Hasidim have original paragraph numbers. The two longest manuscripts, Parma and former JTS Boesky 45 (see below), as well as most of the others, do not.2 Only a small number of late, short manuscripts refer to individual passages by indicating their paragraph number.3 Although printing in some sense created a book called Sefer Hasidim, as it created a book called the Zohar,4 new manuscripts continued to be written based on earlier ones, and some scribes copied down new selections of short passages from Sefer Hasidim traditions.
Although Leopold Zunz already knew in 1845 about SHP as well as SHB, and Moritz Güdemann took both editions into account in his discussion of Sefer Hasidim in 1880, rabbis and scholars took a while to compare the differently numbered parallel paragraphs found in the two published editions.5 For most of the twentieth century, scholars assumed that the manuscripts other than SHP must be short sections of it or of SHB and therefore of little interest.
A potential departure from this binary way of looking at Sefer Hasidim as SHB and SHP came from an awareness that there was a rewriting of Sefer Hasidim that Zunz already recognized from a manuscript, dated 1299, owned by David Oppenheim, now in Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 340 (Neubauer 875), where the text is called “Sefer ha-Hasidut.” This text became the first 152 paragraphs of SHB (see Chapter 2).6
Despite its existence, the binary model of Sefer Hasidim as SHB and SHP has prevailed since the late nineteenth century. The dominant assumption has been that these two versions somehow represent different configurations of a lost original single composition that the author composed (urtext).
Nevertheless, a model that assumes that one original composition of Sefer Hasidim ever existed is untenable. This is not only because the sequence of the paragraphs in the two printed editions is so completely different but also because most of the twenty or so other manuscripts of different sizes of Sefer Hasidim are not textual witnesses to or fragments of either Sefer Hasidim Bologna or Parma, as we would expect if there had been an original single edition.7
This could have become clearer in 1985, when Rabbi Moshe Hershler published one of the other manuscripts: Vatican 285. Actually, he published the longer of two separate collections of Sefer Hasidim passages in that manuscript. Hershler’s annotations showed that the part of the Vatican manuscript that he published consisted of single paragraphs that he numbered, some topically unrelated to each other and without parallels in either SHB or SHP. Vatican 285 is not closely related to either SHB or SHP but is a separate edition.
The appearance in the 1980s of former JTS Boesky 45, still in private hands, did not lead to new textual studies, since this manuscript resembled the sequence of SHP and reinforced it as Sefer Hasidim. Then in 2006, three other short manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim were published and two others mentioned but not transcribed. The editor numbered in brackets the unnumbered paragraphs of each text. The three short manuscripts were different in many respects from the two printed editions, and this demonstrated that Sefer ha-Hasidut and Hershler’s Vatican 285 text were not the only manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim traditions that were different in form, as well as substance, from both SHB and SHP.8
The existence of such manuscripts, and several more not yet discussed in the scholarly literature, proves that Sefer Hasidim began not as a single original composition, but as many single paragraphs that the author and others combined differently into several editions of varying lengths. SHB and SHP were but two published versions of several different editions. It was an accident that they and not the others were published first. The more Sefer Hasidim manuscripts were published, the more obvious it became that neither SHB nor SHP could be the “real” Sefer Hasidim in any objective sense because they were outnumbered by several other editions from some twenty manuscripts (see Catalog and below).
The most ambitious set of publications of Sefer Hasidim traditions appeared online in 2007 as the Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database (PUSHD), an invaluable research tool. For the first time, scholars could digitally search and compare sixteen versions of Sefer Hasidim. In 2015 the editor added three more: Moscow 103, Frankfurt am Main 94, and the Zurich Fragment. A few others remain to be added.9 These manuscripts confirmed further that Sefer Hasidim traditions were preserved in many short and some long editions made up of parallel and unique short passages arranged in different sequences and not as a single original composition that corresponded to either SHB or SHP, for example, or to some lost manuscript that the others resembled in structure.
But PUSHD also inadvertently reinforced the binary Bologna-versus-Parma character of Sefer Hasidim traditions in the editor’s analysis of the manuscripts, “The Recensions of Sefer Hasidim.” Despite wanting to transcribe all the manuscripts as equal, parallel editions of Sefer Hasidim, PUSHD divided the manuscripts into two groups. It then classified and described all of the manuscripts as they were supposedly related to either or both of the two printed editions (SHB or SHP). The editors of PUSHD apparently did this because most of the manuscripts have at least some parallel passages that are shared with the familiar Bologna edition or Parma manuscript or with both of them. The editorial decision to input SHB and SHP first because of their size or familiarity was one thing. To compare all the other manuscripts to one or both of them separately results in privileging those two editions as somehow being more Sefer Hasidim than all the other manuscripts, including former JTS Boesky 45, for example. This was an unintended but unfortunate consequence of how the database was structured. In the description section, the editors also refer to SHP and SHB as the “principal” versions of Sefer Hasidim, a misleading claim if truly parallel editions were intended.
Size alone does not make Bologna and Parma the “principal” manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim any more than a specific content justifies referring to SHP as “the comprehensive statement of German Pietism recorded in the Parma manuscript.”10 That formulation would exclude from German Hasidism not only the majority of Sefer Hasidim manuscripts but also the other pietistic works of R. Samuel he-hasid, of R. Judah he-hasid, and those of R. Eleazar of Worms as well.
Most of the Sefer Hasidim manuscripts contain some paragraph passages that are not found in either SHB or SHP, and each edition or small set of editions is independent of SHB and SHP even when one or more blocks of passages appear in more than one of them. The editions differ with respect to the order of the paragraphs as well as the contents. Since neither SHB nor SHP was the author’s original composition or derived from a lost original composition, all of the manuscripts need to be treated independently. This also means that each paragraph of any manuscript needs to be compared to all of its parallels.
With the exception of the Parma manuscript that was published in facsimile, we do not have much-needed published facsimiles of the other manuscripts.11 Without them, scholars must rely on transcriptions that are of varying degrees of accuracy. PUSHD notes that it does not correct letters it transcribes even when it is obvious that they are scribal errors; the other short published texts have several errors of transcription.
Single Paragraphs as the Initial Unit of Composition
A clue to Sefer Hasidim’s origins in short paragraph units is suggested by the fifteenth-century moralistic work from medieval Germany called either Sefer Hasidim Qatan or Sefer ha-Maskil by R. Moses b. Eleazar ha-Kohen. The author admonishes his reader not to use a codex as a place to store “scraps of your written ideas” (pitqei ketavekha ve-‘inyanekha).12 That may be a good way of thinking about the beginnings of Sefer Hasidim and other Ashkenazic Hebrew books. Authors wrote down short paragraphs on scraps of parchment and then copied the paragraph units on pages or gatherings of parchment pages.
The process of rabbinic authors and students keeping notebooks (yalqutim) of passages
