developments that were first articulated decades later.81 To be sure, such diachronic research is intrinsically valuable—but conceiving of the Pietists as solely a segment of a unified, relatively homogeneous whole makes it all the more difficult to engage in the kind of comparative analysis that I am advocating, and hence to recognize that their distinctive approach to the natural world is indeed something new and worthy of attention.
While the phenomenological approach to the study of Jewish mysticism remains extremely influential, challenges to its methodological groundings have emerged in recent years. In fact, a growing cadre of scholars has expressed doubt as to the usefulness of the analytic term “Jewish mysticism” altogether. Joseph Dan (who embraces the term) has long acknowledged that “mysticism” is an anachronistic label, which the Pietists themselves would not have understood: “Hebrew … does not have a word equivalent even partially to the Latin-Christian term ‘mysticism.’ Any identification of a certain Jewish religious phenomenon as ‘mystical’ is a modern scholarly decision, which relies on the modern scholar’s understanding of the term: there is no intrinsic demand in the texts themselves for such a usage.”82 But more recently, scholars like Boaz Huss have gone even further, claiming that the study of “mysticism” is not only anachronistic from the perspective of the Jewish Middle Ages, but is methodologically inappropriate even for modern scholars. Huss has been especially critical of the prevailing phenomenological approach, which he argues “is based on a theological assumption concerning the universality of the mystical experience”:83 “Not only does research into ‘Jewish mysticism’ artificially link phenomena that are in reality unrelated, it also serves to wrench these phenomena from the actual contexts within which they originated and developed. Most scholars of mysticism agree that so-called “mystical” phenomena existed in specific sociohistorical frameworks; but the claims that these phenomena are expressions of a universal mystical experience, and that they are best analyzed through comparative and phenomenological methods, leads to a disjuncture between these phenomena and their historical contexts, and to a blurring of their social and political characters.”84 Annette Reed has noted the same problem in her study of the connections between Enochic, Apocalyptic, and Heikhalot sources: “It is indeed tempting to believe that we need only to label a text ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ to be exempted from the burden of proof normally required in reconstructions of social, literary, and religious history. Likewise, a surprising number of scholars accept that an appeal to ‘mystical experience’ suffices to support otherwise ungrounded speculations about Jewish movements, beliefs, and practices stretching back to time immemorial, even though scholarship on better attested mystical movements has shown mystical practice to be anything but an ahistorical phenomenon.”85 Most recently, Peter Schäfer has lamented that the phenomenological approach “runs the risk of dehistoricizing the phenomena it is looking at and establishing an ahistorical, ideal, and essentialist construct…. Methodologically it presents a breathtakingly ahistorical hodgepodge of this and that, quotations from many different periods and literatures pressed into scholarly sounding categories.”86 By “re-historicizing” texts and figures whose writings have been studied predominantly from an internalist, diachronic perspective, the present book seeks to put Huss’s, Reed’s, and Schäfer’s methodological appeals into practice.
TRIGGER WARNING: “COHERENCE,” “ECLECTICISM,” OR “COMPLEXITY”?
The argument presented in this book is based on a wide array of medieval Ashkenazic writings, which are read against both the diachronic backdrop of prior Jewish traditions and the synchronic backdrop of contemporaneous northern European culture. By focusing on Pietistic writings in particular, the book draws on a representative sampling of most of the genres that were most widespread in Ashkenazic culture—the German Pietists were extremely prolific, and this book ranges widely across their moralistic tracts, biblical and liturgical commentaries, halakhic (legal) writings and responsa literature, exempla and sermons, travel narratives, magical and visionary texts, and treatises on cosmology and human psychology.
In analyzing such a wide range of texts, however, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that a single underlying theology or coherent set of doctrines united all Pietistic writings, much less all of medieval Ashkenazic spiritual life. One of the recurring difficulties in studying Pietistic writings is what Haym Soloveitchik has called “the congenital inability of the Hasidey Ashkenaz to adhere to any fixed scheme or terminology”;87 or, as Elliot Wolfson has somewhat more diplomatically stated, “consistency is rarely the measure of human creativity, and it is surely not so in the case of Judah the Pious, Eleazar of Worms, and other colleagues or disciples who belonged to their circle.”88 Gershom Scholem’s formulation in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism has remained quite influential; gesturing toward the many, often conflicting texts and traditions upon which the Pietists drew, he suggested the following: “All these elements are intermingled in the richly varied literature of Hasidism, but rather in the form of an amorphous whole than as elements of a system. Its authors … showed themselves unable to develop these elements of thought or to produce anything like a synthesis; possibly they were not even conscious of the manifold inconsistencies among the various traditions, all of which were treated by them with the same reverence.”89 Subsequent scholars have sought to impose order on this textual “amorphousness,” and have sought and found an array of interpretive “keys” that, via comparison, reconstruction, and reconciliation, unlocked the “esoteric doctrines” of the German Pietists. In this view, the Hasidei Ashkenaz did have underlying, esoteric “theological” commitments—they simply need to be carefully rescued from within the sea of extraneous or unrelated surrounding material.90 Thus Joseph Dan has highlighted particularly the philosophical dimensions of Pietistic writings,91 while Elliot Wolfson has argued that the Pietists embraced the eroticized, imaginal theosophy characteristic of the later school of Spanish kabbalists.92
But in a recent impassioned, programmatic essay, Moshe Idel has subjected much of this scholarship to withering criticism, arguing that the search for an underlying, unified Pietistic “theology” has not only been unsuccessful, but methodologically ill conceived. The writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, he argues, are simply rife with inconsistencies, and the efforts to impose order on them reflect the commitments of contemporary scholars rather than those of their historical subjects. The Kalonymides stood at the crossroads of incompatible textual currents—piyyutim and midrashim, magical and theurgical texts, philosophical and rationalist sources—and no amount of analysis or harmonization will reconcile these fundamentally incompatible traditions. And yet, Idel cautions that a lack of coherence is not the same as the kind of incoherent “amorphousness” or “eclecticism” described by Scholem. Rather, he suggests that Pietistic thought is best characterized as “an encounter between different theoretical and religious movements, each possessing a depth of its own. The encounter between them creates complexity (murkavut).”93 Idel never explains precisely what distinguishes “complexity” from “eclecticism,” nor what kinds of generalizations are possible when dealing with authors who did not engage in the kind of systematic writing (not to say thinking) that rewards the search for consistency. In the present book, I attempt to tread a fine line between reductive harmonization on the one hand and a despairing acknowledgment of incoherence on the other. The approach I take is a thematic one, which is predicated on the search for “triggers.” What issues, or concepts, or anxieties provoke the Hasidei Ashkenaz to write (voluminously and sometimes inconsistently) throughout their corpus?94 What specific words or verses or symbols trigger their characteristic outpourings of exegetical and numerological and moralistic reflection? Wide and deep reading in an array of neglected and unknown sources reveals that the theological statuses of the natural world and of the human body are two such triggers, analysis of which allow us to discern an overarching Pietistic worldview, which can in turn be situated within the social and cultural milieu in which it was crafted.
In surveying the varied genres of Pietistic writing, Joseph Dan and Ivan Marcus have noted that they can be roughly divided on the basis of their presumed reading audiences. Texts Dan labeled sifrut ha-yihud (texts on “God’s unity”)
