A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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destabilized in recent years by scholars who have argued for a far more integrated and reciprocal relationship between learned and unlearned strata of society. Eamon Duffy, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Brown, and a host of others have pushed back against the so-called “two tier model,” arguing that medieval “low” cultural production shaped, and was shaped by, “high” intellectual discourse.58 Recognition of this fluidity may well obviate the need for restrictive models of intra-cultural interaction, and recent scholarship has increasingly jettisoned the linear “influence” model, which “is largely predicated upon a view of Jewish culture as foreign to its local environment.”59 As Peter Schäfer has put it, “To regard direct textual evidence as the only conceivable proof for any kind of religious exchange between Christians and Jews” is “as positivistic as it is naïve”: “The Jews certainly did not convene in their synagogues or schools to hatch out ideas that they had heard from their Christian neighbors, which they liked so much that they set out to imitate them consciously and purposefully. This is quite a naïve model of cultural interaction. But Jews and Christians did live in the same world, rather than in two separate worlds rigorously sealed off one from the other. Jews could not avoid seeing and hearing their Christian fellow-countrymen, and even if they did not report to us what they saw and heard, we can assume that they did see and hear a lot of what was happening on both sides.”60 Thus Ivan Marcus has accounted for similarities in religious rituals through a model of “inward acculturation”;61 Sarah Stroumsa has used the symbol of a “whirlpool” to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which ideas circulate within and between cultures;62 and Steven Wasserstrom has unpacked and nuanced the model of interreligious “symbiosis,” subtly distinguishing it from both “influence” and “borrowing.”63 Most recently, Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman has outlined a “specular-relational model,” based on the work of Rina Drory, Robert Bonfil, and others, that situates Jews within their surrounding culture on the structural, holistic level, and argues that aspects of medieval life could be “specifically Jewish” without necessarily being “exclusively Jewish.”64 Scholars of late antique Jewry have also developed a rich scholarship on Jewish-Christian (and Jewish-Roman, and Jewish-Zoroastrian) relations that supersedes the “influence model.”65
Given these more nuanced methods of locating points of contact between Jews and the hegemonic cultures within which they lived, we need not limit ourselves to a search for Jews sitting down to read Christian theological treatises (though I agree with Baer and Vajda that this was not entirely out of the question).66 Indeed, in Sefer Hasidim Judah the Pious himself articulated the seamless way in which Jews were both distinct from and inseparably part of their broader culture: “When [Jews] look around for a place in which to live, they should take stock of the residents of that town—how chaste are the Christians there? Know that if Jews live in that town, their children and grandchildren will also behave just as the Christians do. For in every town … Jews act just like Christians.”67 Judah’s forthright acknowledgment of the unavoidable nature of interreligious entanglement is striking. Aware that Christian townspeople might exercise a bad influence on Jewish inhabitants, he does not instruct his readers to avoid contact with their neighbors, much less to live in isolated segregation. Rather, he advises that they pick righteous Christians to live among, in order to ensure that the ineluctable interactions yield positive spiritual results. Judah’s own nonchalance on the subject makes it all the more surprising that so many scholars have been loath to apply a comparative analytical lens to Judah’s own theology.68
WERE THE GERMAN PIETISTS “JEWISH MYSTICS”?
One final factor that has surely precluded research into Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world centers on the German Pietists specifically—namely, the tendency to view the group as a single link (or a “major trend”) in a self-contained chain of “Jewish mysticism.”69 Medieval Jewish natural philosophers and kabbalists have traditionally been depicted as locked in perpetual battle with one another, and so it should come as no surprise if we tend to assume that “mystics” were opposed to scientists and philosophers, and vice versa. Moreover, while the early Jewish taxonomies of esoteric knowledge singled out for attention both ma’aseh bereishit (“the act of creation [of the natural world]”) and ma’aseh merkavah (“the act of the [divine] chariot”),70 the former tended to be neglected in favor of the latter by those we tend to think of as Jewish “mystics.”71 Indeed, the kabbalistic tradition has come to be associated not with engagement with nature, but with the desire to transcend or spiritualize it. For medieval kabbalists, argues Elliot Wolfson, “nature is not adored as a goddess; it is treated as that which must be conquered and subdued, not in the sense of abusing nature but in the sense of transforming the corporeality of nature and elevating it to the higher, spiritual level.”72 In the view of Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, this lack of interest in nature among medieval kabbalists has been internalized by those who study them in the modern period: “To my knowledge there is no study of the esoteric theology of German Pietism in relation to ecological thinking, because the scholars of German Pietism (all of whom are historians of Jewish mysticism) are not interested in ecology.”73 Yet scholars of medieval and early modern Christian thought have increasingly come to realize that mysticism and esotericism were often inseparable from scientific engagement with the natural world;74 in the Jewish sphere, too, historians have shown that many early modern “scientists” were simultaneously “mystics,” and vice versa.75 Medievalists have begun to incorporate these insights into work on medieval Jewish thought as well, showing the fluidity between such seemingly rigid categories as “magic,” “science,” and “mysticism.”76
The categorization of the Pietists as “mystics” has not merely associated them with disdain for the natural world—it has served to preclude synchronic analysis of German Pietism altogether. Scholars of Jewish mysticism have often treated their subject transhistorically, or “phenomenologically,” comparing mystical texts from widely divergent periods and regions in search of an underlying “universal mystical experience.”77 It is common for contemporary scholars of Kabbalah to read earlier movements in light of later ones, positing the existence of “subterranean currents” that silently transmit doctrines over the course of centuries.78 No wonder, then, that when the Pietists state emphatically that their ideas have descended to them through an unbroken chain of transmission, originating in Babylonia and transmitted via their forebears in Italy,79 many scholars have been content to take them at their word. In fact, much of the recent research on the German Pietists has come either from scholars of merkavah mysticism interested in the medieval “afterlife” of late antique heikhalot texts,80 or from scholars of late thirteenth-century Kabbalah searching for precursors to theological developments that were first articulated decades later.81 To be sure, such diachronic research is intrinsically valuable—but conceiving of the Pietists as solely a segment of a unified, relatively homogeneous whole makes it all the more difficult to engage in the kind of comparative analysis that I am advocating, and hence to recognize that their distinctive approach to the natural world is indeed something new and worthy of attention.
While the phenomenological approach to the study of Jewish mysticism remains extremely influential, challenges to its methodological groundings have emerged in recent years. In fact, a growing cadre of scholars has expressed doubt as to the usefulness of the analytic term “Jewish mysticism” altogether. Joseph Dan (who embraces the term) has long acknowledged that “mysticism” is an anachronistic label, which the Pietists themselves would not have understood: “Hebrew … does not have a word equivalent even partially to the Latin-Christian term ‘mysticism.’ Any identification of a certain Jewish religious phenomenon as ‘mystical’ is a modern scholarly decision, which relies on the modern scholar’s understanding of the term: there is no intrinsic demand in the texts themselves for such a usage.”82 But more recently, scholars like Boaz Huss have gone even further, claiming that the study of “mysticism” is not only anachronistic from the perspective of the Jewish Middle Ages, but is methodologically inappropriate even for modern scholars. Huss has been especially critical of the prevailing phenomenological approach, which he argues “is based on a theological assumption concerning the universality of the