A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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marginal figures like servants and children: “One must not teach a Christian cleric (Hebrew?) letters, or play pleasant music in his presence, lest the cleric use that tune before his idolatry. And a tune used before idolatry must not be used by a Jew in praise of the Holy One, blessed be He.”205 Given a culture in which contacts between Jews and Christians took place so frequently, and in which Jews could be expected to know details of Christian practice,206 and, in some cases, to have access to Latin books, it should come as no surprise that encounters with Christian “philosophers” would yield knowledge of the kinds of natural magic that the Pietists incorporate into their own writings and texts.
Indeed, contacts of this sort may also account for the Pietists’ invocations of “wondrous” animals for theological ends. We have noted above that the twelfth century saw the rise of bestiaries, illustrated compendia that described the character and properties of numerous real and fantastic animals. These texts survive in many distinct recensions and consisted mainly of late antique animal lore, compiled from texts like the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, and the late antique Physiologus.207 The twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries contained much “scientific” data, and many of their contents were themselves incorporated into high medieval scientific encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, bestiaries were hardly intended to be abstract compilations of objective facts; rather, these texts were explicitly concerned with discerning the underlying spiritual meaning of the animals they described—the properties of various animals symbolized or shed light upon doctrines such as the Incarnation, Christ’s resurrection, and so on. Scientific (albeit wondrous) facts about animals are thus invoked not as ends in themselves, but rather for the light they shed on the theological and spiritual truths that they represent. This hermeneutical methodology is remarkably similar to that expressed by the Pietists. In both instances, the (sometimes fantastic) traits of animals are significant not in themselves, but primarily for the light they cast on ‘wondrous’ theological propositions—whether the powerful presence of an invisible God, or the ability of a divine being to become incarnate in a human womb.208
But the linkages between medieval bestiaries and the Pietists’ discussions of animals run deeper than just this conceptual parallel. As noted above, some of the animal properties known to the Pietists could have been observed empirically; others, like the fire resistance of the salamander, are alluded to in rabbinic writings.209 But many of the facts about animals that the Pietists blithely invoke do not appear in any known works by prior Jewish authors that the Pietists would have encountered. Here again, the bestiaries provide us with a solution to the question of the Pietists’ sources. For example, the notion that weasels are able to resurrect one another through the administration of a certain medicinal herb, which the Pietists invoke as a confirmation of God’s power to resurrect the dead, appears nowhere in prior rabbinic literature, but is widespread in the bestiary texts, where weasels are said to revive their children when they die by administering a herb (usually rue) (Figure 1).210 This “fact” was popularized in narrative texts like Marie de Frace’s Eliduc,211 and was also included in subsequent scientific encyclopaedias, such as the popular De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, composed in early thirteenth-century Magdeburg.212 The notion that lions hunt by trapping their prey in magic circles appears in Bartholomew’s work too,213 as well as in numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries.214 The magic circle appears in these bestiaries’ illustrations as well (Figure 2).
Ashkenazic Jews would have had occasion to learn about bestiaries and their contents via oral transmission. After all, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the information about animals contained in bestiaries and encyclopaedias was hardly confined to written documents. Rather, information about the natural world and its theological implications was frequently fodder for Christian preaching. Works in the developing genre of Ars predicandi suggested that the properties of things in nature be invoked in sermons, leading preachers to marshal data culled from bestiaries, animal fables, and works of natural history for their moralistic and theological implications.215 The thirteenth-century German text Proprietates rerum naturalium adaptate sermonibus de tempore per totius anni circulum, for instance, collected wondrous facts about animals and organized them so that they could be interspersed in sermons at the appropriate point in the liturgical year.216 Indeed, medieval bestiaries were frequently combined together with sermons in medieval manuscripts—a fact that led one recent scholar to suggest that the medieval bestiary might have functioned less as a coherent, independent treatise than as a “summa of sermon material.”217
Figure 1. A weasel resurrecting her cubs using “a certain herb” (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, fol. 96v)
Figure 2. A lion hunts using a magic circle (MS Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 3466, 8º, fol. 6v)
It is quite plausible that medieval Ashkenazic Jews could have encountered such preaching, since one of the most prominent ends for which animal data were marshaled was precisely anti-Jewish polemic. A wide array of “Jewish animals” was thought to anchor anti-Jewish beliefs and stereotypes firmly within the symbolic meaning of the natural order.218 Thus the owl, for instance, was consistently equated with the Jews, since both of them “prefer darkness to light.”219 Other animals, like the hyena, which feasts on corpses with its ferocious fangs, and the bonnacon, which attacks men using its dung as a projectile, were linked to Jews in equally unsubtle ways.220
These animals’ supposed properties, and their anti-Jewish implications, could easily have become known to Ashkenazic Jews in the course of polemical encounters. In his Topographia Hibernica, for example, Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223) homiletically invokes the wondrous natural properties of animals found in bestiary lore for anti-Jewish polemical ends:
Repent, unhappy Jew, recollect, though late, that man was first generated from clay without being procreated by male and female; nor will your veneration for the law allow you to deny that. In the second place, woman was generated of the man, without the intervention of the other sex. The third mode of generation only by male and female, as it is the ordinary one, obstinate as you are, you admit and approve. But the fourth, from which alone came salvation, namely, birth from a woman, without union with a man, you utterly reject with perverse obstinacy, to your own perdition. Blush, O wretched man, blush! At least, recur to nature, which, in confirmation of the faith for our best teaching, continually produces and gives birth to new animals, without union of male and female. The first creature was begotten of clay; this last is engendered of wood.221
Gerald refers here to the wondrous properties of barnacle geese, animals that literally grow on trees. They are invoked in order to highlight the Jews’ blindness and stubbornness. After all, the Jews deny the possibility of Christ having been descended only from a woman, with no biological male input—but they should realize that nature itself attests that this is a tenable possibility, since barnacle geese exist despite having neither father nor mother.222
Significantly, Pietistic sources themselves describe encounters in which Jews and Christians debated the theological meaning of animals’ properties. According to Sefer Hasidim,
A gentile once brought a garment to a group of gentiles and said it was the garment of Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, “If you do not believe me, see what I can do with it.” He cast the garment into the fire, and it did not burn. The monks and priests said to the Jews, “See—there is holiness in this garment!” The sage replied, “Give it to me, and I will see what it contains.” He took some strong vinegar, and washed the garment before their eyes. He said, “Now cast it into the fire and test it.” They cast it into the fire, and it burned immediately. They asked [the sage], “Why did you think to wash