envisioned in Sefer Hasidim did not get implemented as a utopian society, the regimen of fasting, atonement, and related practices it advocated did became widespread as part and parcel of East European “common Judaism”31 or of East European Jewish “piety.”
Despite the influence of hasidei ashkenaz modes of atonement, not everyone agreed with this approach, as we see in the northern French adaptation of Sefer Hasidim traditions. This text appears as the first part of the printed edition, preceding Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah that begins with paragraph SHB 153. It is not found in SHP (or its adaptation in former JTS Boesky 45). This text circulated in three manuscripts as an independent composition. In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 340 (Neubauer 875), dated 1299, it is called “Sefer ha-Hasidut (ShH).” It is also found in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, X.111 sup. and in Moscow, Russian State Library, Günzburg 103.32
Sefer ha-Hasidut also became the first 152 numbered paragraphs of Cambridge Add. 379 and the shorter related manuscript Oxford Add. Fol. 34 (Neubauer 641). Two other manuscripts, Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984), are fragments of either that text or of it combined with a version of SHB I and SHP II. Since one cannot determine if Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984) contained more than ShH or ShH alone, neither can be counted as a manuscript just of ShH.
This particular text is unusual because it is very stable. Unlike the pairs of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim discussed in Chapter 1 that have most parallel paragraphs in the same sequence but have different single paragraphs missing, the several witnesses of Sefer ha-Hasidut tend to agree with each other. Only the Oxford text is defective, apparently because a page or two was lost, and the text is missing for pars. 102 (middle)-117.33 In all of the other full versions, these paragraphs as well as all of the other parallels are found. This difference suggests that the French Sefer Hasidim was composed once and copied, not written more than once, as was the case with many German Pietist and other Ashkenazic Hebrew works. It circulated by itself or was combined with other blocks of text, but either way its 152 paragraphs circulated without much variation and this makes it unusual.
Following Haim Yosef David Azulai and Leopold Zunz, Jacob Reifmann, Solomon Wertheimer, and Jacob Freimann studied Sefer ha-Hasidut and observed that the first part of SHB contains unattributed Maimonidean passages on piety and repentance and lacks the ascetic penances found in the published Sefer Hasidim and in R. Eleazar of Worms’s penitential compositions.34
In addition to the presence of passages from Maimonides, all the le‘azim (vernacular expressions) found in this text are French.35 From Hebrew transliterations of medieval French words and phrases, the Hebrew text seems to come from an area to the west of Paris, between eastern Normandy and the Ile de la Cité.36 In the rest of SHB or SHP the vernacular terms are mostly in German, although a few French words also appear there as they continue to do in German-Jewish compositions in German Ashkenaz.37 For this reason, it is sometimes called the “French Sefer Hasidim.”
Other than the passages from Maimonides and the dominance of French le‘azim in this text, little else sets Sefer ha-Hasidut apart from the printed versions of Sefer Hasidim or from the majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, and its importance should not be exaggerated. For example, references to “the will of the Creator” (rezon ha-borei), one of several formulations of an underlying concept of an enlarged hidden divine will, not “the most distinctive element of Sefer Hasidim,”38 are not frequently found in any of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim. In all of SHB and SHP, for example, it and similar phrases appear or are elaborated but a few times, so it is not significant if the phrase is not found often in Sefer ha-Hasidut either.39 Similarly, although exegesis by use of numerology is very common in R. Eleazar of Worms’s esoteric writings, it is not the case that gematria are “ubiquitous in Sefer Hasidim” in the printed Sefer Hasidim editions or in the manuscripts, and Sefer ha-Hasidut is no different.40
The absence of religious stories (ma‘asim) in Sefer ha-Hasidut,41 also true of many of the shorter manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, correlates with the absence of a program of social criticism in those texts. The majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, like Sefer ha-Hasidut, focus on the individual’s relationship to God and not on society. For that reason, they do not contain stories that illustrate social relationships. There are also hardly any stories in Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah at the beginning of SHP, or in SHB 153–162, and there are none in Eleazar’s Hilekhot Hasidut. Both Samuel and Eleazar obviously are German pietist authors but their pietistic writings do not contain either social criticism or stories, both of which are found in only some of Judah’s writings.
One difference between the longest editions of Sefer Hasidim and Sefer ha-Hasidut suggests a historical context for each that has not been considered. Although SHP, and the closely related former JTS Boesky 45, and SHB do not seem to refer to the rabbinic idea of ancestral merit (zekhut avot), that is, an appeal to biblical and other ancient figures’ merit to mitigate later generations’ deserved punishment, they do refer to the merit of the pietists’ own families going back three or four generations.42 This theme correlates with their awareness of family traditions that they sometimes refer to as “minhag avoteinu,” but Sefer ha-Hasidut does not have any awareness of time.43 Instead, its focus is on the individual pietist’s sins and merits alone as the basis of one’s reward or punishment.
This difference points to a possible historical link between the martyrs and Jews who survived as forced converts in 1096, the anti-Jewish riots in the Rhineland that accompanied the First Crusade, and R. Judah he-hasid’s vision of an ideal society. In Germany, the trauma of the anti-Jewish riots in 1096 was real, and there are other signs that the memory of 1096, including survivor guilt but not contemporary persecution, underlies Sefer Hasidim’s world. When someone rewrote Sefer Hasidim in northern France, a region that did not experience or remember the converts and martyrs of 1096, it is understandable that he would not invoke the ancestral merit of four generations earlier, that is, of the martyrs of 1096. The Jews of northern France also did not need the same penitential system for the same reasons, assuming for the moment that conversion guilt was a factor in generating some of the need for ascetic penances. In point of fact, the penitentials focus much more on sins of pride, anxieties over women, money, and violence carried out between Jews than with apostasy.44 In stark contrast to these social concerns but like Huqqei ha-Torah, Sefer ha-Hasidut floats in social space. That text does not contain the imagined utopian pietist society that one finds everywhere in the longest manuscripts of R. Judah he-hasid’s Sefer Hasidim.
The most significant difference between Sefer ha-Hasidut and some of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and other German pietist writings is the absence of penances and the theory of teshuvat ha-mishqal (suffering proportional to pleasure) and reliance instead on Maimonidean repentance, following Saadia’s approach already quoted in SHP.45 Such repentance requires a change of will, avoidance of sin, and confession of sins, but not public or even private acts of atonement or penances as the three German pietist authors stipulate. The innovation of Sefer ha-Hasidut was not in adding to ascetic penances a different form of atonement based on Maimonides, but in replacing the former by the latter. However, since the ascetic penitentials, even in confessing one’s sins to another Jew, as in Sefer Hasidim, were practiced by some in later Judaism (see below), one could argue that the author of Sefer ha-Hasidut failed to neutralize the influence of hasidei ashkenaz penitential atonement with the Maimonidean substitute. Regarding penitential practice, at least, it is misleading to claim that “SH I [Sefer ha-Hasidut] had a diffusion far greater than that of Sefer Hasidim itself.”46 Unless one insists on arbitrarily defining Sefer Hasidim as being only the long manuscripts that contain Judah’s social critique, there are some
