Introduction

      My purpose is always to write history.

      —Erich Auerbach

      For some time, scholars have been studying the history of the book as a way to understand a culture.¹ This book is a reassessment of the classical Hebrew text known since the thirteenth century as Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), written anonymously but attributed to Rabbi Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (the pietist) of Regensburg (d. 1217).² It presents a case study of the history of the Ashkenazic Hebrew book that offers a new approach to the medieval Jewish subculture in Germany, northern France, and England, known as Ashkenaz.³ In exploring Sefer Hasidim, unexpected areas of research have emerged about the library of Hebrew books Jews produced in medieval Christian Europe. In comparison with other post-classical Jewish books, the form of Hebrew books from medieval Ashkenaz demonstrates the limits of Jewish acculturation.

      In some respects, Sefer Hasidim is unusual compared to other books Jews wrote in medieval Ashkenaz. This book has been called a “strange work”⁴ and “a book that is different from any other in our literature.”⁵ It is “strange” but rather than being “different,” Sefer Hasidim turns out to be similar to other Ashkenazic Hebrew books. In turn, many of the other Hebrew books written in Ashkenaz resemble Sefer Hasidim more than has been realized.

      Although Moritz Güdemann remarked in 1880 that Sefer Hasidim is a book that was little studied, it was widely read.⁶ Two dozen manuscripts contain versions of it, and almost sixty printed editions appeared, most of them in the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe.⁷ After a long period of scholarly neglect, Sefer Hasidim has recently become an important subject of research. In the last thirty-five years alone a flurry of studies have made use of this strange Hebrew book from medieval Germany. In Piety and Society (1981), I included a bibliographical essay on works about Sefer Hasidim from the eighteenth century down to the late 1970s that discussed some thirty of almost sixty publications on this book listed in the bibliography, nearly all of them written in Hebrew. Since then, over a hundred and fifty more articles and a few books have been published, more than half of them written in languages other than Hebrew.⁸

      Unlike most Jewish books written in northern France or Germany in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Sefer Hasidim is not a commentary on another book, nor is it primarily devoted to Jewish law or the liturgy. It contains thousands of interpretations of biblical verses, but it is not a new biblical commentary nor is it an anthology of earlier ones. A book of religious instruction, it contains hundreds of stories that mirror situations in everyday medieval social living unparalleled in Hebrew literature or in most contemporary Christian sources, but it is not an anthology of Hebrew stories.

      Sefer Hasidim as an Inverted Pyramid

      To date, scholars have addressed different religious and social questions and selectively quoted from Sefer Hasidim or anthologized it. They have written about its ascetic ideals and penitential practices; its egalitarian views about society; the production of the medieval codex as a physical object; women in business and family life; and Jewish-Christian relations, among many other topics. In each case, scholars selected passages from some versions of Sefer Hasidim for evidence about the subject that interested them as historians or folklorists or students of halakhah (Jewish law). The working assumption behind these studies is that Sefer Hasidim is an important source about the everyday life of the Jewish world of thirteenth-century Germany. And it is.

      But it is not the contents alone that make Sefer Hasidim important. Although Sefer Hasidim and other medieval Hebrew books have long been studied critically over the last two centuries for their contents—the message—and in the last few decades for their properties as physical objects—the medium—only recently have they also been examined for their literary form—the medium of the message.⁹ By this I refer not to the shapes of the letters (paleography) or to the properties of the material on which a text is written (codicology) or to the design of the page (mise-en-page), but to how units of text were composed and put together.¹⁰

      Few