A Remembrance of His Wonders
Introduction
Might it be that Judaism and nature are at odds?
—Steven Schwarzschild, “The Unnatural Jew”
The Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were economically industrious and religiously devoted. They served at the courts of emperors and bishops, where they were prized for their commercial and financial acumen.1 They pored over the Bible, subjecting it to careful and critical literary scrutiny; engaged in intricate and highly abstract talmudic dialectics; and composed stirring and elaborately structured works of poetic verse.2 The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were also obsessed with vampires, werewolves, and zombies. They dabbled in demonology and magical adjurations and used runic incantations to animate quasi-human Golems out of mud and clay. They dreamed of monstrous races, fought with dragons, and rode flying camels.3
This bifurcated perception of Ashkenazic Jewry—as simultaneously learned and benighted, critical and credulous—has generated a paradoxical historical image. Some scholars have extensively mined Ashkenazic Jews’ sophisticated legal and exegetical compositions while dismissing ostensibly superstitious beliefs and practices as mere incursions of contemporary folklore. Others have identified magic and mysticism as the very core of Ashkenazic culture, describing a mystical theology that pervaded Jewish society, and that was prized alongside—and sometimes above—the more mundane realms of religious ritual and law.
But despite their differing emphases, these opposing depictions have converged on the question of medieval Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world. Whether because they were exclusively engaged in rabbinic pursuits, or because of their preference for the mystical and occult, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, it is assumed, had no interest in the rational or empirical exploration of their physical surroundings. Indeed, the Ashkenazic neglect of science and natural philosophy has long served as one of the linchpins of the dominant historical narrative about Jewish life in the European Middle Ages. Unlike the cultured, cosmopolitan Jews of Sepharad, who were deeply integrated into the Islamic and Christian cultures of Iberia and Languedoc, and who adapted regnant scientific and philosophical currents for their own Jewish theological ends, the Jews of northern France and Germany are thought to have been socially and culturally isolated, preoccupied by the otherworldly and supernatural, and ignorant of the intellectual developments in their surrounding culture. This isolation, it is often assumed, was born of persecution, and in turn bred fundamentalism—hence the famed Ashkenazic propensity for harsh asceticism, eagerness to embrace martyrdom, and extreme punctiliousness in observance of Jewish law. While their Christian neighbors were in the midst of the “twelfth-century renaissance,”4 with its attendant “discovery of nature,”5 the Jews of Ashkenaz were hunkered down in a defensive posture—ready to polemicize against contemporary culture but unwilling to adapt to it.
Recent scholarship has done much to refine and revise these overarching paradigms. Historians have effaced the sharp boundaries between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, showing that Ashkenazic Jews were hardly uniformly pious, that Sephardic Jews embraced martyrdom just like their Ashkenazic coreligionists, and that people and texts migrated frequently between northern and southern Europe.6 At the same time, an abundance of research has revealed the profound embeddedness of medieval Ashkenazic Jews within their surrounding Christian context. Far from being isolated and oblivious, the Jews of northern France and Germany lived in close proximity to their Christian neighbors and interacted regularly in both the social and economic spheres; the periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the Middle Ages were the exception, not the rule.7 Recent studies of Jewish family and communal life, devotional practices, and artistic and literary production have convincingly illustrated that Ashkenazic Jews were consistently in dialogue with—and were at times indistinguishable from—their Christian contemporaries.8 Even anti-Jewish violence—seemingly the most ringing manifestation of the “otherness” with which these communities treated one another—could paradoxically serve to anchor the Jewish minority within their majority surroundings,9 and at times served as a conduit through which Jews and Christians learned about one another’s practices and traditions.10
And yet, it is still taken for granted that “mystical” Ashkenazic theology drew exclusively upon an autonomous, internal tradition that developed in isolation from its Christian setting. For reasons I survey below, the presumption remains that Ashkenazic Jews were nearly untouched by the intellectual and institutional culture of “the long twelfth century,” and particularly by the scientific and philosophical advances reshaping the worldviews of Christians and Sephardic Jews alike. Oblivious, if not hostile, to the systematic exploration of the natural world, the Jews of Ashkenaz instead fixated upon the wondrous, miraculous, monstrous, and occult—what scholars of medieval Ashkenaz have generalized under the rubric of “the supernatural.”
The present book seeks to revise this entrenched paradigm, and argues that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz understood the physical world to be deeply imbued with spiritual meaning. A Remembrance of His Wonders uncovers and analyzes a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, and shows that investigation of the workings of nature and the body was a core value and consistent preoccupation of Ashkenazic theologians. While it is true that wonders, magic, and occult forces were central to Ashkenazic thought, these supposedly “supernatural” elements do not signify apathy or antipathy toward the natural world, but rather a determined effort to understand its innermost workings and outermost limits. Phenomena that modern scholars have sometimes labeled “supernatural” or “superstitious” were, during the high Middle Ages, anything but; after all, it was only over the course of the high Middle Ages that sharp distinctions between the natural and supernatural realms were being gradually formulated in the first place. When medieval Jews’ writings are analyzed inductively, rather than squashed by the retrojection of anachronistic terminology, it emerges that Ashkenazic interest in werewolves, adjurations, divination, and so on should be seen as markers of intellectual sophistication, and of integration into a broader European culture that was investing unprecedented energy into investigating the scientific workings and spiritual meaning of its natural surroundings. By integrating scientific, magical, and mystical currents into their exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz consumed and contributed to the naturalistic and scientific discourses of the twelfth-century renaissance.
This book also seeks to shed new light upon the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval northern Europe. Ashkenazic Jews’ attempts to derive spiritual meaning from the natural world and human body paralleled those of their Christian contemporaries—but these similarities were not merely analogous responses to some broader, external Zeitgeist. On the contrary, Jewish texts contain detailed knowledge of medieval Christian ideas and doctrines, knowledge that could only have resulted from direct exposure to, and overt incorporation of, the developing Christian “incarnational” worldview that sought theological and devotional meaning in the material, embodied world. These instances of doctrinal diffusion force us to reconsider
