then, is an Ashkenazic “book” in medieval Europe? The present study sets out to raise this question for future research by focusing on the case study of Sefer Hasidim, one of the most enigmatically written exemplars of segmented book writing in medieval German lands and northern France. The chapters that follow present new conclusions about Sefer Hasidim that have implications for understanding some of the other segmented Hebrew books Jews wrote in medieval Europe.
Chapter 1 discusses Sefer Hasidim as an “open text” in the specific sense of a work written in small, disjunctive units, arranged differently in several parallel editions that cannot be reduced to an author’s single original composition. Sefer Hasidim is preserved in over twenty manuscripts. The fourteen manuscript and early print editions of Sefer Hasidim (see Chapter 1) are each made up of unique sequences of short text passages that need to be studied together as Sefer Hasidim. There is no evidence that Sefer Hasidim can be described as a single original authored text, with a defined structure, that the author or others revised one or more times, as Ta-Shma argued about Maimonides’ and a few other Jewish authors’ works and that Yisrael Peles refers to as a work of “multiple editions” (merubeh ‘arikhot), which the author himself composed and reedited more than once.34
Chapter 2 looks at different aspects of rewriting in German Pietist (hasidei ashkenaz) culture in the circle of the principal pietist authors. The composition of Sefer Hasidim traditions is placed in the broader context of the other works that R. Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (d. 1217) and his student R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. ca. 1230) wrote as overlapping or fluid compositions. Their works are a series of rewritings of short paragraph-length texts. A different kind of rewriting resulted in the so-called “French Sefer Hasidim,” the first 152 paragraphs of the first edition, Bologna, 1538. Despite its unique features, that text is but one of several rewritings of Sefer Hasidim traditions.
Biographical and hagiographical sources about the traditional author of Sefer Hasidim, R. Judah he-hasid, are discussed with a close look at genre and historical methodology in Chapter 3. From comments his students and his son, R. Moses Zaltman, made about him and from local Hebrew and Yiddish story cycles, including sources that resemble some of the traditions in Sefer Hasidim that are mainly about anonymous pietists, we can try to sketch out what we know about R. Judah he-hasid and other pietist Jews who formed around him a small circle of students and family members, not a movement.
Moreover, these pietists lived in one or more of four German towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Speyer, Regensburg, Worms, and Mainz. This chapter looks into this “tale of four cities” in an attempt to illuminate better the traditions preserved about one or more of the pietist authors: Judah’s father R. Samuel ben Qalonimos the Elder of Speyer; Judah himself, who grew up in Speyer but spent the last two decades of his life in the medieval boom town of Regensburg on the Danube, today in the German State of Bavaria; Judah’s cousin, R. Eleazar of Worms, who studied with his father in Mainz, and with others including R. Judah he-hasid in Speyer and Regensburg, and then moved on to be a leading rabbinical figure in Worms.
In some ways, Speyer displaced Mainz, the earliest of the Rhineland towns, weakened by anti-Jewish riots there in 1096. The pietists flourished first in Speyer, most of whose Jews survived 1096, but it was to Regensburg, another town of Jewish survivors, that Judah emigrated. Worms, like Mainz, also suffered in 1096, but it remained a center of Jewish legal scholarship where Eleazar combined German pietism with Jewish law, as Judah did to some extent in Regensburg.35 An examination of how the Rhineland towns of Mainz, Worms, and especially Speyer are related to Regensburg, the West to the East, offers a way to map changes in the cultural geography of this group of Jewish thinkers.
Chapter 4 places the peculiar form of Ashkenazic Hebrew book writing into another historical context by briefly comparing it to earlier Jewish book production as well as to classical Greco-Roman, medieval Muslim and Christian book writing. In surveying the structures of several major Hebrew works written in medieval Ashkenaz it becomes clear that many of them are similar in their segmented paragraph text units and multiple parallel editions to the way Sefer Hasidim was written. A few are examples of Ta-Shma’s “open book” composition of an early edition that the author himself revised into a later edition of the same book.
The book concludes with two new research tools. The first is an annotated catalog of the manuscripts and printed editions of Sefer Hasidim. From the printing history of Sefer Hasidim, it is clear that it was popular especially where East European Hasidism expanded during the nineteenth century. In contrast to the many editions of Sefer Hasidim that appeared in areas of Hasidic populations, only one modern edition was published in Lithuania (Vilna, 1819, in Yiddish), the base of anti-Hasidic activity. The twenty manuscripts and sixty editions of Sefer Hasidim suggest that the book had a significant impact on Jewish cultural history. The abundant passages from the book found in early modern Hebrew books and the relationship of the stories in Sefer Hasidim to modern Hebrew literature, for example, have barely been explored.36
The multi-tiered Select Bibliography is divided into several sections of primary sources, followed by secondary sources on Sefer Hasidim and German pietism. It is clear that over the last thirty-five years, the study of Sefer Hasidim has become a central subject of scholarly research. It is my hope that this book will offer a new comprehensive treatment from which to move forward.
Chapter 1
Sefer Hasidim as an Open Book
Undistinguished and even awkward in style, often resembling a mass of casual jottings rather than a coherent literary composition, it is yet undoubtedly one of the most important and remarkable products of Jewish literature.
—Gershom Scholem
When Gershom Scholem described Sefer Hasidim as “often resembling a mass of casual jottings rather than a coherent literary composition,” he was onto something.1 Not finding in the book a coherently written argument about a single subject divided into chapters, Scholem saw the segmented way the book is compiled as a defect. But there is another way of reading Sefer Hasidim and many other books written in medieval Ashkenaz, and that is to see them as embodying a unique approach to book composition. Scholars who work on individual rabbinic authors and their texts usually focus on the contents of the work, not on the way the text is structured.
The present chapter discusses Sefer Hasidim as a case study about ideas of composition and authorship also found in several other Hebrew texts from medieval Ashkenazic culture briefly surveyed in Chapter 4. These books are “open” in the sense that they were composed in small text units that the authors themselves sometimes combined into more than one parallel edition. The result is that there never was one original author’s composition (urtext) for many of these books. The surviving manuscripts consist of combinations of parallel and unique short passages that are often arranged in different sequences. Sefer Hasidim is an unusually well documented case of this kind of Hebrew open book written in early Ashkenaz.
Sefer Hasidim as Many Parallel Editions
Sefer Hasidim manuscripts consist of a series of short passages, defined by indentation, and sometimes numbered in some of the longer combinations. Very
