking how gender produced, preserved, and challenged social hierarchies as a means of privileging the deeds of one group over another in discrete contexts.92 Thus, gender serves as a tool for examining broader patterns of piety and offers a fuller view of community members. Although they did not compose our transmitted texts, this more diverse Jewish population is present in the writings that we have, for they are featured in them and their lives shaped these texts even as they were reciprocally guided by them. Prioritizing practice when examining
