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.
CHAPTER 2
The World Made Flesh
Why all the fuss about the body?
—Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?”
To medieval Jewish theologians, the body was well worth fussing over—specifically, God’s body, and, more specifically, the question of whether He had one. Rationalist thinkers, heirs to a philosophical tradition that privileged form over matter, took pains to distance God from any hint of corporeality, explaining away the Bible’s anthropomorphic language in favor of a wholly abstract and radically transcendent deity.1 Kabbalists, whose literary heritage included the unself-consciously anthropomorphic Shi’ur Komah—a work that painstakingly measures the length of God’s appendages and facial features—constructed a spiritualized divine body out of the ten sefirot, one whose “limbs” and “organs” represented divine hypostases rather than physical realities.2 Scribes and artists, meanwhile, tiptoed around the physical representation of God, arriving at varied solutions to the question of whether the Bible’s prohibition on pictorial depictions of God extended to the drawing of human figures altogether.3 Caroline Bynum, in her now-classic article on medieval understandings of embodiment, could take for granted that the body had intrinsic meaning for Christian theologians, committed as they were to the notion that, at a key moment in salvation history, “the Word was made flesh and lived among us.”4 For medieval Jews, ostensibly removed from the incarnational worldview presupposed by so much of Christian theology, the spiritual status of the body was far from obvious, and subject to almost constant questioning.
When we turn to the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, we find reflections, and refractions, of each of these theological trends. From the philosophical works of the tenth-century theologian Saadia Gaon, Ashkenazic theologians imbibed a strict belief in God’s incorporeality—even as they used floridly anthropomorphic language and imagery in their theological and liturgical writings.5 They showed little awareness of the kabbalists’ sefirotic divine body but enthusiastically cited from Shi’ur Komah,6 and may even have conceived of God as comprising multiple gendered, and hence irreducibly embodied, strata.7 Ashkenazic artists at times relied upon zoomorphic illustration, perhaps to avoid the drawing of embodied human figures, and at other times had no compunctions about depicting God Himself in a straightforwardly physical guise.8 But for all the ambiguity surrounding their views of God’s body, scholars have tended to agree on Ashkenazic Jews’ attitudes toward mundane, physical, human bodies: namely, that they were committed to a dualistic anthropology that privileged the immortal soul at the expense of its disposable physical container. Such denigration of embodiment, it is assumed, explains the Ashkenazic propensity for martyrdom and extreme asceticism; as Joseph Dan has put it, “The sages of Ashkenaz agreed unanimously that … withdrawal from the world, sacrifice of the body on behalf of the soul, giving up one’s life for one’s faith … were the goal of religious life. This sensibility … impressed itself upon the teachings of the German Pietists … ensuring that their theological writings were imbued with a deeply pessimistic air.”9 Put differently, the Pietists, like their Ashkenazic contemporaries more broadly, “[posited] utter self-nullification and assimilation into the divine world.”10 These thinkers ruminated obsessively about the body of God (or lack thereof), but saw little of value in the human body itself.
But the notion that the physical body was dross to be discarded at the earliest opportunity does not accord with the diverse and overwhelmingly positive discussions of human embodiment found in a wide array of Pietistic texts. Nor, for that matter, does it do justice to the varied and complex notions of just what a “body” was for medieval thinkers. Just as “nature” had a range of definitions and uses in medieval thought, so too “the body” functioned simultaneously, and not always consistently, in overlapping physical, political, and theological registers.11 In recent years, practitioners of linguistic, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and disability theories have shown that conceptions and definitions of human bodies are culturally constructed rather than essentially or transhistorically predetermined. Medievalists have profitably harnessed and contributed to these overlapping fields, producing a sophisticated “history of the body” that has demolished the longstanding truism that premodern thinkers privileged the soul at the expense of the body or, indeed, that the two could be sharply distinguished from one another altogether.12 Scholars of rabbinic and medieval Judaism have brought many of these insights to bear on their respective fields of study—but the valences and vicissitudes of the medieval Ashkenazic body has remained by and large unexamined.13
This chapter will survey a range of Pietistic writings that, far from bemoaning human embodiment, positively celebrate the body and its capabilities. A wide reading of Pietistic halakhic, moralistic, liturgical, and theological compositions reveals the human body to be an object of almost obsessive concern. This interest is reflected in passages devoted to the detailed workings of the physical human body—texts that revel in anatomical details, and methodically investigate the workings of the body’s physiological processes. But the Pietists also invoke the human body in more abstract, overtly theological contexts. In particular, they return again and again to the man’s status as an olam katan (world in miniature), a microcosm of the created world as a whole. Given that the Pietists saw the natural order as imbued with spiritual profundity, it should come as no surprise that the body which reflected and encapsulated that order was seen as reflection of God’s goodness, as theologically meaningful—indeed, as the very linchpin of creation.
In their nuanced approach to human embodiment, and particularly in their use of the olam katan motif as an organizing principle, the Pietists echoed discourses that were increasingly in vogue in high medieval learned culture. While their Sephardic coreligionists—“mystics” and “philosophers” alike—were increasingly imbibing a negative conception of human embodiment from currents of regnant, world-rejecting neoplatonic thought, the Pietists’ Christian neighbors—ironically, also under the influence of neoplatonic writings—were simultaneously lauding the human body as an encapsulation of and conduit toward spiritual profundity.
