and accessible moral instruction. Esoteric writings, in contrast, expressed the secret doctrines that the group never intended to widely circulate.95 This book treats both the Pietists’ exoteric writings, such as Sefer Hasidim and the sifrut ha-yihud, and esoteric works like Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razya. Indeed, by seeking out thematic “triggers” rather than doctrinal coherence, this book destabilizes the very boundaries between restricted, elite theological discourses and outwardly directed popular teachings. The questions and interpretive strategies that the Pietists utilize in their exploration of the theological meaning of the natural world are quite similar, if not identical, across the genres in which they write. Elisheva Baumgarten has recently called for scholars of medieval Ashkenaz to move beyond the prescriptive, rarified texts composed by rabbinic elites, and to reconstruct descriptively the “everyday observances” of pious laypeople who did not leave behind written records of their pious practices.96 Such renewed attention to medieval Ashkenazic “lay piety” can be complemented by this book’s attempt to interrogate how ostensibly naïve “folk” beliefs functioned within the broader theological discourse, in which the boundaries separating elite theology from, say, popular preaching were far less restrictive than the typical focus on Pietistic “esotericism” might suggest.
The main body of the present book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is structured around an extended case study of the Pietists’ interpretation of Psalms 111:4 (“He has created a remembrance of His wonders”), a verse they return to obsessively throughout their esoteric and exoteric writings. This chapter argues that the Pietists prized, and saw theological meaning in, the workings of the natural world—both the marvelous and the mundane. In both their popularizing and esoteric theological writings, the Pietists explored the empirical workings of the predictable, consistent natural order, while simultaneously ruminating upon the meaning and causes of ostensibly “wondrous” exceptions to natural causation. The Pietists’ attempts to explore the meaning and limits of the natural world were in keeping with the scientific and theological interests of their Christian neighbors—interests they were aware of in part due to the polemical uses for which they were not infrequently marshaled.
Chapter 2 links the Pietists’ general engagement with the natural world to their specific preoccupation with the meaning and workings of human embodiment. It argues that the Pietists understood the human body to be a microcosm of the created order in its entirety, and that their liturgical, embryological, and even physiognomic writings appropriate medieval scientific notions about the human body in the service of their overarching theological agenda. Like their Christian contemporaries, whose incarnational theological commitments increasingly privileged the human body as a site of spiritual meaning, the Pietists understood the body to be key to human identity—a view that helps explain their novel attempts to create Golems, microcosmic human bodies animated via theurgic means. Chapter 3 explores the role of the human soul within this microcosmic worldview, and shows that the Pietists saw the human person as essentially a psychosomatic unity—which led them to conceive of the soul itself as having some fundamentally corporeal qualities. Their simultaneous focus on the embodiedness of the soul and on the spiritualization of the body sheds new light upon Pietistic penitential theology, which has often been understood to reflect a disdain for or flight from the body.
Chapters 4 and 5 explore Pietistic understanding of human physiology, in particular the body’s outer limits and eventual breakdown. Chapter 4 looks at Pietistic discussions of lycanthropy (werewolves) and argues that Jews appropriated contemporary Christian notions of monstrosity in an effort to engage with the theological meaning of corporeal mutability. Some Pietistic authors linked monsters with demons, and this chapter shows that discourses of demonology provided the Pietists with another means of thinking about the limits and possibilities of the physical body. Chapter 5 reconstructs the Pietists’ anxieties over the decomposition and future resurrection of the body by investigating their surprisingly extensive writings on human excrement. “Waste treatment” was a pervasive topic in Sefer Hasidim and many other Pietistic texts, and this chapter shows that lowly excrement was invested with lofty theological significance in eschatological and polemical contexts. The book’s conclusion selectively surveys the reception of medieval Ashkenazic ideas about nature and the body in the later Middle Ages, and suggests some directions for future research.
CHAPTER 1
Wondrous Nature and Natural Wonders
Heir to all the fantastic notions concerning the universe that were current in the ancient world, with equal title to the wild and wonderful tales that swept medieval Europe, it is a source of surprise not that Jewish literature laid claim to these ideas and stories, but rather that it made so little of them. Compared with the intense popular interest that was focused upon the curious and weird phenomena of nature in the Europe they inhabited, the Jews may be said almost to have neglected the subject altogether—allowing for the circumstance that Jewish writings, with their juridical and exegetical orientation, did not fully reflect the state of popular credulity. Nonetheless, the “facts” that may be culled from them make strange reading enough.
—Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition
In his theological treatise Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u-Penimiyot (Pure Utterances Revealed and Hidden), Judah the Pious offers a fascinating argument for the plausibility of God’s existence: “If one places hot ash on hot excrement, it will cause harm to the one who produced [the excrement]. And although we cannot see any connection between the excrement and the person’s body, nonetheless the body will be harmed by the power of the excrement. Thus, there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see…. Just as [this connection] is real, even though it cannot be seen by the eye, so too our Creator, may his Name be blessed, is a real entity, whose power is in everything, even though we have never seen Him.”1 In this passage, to which we return in detail below, Judah justifies a common Jewish doctrine—God’s existence and omnipotence—using a decidedly uncommon interpretive strategy. The ability to apply heat to and hence “weaponize” human excrement somehow lends credence to a seemingly unrelated theological tenet. Indeed, the invocation of excrement and its magical properties is of a piece with a broader tendency in Pietistic writings to engage intensively with a wide array of fantastic creatures, objects, and phenomena. In Pietistic works like Sefer Hasidim, for example, men turn into wolves, demons work mischief with impunity, magical spells are routinely, sometimes dangerously, effective, and wearing the proper amulet can mean the difference between life and death. If one focuses on these passages—and there are many of them—it is easy to understand why generations of scholars have sought to situate the Pietists exclusively within the “superstitious” worldview of medieval Germanic folk culture. Joshua Trachtenberg’s analysis of the “wonders of nature” in medieval Ashkenazic culture is typical in this regard. In the epigraph that begins this chapter, Trachtenberg diagnoses the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz as suffering from a double malady. First, their “juridical and exegetical orientation”—which later scholars would dub “talmudocentrism”2—prevented them from engaging with the workings and meaning of their natural surroundings. Second, to the limited extent that they did appreciate or seek to understand the natural world, they were boxed in by the “fantastical notions” and “wild and wonderful tales” that predominated in their northern European surroundings. The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, in this telling, labored under an ignorance compounded by isolation.
Trachtenberg’s generalization has been accepted, and extended, by an array of subsequent scholars who have contended that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were at
