Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten
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I have tried to straddle the individual and the communal realms by focusing on rituals that were performed by individuals yet were also seen as reflections of corporate religious identity.75
German Pietism
One subject that exemplifies some of the definitions and distinctions that I have outlined and that is worthy of particular attention is the Ashkenazic pietist group from the Rhineland known as Hasidei Ashkenaz, or German Pietists.76 This appellation has been used to describe Samuel b. Judah (twelfth century) and two of his disciples, his son Judah (known as Judah the Pious, d. 1217) and Judah’s student, Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. before 1232), along with their assumed followers.77 These rabbis composed influential works—Sefer Hasidim and Sefer haRokeah among them—in which they present their ideas for conducting pious lives, in constant fear and awe of God.78 Some scholars have described their philosophy and outlook on life as “sect-like” and too radical to be widely influential, others as consonant with the Christian practices of their time, and still others as theoretical rather than practical.79 Many scholars have studied these texts for the mystical worldviews and the theological principles set forth in them. Without distracting from their importance for the history of mysticism, my reading of them concentrates on the evidence of practice reflected in them.80 These guidebooks outline behavior for their contemporaries who wished to raise the level of piety in their lives; therefore, they serve as important sources for this study. One of the questions I ask when examining materials that originate with Hasidei Ashkenaz (whose leaders first lived in Speyer and Worms, then in Regensburg) is to what extent the pious practices that they recommended were already widely known; or, in other words, how innovative were these teachings in their immediate vicinity and in northern France?81 That is, were these zealous versions of the practices that other Jews performed less stringently?
These questions are related to a key issue that has been raised in research on Hasidei Ashkenaz: should they be called “Pietists” as a defined group rather than “pious,” without any specifics to indicate their unique position in medieval Jewish society?82 The claim that Hasidei Ashkenaz should be denoted as “Pietists” has been promoted by Ivan Marcus, Haym Soloveitchik, and others, in studies that have been instrumental for those seeking to delineate the intellectual and doctrinal contours of pietistic thought over and above its social framework. Haym Soloveitchik has studied a number of pietisms, German and otherwise, in an effort to articulate the distinctions between them.83 In contrast to Soloveitchik and Marcus, I am not seeking to distinguish between the pious and the Pietists. Rather, I am investigating the rituals that were performed by Jews who wished to fulfill their religious obligations; thus, I use the term “pietistic” to characterize the attitudes of leaders such as Judah and Samuel, who occupy the far end of the religious spectrum. In some cases, these “pietists” are presented as virtuosi, stellar examples of ardent belief and ascetic practice. However, my main interest lies in how pious practice was promoted, diffused, and explained within the medieval world, not the intellectual biographies or thought processes of the rabbis and individuals whose praxis characterize them as extreme rather than representative.84 Much as the word hasid (pious) conveyed different meanings and inflections in medieval texts, so it is in this study, where it can carry prescriptive and descriptive senses that allow a more nuanced understanding of Jewish society in medieval Ashkenaz.85
Piety and Gender
Gender serves as a critical prism for examining piety in this study, which is motivated by the desire to include community members who are rendered nearly invisible in medieval accounts but who surely composed a considerable segment of the medieval Jewish population. Adult men who were not especially learned represent one such category, since most male members of medieval Jewish communities were neither halakhic authorities nor learned scholars, yet information on them is especially sparse. Another significant group within the community’s fabric were women. Children, too, constituted a meaningful cohort of the community to whom I refer throughout this book.
The piety of medieval Ashkenazic women, like that of the entire community, has most prominently been noted in descriptions of their deaths, by the Crusaders or by their own hands.86 Women’s piety has further been remarked upon in the context of religious rituals, especially those defined as “positive time-bound commandments,” such as precepts related to the holidays and the obligations of tefillin and tzitzit.87 As feminism and gender theory have increasingly influenced Jewish studies in the past two decades, research on medieval Jewish women has flourished. Of special note is the work of Judith Baskin, who was one of the first scholars to address these issues in the Ashkenazi context.88 Avraham Grossman has provided the most comprehensive overview of medieval Jewish women thus far in his comparison of Jewish life in Europe and Islamic lands, which includes the status of Jewish women in their environs. Grossman’s work dedicates one full chapter plus occasional references to aspects of daily religious practice among medieval Jewish women.89 Most recently, Bitha Har-Shefi wrote her dissertation on select halakhic developments pertaining to women in Ashkenaz during the Middle Ages.90 While I concentrate throughout this volume on the comparison between Jewish and Christian piety in northern Europe, I occasionally reference examples from Jewish life in Christian Spain and Muslim lands.
Practicing Piety seeks to move scholarly discourse on medieval Jewish women a step further by studying the pious practices of Jewish women and men, separately and together. In some instances, women serve as representative examples of the less educated members of the community, leading to comparisons of men’s and women’s observance. At other times, I examine how women’s piety was defined in contrast to men’s practices, generally and from specific angles,91 by asking how gender produced, preserved, and challenged social hierarchies as a means of privileging the deeds of one group over another in discrete contexts.92 Thus, gender serves as a tool for examining broader patterns of piety and offers a fuller view of community members. Although they did not compose our transmitted texts, this more diverse Jewish population is present in the writings that we have, for they are featured in them and their lives shaped these texts even as they were reciprocally guided by them. Prioritizing practice when examining the past is hardly new, particularly when studying the religious lives of women. This approach is especially pertinent in medieval Jewish history, given the absence of texts produced by women and the scant writings intended for them as a readership.93
Gender serves not only as a category of differentiation but also as one of comparison in the Jewish-Christian context. Despite the deep divergence in their religious beliefs presented above, Jews and Christians shared a patriarchal outlook that enforced and perpetuated hierarchal gender relationships, where women were considered subservient to men. Although one can point to contrasts between Jewish and Christian societies that were crucial in determining the life paths of their members, such as the centrality of celibacy in Christianity and of marriage among Jews,94 I would argue that these distinctions did not eradicate gendered conventions. As such, gender can reveal divisions and commonalities, while it also exposes power struggles and ideological shifts, since women and their bodies frequently personified cultural borders and barriers.95 From a historiographic perspective, it is noteworthy that while scholars have labored to distinguish Jewish men from their Christian peers, these same researchers have been far less hesitant to categorize Jewish and Christian women as a homogeneous group. My attention to gender gives voice to both perspectives, assessing medieval women by religion and as one cohort.
My research relies on testaments to the involvement of medieval Jewish and Christian women in religious life and their ongoing quest for piety. Indeed, medieval Jewish and Christian authors alike have remarked that women led active religious lives. As Berthold of Regensburg (1220–1272) states: “You women, you go more readily to church than men do, speak your prayers more readily than men do, go to sermons more readily than men do.”96 Some Hebrew sources convey this same message.97 Scholars have argued that a major shift in the perception of women, their roles in society, and the overall conceptualization of gender relations took place during the High Middle Ages, with a general trend toward excluding women’s ritual and religious practice from the thirteenth century onward, after a period when women enjoyed relative freedom.98 Many other