Rather, all of them ultimately drew on a reservoir of thousands of short passages. R. Judah he-hasid composed Sefer Hasidim in individual paragraph units that he and later others combined and recombined into blocks of different sizes. Some were written down in units of two or more paragraphs from the beginning. In some cases, notebooks of a hundred or more, including “duplicates” that may be his rewritings of single paragraphs, were produced. None was written as a single integrated composition or book. Hasidei ashkenaz quoted Saadia but they did not imitate him when it came to book composition.
From a consideration of the manuscripts and patterns of parallels and unique passages, one should consider all manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and SHB to be different combinations of single-paragraph compositions. Assigning greater weight to any of these editions is a consequence of a tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that thought of Sefer Hasidim as a conventional book. In fact, it is an Ashkenazic open text, in the sense defined here of parallel editions from the beginning, and it needs to be understood as multiple in form, as an inverted pyramid, not as an author’s single original composition that he revised, Israel Ta-Shma’s meaning of “open book.”
It is likely that R. Judah he-hasid was the author of most of these single paragraphs and also of the sequences of fourteen topics that form different editions in Cambridge Add. 379 and Oxford Add. Fol. 34 (Neubauer 641); in SHP and former JTS Boesky 45; and in SHB that itself contains three sets of topically arranged booklets of related paragraphs. Once Judah was gone, students or his son may have selected single paragraphs from the many that Judah had written and assembled them into various combinations of “liqqutim,” without most of the social vision that he had advocated. Regardless of the subjects in any manuscript, all of them are Sefer Hasidim, a series of writings and rewritings of Judah’s short texts. In addition, Judah and his student R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms wrote and rewrote different overlapping compositions, and it is to those forms of open texts that we now turn.
Chapter 2
Rewriting Jewish Pietist Traditions
Once published, S[efer] H[asidim]—without distinction between what Soloveitchik termed S[efer] H[asidim] I and the rest of the book—stood as an independent work of medieval rabbinic scholarship that carried the halo of German Jewish piety with it into the sixteenth century and beyond.
—Edward Fram
Sefer Hasidim was always a work in progress, an open text of a special kind, rather than a single fixed book. Over time, some fourteen different editions came into being, some topical, others made up of unrelated paragraph units; some of over a thousand paragraphs, others but a few passages strung together.
Besides Sefer Hasidim, Judah also produced different but related texts such as his Zava’ah (Commands) and Sefer ha-Kavod (Book on the Divine Glory). R. Eleazar of Worms, for his part, wrote many private penitentials and different but overlapping halakhic works, large compositions about theological matters, different commentaries on the prayer book, and dozens of piyyutim (see below and the bibliography). Because each author’s own compositions overlap, other writers can cite passages that appear in more than one work by referring to different titles. A comparison of the texts attributed to each author indicates not a set of unique, original, and distinct compositions but a fluid range of overlapping and multiple expressions of different though related texts all composed of small text units. After considering how Judah and Eleazar each wrote overlapping or fluid texts, I look at how one French Jewish author rewrote Sefer Hasidim.
Overlapping or Fluid Texts
Textual overlap or fluidity has long been noted about ancient rabbinic works and about heikhalot texts that unknown editors produced. Short sections of related texts circulated, and editors combined them in different works.1 In many Ashkenazic books, an additional kind of fluidity exists: one rabbinic author might write more than one related text in short paragraph units on the same subject. This pattern of composition is different from an author revising a single work. Saadia Gaon recycled some of his earlier writings in later ones, and Maimonides revised parts of his Commentary on the Mishneh, as we know from drafts of early versions found in the Cairo Geniza. That is different from the fluidity we find in R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer Hasidim and his other pietistic writings or in some of R. Eleazar of Worms’s compositions.2
When an author writes multiple parallel versions of a single composition or names them differently or gives the same title to a single work and to a collection of related works, we need to rethink what we mean by a text. We would normally be inclined to try to sort out what appears to us as bibliographical confusion by assigning a unique title and author to each work, but we should not project our ideas of bibliography, derived from familiar single-authored unique compositions, back into medieval Ashkenaz where ideas about an author and a text were often more fluid.
Among examples of textual fluidity in R. Judah he-hasid’s writings is Sefer ha-Kavod, a composition he may have written more than once and that overlaps in some ways with Sefer Hasidim.3 Jacob Freimann showed that manuscripts of Sefer ‘Arugat ha-Bosem, written by R. Judah he-hasid’s student R. Abraham b. ‘Azriel, contain quotations from a Sefer ha-Kavod attributed to R. Judah he-hasid.4 Two Oxford manuscripts that contain a work called Sefer ha-Kavod and a truncated second discussion also about the Divine Glory (kavod) do not contain the passages quoted from “that work” in Sefer ‘Arugat ha-Bosem. The two Oxford manuscripts do, however, contain passages attributed to R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer ha-Kavod that are found in R. Moses Taqu’s Ketav Tamim, a work that polemicized with Judah’s writings.5
Joseph Dan presents as a dilemma having to decide either that one of the two medieval authors is wrong in attributing his quotations to Judah’s Sefer ha-Kavod or that Judah wrote two versions of Sefer ha-Kavod. He considers which possibility is “more reasonable” (sevirah yoter). Although he thinks choosing between the two possibilities is “somewhat arbitrary” (yesh bah middah shel sheriratiyut), he decides in favor of Moses Taqu’s reliability, with the result that the Oxford manuscripts containing the quotations R. Moses Taqu attributes to Sefer ha-Kavod is in fact Sefer ha-Kavod. However, in light of Ashkenazic book culture’s fluidity, Dan’s second hypothesis, that Judah wrote more than one Sefer ha-Kavod, is very probable.6 R. Abraham b. ‘Azriel had one version of Sefer ha-Kavod, possibly lost, and R. Moses Taqu had a different one, that which was found in the Oxford manuscripts.7 There was no author’s single original text of Sefer ha-Kavod any more than there was one of Sefer Hasidim.8
The multiple character of Hebrew book composition in medieval Europe also explains some apparent anomalies in the sources such as a reference to “Sefer Hasidim” in a paragraph in Sefer Hasidim.9 The author did not think of a title as belonging uniquely to only one edition of related passages that he strung together more than once.10
Aside from Sefer Hasidim and Sefer ha-Kavod each consisting of more than one edition, the two works themselves seem to overlap. We see this from quotations of Sefer ha-Kavod found in Sefer Hasidim. Sometimes the author of Sefer Hasidim refers the reader to Sefer ha-Kavod for a longer treatment of something he mentions briefly in Sefer Hasidim. This would mean that a version of Sefer ha-Kavod already existed before that part of Sefer Hasidim was written. But in other passages in Sefer Hasidim, Judah indicates that more will be written in Sefer ha-Kavod. Here it seems that at least parts of Sefer Hasidim are earlier than a version of Sefer ha-Kavod.11
That
