"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe. Ivan G. Marcus
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and other pietist Jews who formed around him a small circle of students and family members, not a movement.
Moreover, these pietists lived in one or more of four German towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Speyer, Regensburg, Worms, and Mainz. This chapter looks into this “tale of four cities” in an attempt to illuminate better the traditions preserved about one or more of the pietist authors: Judah’s father R. Samuel ben Qalonimos the Elder of Speyer; Judah himself, who grew up in Speyer but spent the last two decades of his life in the medieval boom town of Regensburg on the Danube, today in the German State of Bavaria; Judah’s cousin, R. Eleazar of Worms, who studied with his father in Mainz, and with others including R. Judah he-hasid in Speyer and Regensburg, and then moved on to be a leading rabbinical figure in Worms.
In some ways, Speyer displaced Mainz, the earliest of the Rhineland towns, weakened by anti-Jewish riots there in 1096. The pietists flourished first in Speyer, most of whose Jews survived 1096, but it was to Regensburg, another town of Jewish survivors, that Judah emigrated. Worms, like Mainz, also suffered in 1096, but it remained a center of Jewish legal scholarship where Eleazar combined German pietism with Jewish law, as Judah did to some extent in Regensburg.35 An examination of how the Rhineland towns of Mainz, Worms, and especially Speyer are related to Regensburg, the West to the East, offers a way to map changes in the cultural geography of this group of Jewish thinkers.
Chapter 4 places the peculiar form of Ashkenazic Hebrew book writing into another historical context by briefly comparing it to earlier Jewish book production as well as to classical Greco-Roman, medieval Muslim and Christian book writing. In surveying the structures of several major Hebrew works written in medieval Ashkenaz it becomes clear that many of them are similar in their segmented paragraph text units and multiple parallel editions to the way Sefer Hasidim was written. A few are examples of Ta-Shma’s “open book” composition of an early edition that the author himself revised into a later edition of the same book.
The book concludes with two new research tools. The first is an annotated catalog of the manuscripts and printed editions of Sefer Hasidim. From the printing history of Sefer Hasidim, it is clear that it was popular especially where East European Hasidism expanded during the nineteenth century. In contrast to the many editions of Sefer Hasidim that appeared in areas of Hasidic populations, only one modern edition was published in Lithuania (Vilna, 1819, in Yiddish), the base of anti-Hasidic activity. The twenty manuscripts and sixty editions of Sefer Hasidim suggest that the book had a significant impact on Jewish cultural history. The abundant passages from the book found in early modern Hebrew books and the relationship of the stories in Sefer Hasidim to modern Hebrew literature, for example, have barely been explored.36
The multi-tiered Select Bibliography is divided into several sections of primary sources, followed by secondary sources on Sefer Hasidim and German pietism. It is clear that over the last thirty-five years, the study of Sefer Hasidim has become a central subject of scholarly research. It is my hope that this book will offer a new comprehensive treatment from which to move forward.
Chapter 1
Sefer Hasidim as an Open Book
Undistinguished and even awkward in style, often resembling a mass of casual jottings rather than a coherent literary composition, it is yet undoubtedly one of the most important and remarkable products of Jewish literature.
—Gershom Scholem
When Gershom Scholem described Sefer Hasidim as “often resembling a mass of casual jottings rather than a coherent literary composition,” he was onto something.1 Not finding in the book a coherently written argument about a single subject divided into chapters, Scholem saw the segmented way the book is compiled as a defect. But there is another way of reading Sefer Hasidim and many other books written in medieval Ashkenaz, and that is to see them as embodying a unique approach to book composition. Scholars who work on individual rabbinic authors and their texts usually focus on the contents of the work, not on the way the text is structured.
The present chapter discusses Sefer Hasidim as a case study about ideas of composition and authorship also found in several other Hebrew texts from medieval Ashkenazic culture briefly surveyed in Chapter 4. These books are “open” in the sense that they were composed in small text units that the authors themselves sometimes combined into more than one parallel edition. The result is that there never was one original author’s composition (urtext) for many of these books. The surviving manuscripts consist of combinations of parallel and unique short passages that are often arranged in different sequences. Sefer Hasidim is an unusually well documented case of this kind of Hebrew open book written in early Ashkenaz.
Sefer Hasidim as Many Parallel Editions
Sefer Hasidim manuscripts consist of a series of short passages, defined by indentation, and sometimes numbered in some of the longer combinations. Very few of the many manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim have original paragraph numbers. The two longest manuscripts, Parma and former JTS Boesky 45 (see below), as well as most of the others, do not.2 Only a small number of late, short manuscripts refer to individual passages by indicating their paragraph number.3 Although printing in some sense created a book called Sefer Hasidim, as it created a book called the Zohar,4 new manuscripts continued to be written based on earlier ones, and some scribes copied down new selections of short passages from Sefer Hasidim traditions.
Although Leopold Zunz already knew in 1845 about SHP as well as SHB, and Moritz Güdemann took both editions into account in his discussion of Sefer Hasidim in 1880, rabbis and scholars took a while to compare the differently numbered parallel paragraphs found in the two published editions.5 For most of the twentieth century, scholars assumed that the manuscripts other than SHP must be short sections of it or of SHB and therefore of little interest.
A potential departure from this binary way of looking at Sefer Hasidim as SHB and SHP came from an awareness that there was a rewriting of Sefer Hasidim that Zunz already recognized from a manuscript, dated 1299, owned by David Oppenheim, now in Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 340 (Neubauer 875), where the text is called “Sefer ha-Hasidut.” This text became the first 152 paragraphs of SHB (see Chapter 2).6
Despite its existence, the binary model of Sefer Hasidim as SHB and SHP has prevailed since the late nineteenth century. The dominant assumption has been that these two versions somehow represent different configurations of a lost original single composition that the author composed (urtext).
Nevertheless, a model that assumes that one original composition of Sefer Hasidim ever existed is untenable. This is not only because the sequence of the paragraphs in the two printed editions is so completely different but also because most of the twenty or so other manuscripts of different sizes of Sefer Hasidim are not textual witnesses to or fragments of either Sefer Hasidim Bologna or Parma, as we would expect if there had been an original single edition.7
This could have become clearer in 1985, when Rabbi Moshe Hershler published one of the other manuscripts: Vatican 285. Actually, he published the longer of two separate collections of Sefer Hasidim passages in that manuscript. Hershler’s annotations showed that the part of the Vatican manuscript that he published consisted of single paragraphs that he numbered, some topically unrelated to each other and without parallels in either SHB or SHP. Vatican 285 is not closely related to either SHB or SHP but is a separate edition.
The appearance in the 1980s of former JTS Boesky 45, still in private hands, did not lead to new textual studies, since this manuscript resembled the sequence of SHP and reinforced it as Sefer Hasidim. Then in 2006, three other short manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim were published and two others mentioned but not transcribed.