that is not subject to limitation or closure by way of appeal to an original.” The Alexander Romance “is an agglutinative work, remarkably susceptible to additions, subtractions, and transpositions of passages and episodes.”24 The same can be said about Sefer Hasidim and about many of the best-known Hebrew texts produced in medieval Germany and northern France in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.
The overwhelming evidence of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and of many other Ashenazic books does not support the possibility that an author wrote a single composition once and revised it one or more times. Unlike the type of open book that Ta-Shma discusses, Sefer Hasidim is made up of small, independently written passages that the author arranged in different sequences in more than one parallel edition. These editions are all original versions of the same book and are “open” in the sense of being written in parallel editions. There was no single original book and so no single edition is the “real” Sefer Hasidim. All of them are.
Until now, scholars have analyzed Sefer Hasidim according to the standard model of a book by assuming that even though it was written anonymously, the manuscripts and printed versions of Sefer Hasidim were remnants of an author’s single original version (urtext) that was now lost. But the form of the two printed editions of Sefer Hasidim points to it as an open book in the sense of being written in multiple parallel editions. And it turns out that many other Hebrew books that authors wrote in medieval northern France and Germany resemble the book form of Sefer Hasidim in several significant respects.
In Muslim lands, Jews wrote Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic books mainly in continuous, lengthy, multi-page passages divided into chapters or other relatively long parts. Sometimes they wrote one version of a book and revised it. In Ashkenaz, on the other hand, Jewish writers tended to compose Hebrew works as independent paragraph passages, assembled them disjunctively, often without literary continuity, and combined them into large units of text. Often they produced parallel editions of the same book.
In the former type of book, if a passage is omitted, a semantic gap is created that interrupts the flow of the composition, and one realizes that something is wrong. In the latter type, like Sefer Hasidim, and some other Hebrew books produced in medieval Ashkenaz, it is often possible to remove a passage without the reader sensing that something is missing. The passages are disjunctive; they are independent text units, not parts of a continuing exposition.
One scholar recently compared the short, disjunctive style of such Hebrew book composition to Lego, the colored plastic bricks manufactured by the Danish toy company whose CEO recently said about his product that it “acts as if it was glued and yet you can easily take it apart.”25 That is an apt way of looking at the modular or disjunctively constructed Hebrew compositions many medieval Ashkenazic authors produced.
Authorial composition of texts in short, disjunctive paragraphs should also be distinguished from the contribution of activist scribes. Although scribes contributed to the appearance on the page of these disjunctive texts, they did not create them. True, in the transmission of ancient rabbinic texts or of the early mystical heikhalot (Palace) manuscripts, for example, learned scribes in Ashkenaz, unlike rote copyists, did not hesitate to modify or even add their own comments into the text they were copying. This scribal activism implies a collective or collaborative view of authorship.26
Nor are we dealing with editors compiling anthologies or miscellanies by cutting and pasting works that already existed but of a form of authorial composition in discrete, relatively short textual units.27 The authors themselves produced the types of books that Sefer Hasidim resembles and they did so in segmented paragraphs that they combined into parallel editions.
Selective Inward Acculturation and Persistence
Why were these compositions written in Lego-like segments, more openended and fluid compared to the familiar single-authored “book” that we find more in Jewish Muslim culture than in Ashkenaz? Jewish culture in medieval Ashkenaz was an extension and development of ancient rabbinic culture that itself had resisted allowing the influence of Greco-Roman civilization to reshape it into the latter’s literary forms and genres. Sefer Hasidim and many other Ashkenazic Hebrew books are not written in the same form as was ancient rabbinic culture, but they are one of its extensions and developments. Like ancient rabbinic culture, the form of Ashkenazic Hebrew books exhibits selective inward acculturation. Rabbinic authors in Roman Palestine knew Greek in many cases but selectively appropriated only the Greco-Roman lexicon, not the literature, in their cultural world. They also did not write some books in the widespread classical Greco-Roman form of a single-authored work.
Even the ancient rabbis’ introduction of thousands of Greek words and terms into the works they wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic was done selectively: when it came to writing liturgy, they insisted on using a pure Hebrew vocabulary, despite all the Greek they were comfortable using in their studies of Scripture or in legal compilations.28 However, in inscriptions such as those on surviving tombstones, Greek and Latin with a minimal use of Hebrew was common in late antiquity and in early medieval Italy and northern France.
But from the eighth century, things changed, and European Jewish funerary inscriptions were written only in Hebrew.29 The rabbis in northern Europe refused to read, let alone write, Roman letters and instead developed their indigenous traditions in Hebrew, even when they were open to adapting and internalizing Christian cultural forms and themes.30
The Ashkenazic Hebrew book is also part of Jewish cultural persistence and self-definition in medieval Christian Europe, an aspect of Jewish self-fashioning that has not been studied as a defining feature of medieval Jewish culture. It is not enough to note that some aspects of Christian culture were adapted in Jewish circles.31 We also need to ask why others were not. Had Jews been willing to read Christian authors in Latin, we would know it. They would have cited Latin authors or at least alluded to them. And unlike the ancient rabbis, but like their Christian contemporaries, medieval Ashkenazic rabbis would have written Hebrew books that look like Latin books. They did not.
The form of many Ashkenazic books, then, is an important part of the new Jewish cultural studies that emphasize the openness of Jewish writers to their Christian surroundings and their appropriation or adaptation into Jewish culture. In the case of text composition, as opposed to physical book production, Jews developed a world of their own, resisting how Latin or vernacular books were composed, even when they shared codicological features and even paleographical pen strokes in Hebrew influenced by Gothic verticality typical of contemporary Latin book hands. The medium was shared but the “medium of the message,” the way the text itself was composed, remained Jewish.32
It is beyond the scope of this study to explore when Ashkenazic Jews began to write books in the Geonic-Sephardic style of a work divided into chapters that progress from start to finish. Is this change linked to the well-known influence in Central or Eastern European Jewish circles of the Sephardic Hebrew book or of the book written in Latin or vernacular Western languages that Jews now began to read? If so, we need to ask when northern European Jews began to read Roman letters and add works written in those languages to the exclusive Hebrew library and language that had been their reading and writing medium for hundreds of years—but this needs to be worked out.33
For now, there is no comprehensive study of the form of Ashkenazic book composition. By raising these questions in the process of studying Sefer Hasidim in depth, I hope that others will research this important topic and also explore further the cultural filter through which medieval Jews took over some features of Christian Europe or just experienced them in common, whereas they ignored others. These issues suggest how the study of the forms in which Hebrew books were composed can shed light on comparative cultural issues in European Jewish history.
The Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe
What,
