A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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far removed from the apologetic agendas of the nineteenth century have maintained the binary opposition between Ashkenaz and Sepharad. Thus the eminent historian of medieval science Gad Freudenthal prefaced a recent survey of medieval Jewish scientific activity with the categorical assertion that “the Jews of northern France and Ashkenaz remained thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy, and will be left out of consideration.”38 Haym Soloveitchik has gone so far as to argue that opposition to natural philosophy and other extra-rabbinic pursuits constituted the very raison d’être of Ashkenazic culture, and that much of the cultural ethos of Ashkenaz originally developed as an oppositional response to Babylonian Jewry’s embrace of contemporary rationalism.39
Conceptually, the broad, apparently self-evident claim that Ashkenazic Jews were “thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy” rests in part upon the implicit assumption that medieval “science” was monolithic, and identical to the Aristotelian, so-called “Greek wisdom” whose impact upon Sephardic culture was indeed profound. For example, in the proceedings of a 2008 conference on the role of science and philosophy in medieval Ashkenazic culture, article after article proves the case that Sephardic scientific texts and modes of thought had a negligible impact upon medieval Ashkenazic thinkers and ideas.40 Gad Freudenthal, the volume’s editor, rightly cautions that “when asking whether there was interest in science and philosophy in Ashkenaz and Tsarfat, we should not reduce this question to one about the attitude toward science and philosophy in the rationalistic, that is Greco-Arabic tradition. The absence of reception of the rationalist tradition does not imply a lack of interest in nature and its workings.”41 Yet having demonstrated that the kind of science that appealed to Maimonides or Gersonides did not appeal to Ashkenazic thinkers, the contributors to this volume seem uninterested in exploring what kinds of attitudes toward nature did appeal to them.42 Were there perhaps writings on the natural world that reflect a different approach, which sets Ashkenazic culture (or even “Ashkenazic science”) apart from that of Sepharad? In focusing on a single exclusive approach to the natural world, and using it as the sole standard of attitudes toward “science” and “nature,” these scholars demonstrate convincingly what medieval Ashkenazic thinkers were not, but miss an opportunity to explore what they were.43
The notion that the Greek wisdom that appealed to Sephardic thinkers should lay exclusive claim to the label “medieval science” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that it was only relatively recently that historians of science deigned to acknowledge that there was such a thing as “medieval science” altogether.44 It was only with the “revolt of the medievalists” that historians like Charles Homer Haskins and Lynn Thorndike rejected periodizations that sharply distinguished the credulous and casuistic medieval scholastics from their more rational and “modern” descendants. Thus, the history of science has transitioned in recent decades from a field rooted in positivistic, teleological assumptions, concerned exclusively with “discoveries and discoverers,”45 to one that has “[abandoned] altogether the preoccupation with positive discoveries, and [instead] examine[s] the theoretical webs of beliefs of a given society, quite irrespective of whether or not these beliefs happened to give rise to noteworthy discoveries.”46 Rather than narrowly focusing on the precursors of the present-day scientific worldview, scholars are considering the broader question of “the place which science, taken as a set of beliefs and practices, occupies in a given society.”47 Thus, as the historiography of medieval science has grown, scholars have shown that scientific acumen, technological advancement, and sophisticated, critical thinking about the natural world were by no means lacking among medieval thinkers. Recent scholars of ancient and late antique Judaism have similarly emphasized that Jewish engagement with “science” long predated their exposure to rationalist philosophy during the Geonic period.48 The same approach might be applied to thinkers in medieval Ashkenaz, who hardly neglected the natural world, even if they showed little interest in contemporary “rationalist” scientific and philosophical inquiry. The decisive impact of a priori definitions is particularly apparent when it comes to the subjects of scientific exploration: “nature” in general, and “the body” in particular. Just as “whiggish” metanarratives of the history of science have been dismantled in recent years, so too have essentialist, transhistorical conceptions of nature and the body. Each of these constructs, and their roles in medieval Jewish thought in Ashkenaz and beyond, will be examined in detail in the chapters that follow.
“JEWS ACT JUST LIKE CHRISTIANS”
If overly restrictive definitions of “science” and “nature” have prevented scholars from analyzing Ashkenazic engagement with the natural world, so too have overly exacting interpretive requirements stymied attempts to situate Ashkenazic thought in its Christian setting. In spite of the now widespread acknowledgment that medieval Ashkenazic norms and ideals developed in dialogue with medieval Christianity, Jewish theology is believed to have been sacrosanct—particularly the mystical writings of the German Pietists. Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Dan noted that
the dimension in which the investigation of Christian influence upon the writings of the German Pietists is most important is the dimension of speculative theology…. Almost nothing has been done in this area by scholars, and the possibilities and questions are numerous. It is difficult to dispute that many important ideas in the realm of astrology, natural philosophy, the structure of the celestial worlds, and even actual theological doctrines entered the thought of the German Pietists from the Christian environment—whether from the Christian theological literature and the scientific writings associated with it, or whether via oral transmission…. However, since no comprehensive research has been conducted yet, and the Christian sources of this period have not been investigated in careful comparison with the writings of the Pietists, it is currently impossible to draw any definitive conclusions regarding these questions.49
Yet in the interim, little progress has been made.50 For instance, while a plethora of recent scholarship has analyzed Pietistic involvement in the contentious medieval Ashkenazic debates over whether God has a physical body, these debates have rarely been situated in the context of medieval Christian debates over the Incarnation—a comparison that would appear to be heuristically useful at the very least.51 Ephraim E. Urbach’s half-century-old suggestion that the Tosafist enterprise be analyzed in light of the contemporaneous rise of scholasticism, a notion that generated no small amount of controversy at the time, also has yet to be studied in any comprehensive manner.52 The chapters that follow demonstrate that numerous other dimensions of medieval Ashkenazic theology profit from such comparative treatment.
In part, the neglect of comparative attention to Ashkenazic theology is due to the very high evidentiary bar that scholars have needed to clear in order to demonstrate that Christians “influenced” Jews. For instance, after noting a detail of Pietistic theology that seemed to parallel a concept found in John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Elliot Wolfson dismissed such a comparison, deeming it “highly unlikely that the Haside Ashkenaz had direct access to or had the facility to utilize the aforementioned philosophical text.”53 The few scholars who (decades ago) explicitly argued for the cooption of Christian theology by medieval Ashkenazic authors operated under the same methodological assumptions. Yitzhak Baer could confidently point to Christian influences upon German Pietism because he had no doubts that the Pietists read Christian theological works in the original Latin;54 the same belief informed Georges Vajda’s work on Elhanan b. Yakar of London.55 This assumption that linguistic facility and access to written texts is the sine qua non for the transfer of theological ideas is based in part on an implicit comparison between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultural models. Jews in southern Europe spoke and read the dominant elite languages (Arabic, and to a lesser extent Latin), and had unfettered access to influential scientific and philosophical texts in their broader culture.56 Because the same cannot be said for Ashkenazic Jews, who were by and large not conversant in Latin, it is assumed that, at best, they were impacted by the orally transmitted “folk culture” endemic to the unlearned classes of northern European. This ascription of ignorance and provincialism has seemed particularly appropriate with regard to the German Pietists, whose writings are rife with “superstitious” discussions of werewolves