"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe. Ivan G. Marcus
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is not because these authors had passages from a larger Sefer ha-Roqeah in the author’s original unique composition that did not survive, but because the title was applied to related, overlapping, but different texts that the same author composed from hundreds of short text units that he wrote.25
In the case of R. Eleazar of Worms, the title “roqeah” also denotes the author’s name, “Eleazar,” since he explains in the introduction to his Sefer ha-Roqeah that he called the book “Roqeah” after his name “Eleazar,” a numerical equivalent. Each Hebrew word adds up to 308. By doing this, Eleazar in effect equated his name as author with the title or titles of his books. As a result, several books written by the same author could be called by his name-title, regardless of what other titles they might have.
Eleazar’s speculative writings that include Sefer ha-Shem (Book of the [Divine] Name), on God’s mystical names, or his Peirush ‘al Sefer Yezirah (Commentary on the Book of Creation), have those titles, but they are also part of a larger work that Eleazar called Sodei Razayya (Hidden Mysteries). The title “Sode Razayya,” in turn, can refer to a specific work by that name, but it also can refer to the collection of five related works including Sefer ha-Shem and the Peirush ‘al Sefer Yezirah.
Like R. Judah he-hasid, Eleazar also wrote different versions of a commentary on the standard prayer book that includes many Psalms, and he also wrote a commentary on the Book of Psalms. Passages from each “work” were copied into the other. He also wrote over fifty piyyutim.26
Adapting the Works of Others in Ashkenaz and the French Sefer Hasidim
Continuous adaptation was a characteristic feature of Jewish subcultures in medieval Europe, and a northern French Jewish rewriting of Sefer Hasidim can be viewed as part of a broad process of Jewish cultural migration and adaptation. From time to time, a feature of one subculture was brought to another that absorbed and modified it. For example, Ashkenaz imported Iberian quantitative Hebrew poetic meter, and writers such as R. Jacob b. Meir, known as Rabbeinu Tam (d. 1171), adapted it.27 Later, R. Meir b. Barukh (Maharam) of Rothenberg (d. 1293) used it when he wrote his lament on the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 and combined it with the genre Judah Halevi had used in his “Odes to Zion” (Shirei Ziyyon).28 A prose example is the early modern Iberian story cycle in Solomon Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah) that was transformed into a Yiddish version with an Ashkenazic point of view.29
In addition to Ashkenazic authors adapting Iberian Jewish cultural features, some French Ashkenazic texts show the influence of German Hebrew works. An example of such a text is Huqqei ha-Torah (Rules of the Torah) that describes a Jewish study community or yeshivah-like boarding school. Jewish males are described as studying there during the week and older ones go home to their wives for the Sabbath. The provenance of the text has been proposed in southern France or further north as in the Evreux brothers’ community in Normandy or in Paris.30
Regardless of its social context, some of the ideas found in the text remind us of Sefer Hasidim and some recommended patterns of study found in it. It may be an example of German pietist influence on a French Jewish thinker, even if there was no implementation of its recommended practices, a conclusion that may also be drawn about the utopian and sectarian world of Sefer Hasidim itself. Although the social program envisioned in Sefer Hasidim did not get implemented as a utopian society, the regimen of fasting, atonement, and related practices it advocated did became widespread as part and parcel of East European “common Judaism”31 or of East European Jewish “piety.”
Despite the influence of hasidei ashkenaz modes of atonement, not everyone agreed with this approach, as we see in the northern French adaptation of Sefer Hasidim traditions. This text appears as the first part of the printed edition, preceding Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah that begins with paragraph SHB 153. It is not found in SHP (or its adaptation in former JTS Boesky 45). This text circulated in three manuscripts as an independent composition. In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 340 (Neubauer 875), dated 1299, it is called “Sefer ha-Hasidut (ShH).” It is also found in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, X.111 sup. and in Moscow, Russian State Library, Günzburg 103.32
Sefer ha-Hasidut also became the first 152 numbered paragraphs of Cambridge Add. 379 and the shorter related manuscript Oxford Add. Fol. 34 (Neubauer 641). Two other manuscripts, Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984), are fragments of either that text or of it combined with a version of SHB I and SHP II. Since one cannot determine if Nîmes 26 and Oxford Mich. 155 (Neubauer 1984) contained more than ShH or ShH alone, neither can be counted as a manuscript just of ShH.
This particular text is unusual because it is very stable. Unlike the pairs of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim discussed in Chapter 1 that have most parallel paragraphs in the same sequence but have different single paragraphs missing, the several witnesses of Sefer ha-Hasidut tend to agree with each other. Only the Oxford text is defective, apparently because a page or two was lost, and the text is missing for pars. 102 (middle)-117.33 In all of the other full versions, these paragraphs as well as all of the other parallels are found. This difference suggests that the French Sefer Hasidim was composed once and copied, not written more than once, as was the case with many German Pietist and other Ashkenazic Hebrew works. It circulated by itself or was combined with other blocks of text, but either way its 152 paragraphs circulated without much variation and this makes it unusual.
Following Haim Yosef David Azulai and Leopold Zunz, Jacob Reifmann, Solomon Wertheimer, and Jacob Freimann studied Sefer ha-Hasidut and observed that the first part of SHB contains unattributed Maimonidean passages on piety and repentance and lacks the ascetic penances found in the published Sefer Hasidim and in R. Eleazar of Worms’s penitential compositions.34
In addition to the presence of passages from Maimonides, all the le‘azim (vernacular expressions) found in this text are French.35 From Hebrew transliterations of medieval French words and phrases, the Hebrew text seems to come from an area to the west of Paris, between eastern Normandy and the Ile de la Cité.36 In the rest of SHB or SHP the vernacular terms are mostly in German, although a few French words also appear there as they continue to do in German-Jewish compositions in German Ashkenaz.37 For this reason, it is sometimes called the “French Sefer Hasidim.”
Other than the passages from Maimonides and the dominance of French le‘azim in this text, little else sets Sefer ha-Hasidut apart from the printed versions of Sefer Hasidim or from the majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, and its importance should not be exaggerated. For example, references to “the will of the Creator” (rezon ha-borei), one of several formulations of an underlying concept of an enlarged hidden divine will, not “the most distinctive element of Sefer Hasidim,”38 are not frequently found in any of the manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim. In all of SHB and SHP, for example, it and similar phrases appear or are elaborated but a few times, so it is not significant if the phrase is not found often in Sefer ha-Hasidut either.39 Similarly, although exegesis by use of numerology is very common in R. Eleazar of Worms’s esoteric writings, it is not the case that gematria are “ubiquitous in Sefer Hasidim” in the printed Sefer Hasidim editions or in the manuscripts, and Sefer ha-Hasidut is no different.40
The absence of religious stories (ma‘asim) in Sefer ha-Hasidut,41 also true of many of the shorter manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, correlates with the absence of a program of social criticism in those texts. The majority of manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim, like Sefer ha-Hasidut, focus on the individual’s relationship to God and not on society. For that reason, they do not contain stories that illustrate social relationships. There are also hardly any stories in Samuel’s Sefer ha-Yir’ah at the beginning of SHP, or in SHB 153–162, and there are none in Eleazar’s Hilekhot Hasidut. Both Samuel and Eleazar obviously are German pietist authors but their pietistic writings do not contain either social criticism or stories, both of which are found in