Jewish History最新文献

This paper examines R. Judah he-Ḥasid’s approach towards journeys to distant places, including pilgrimage to the land of Israel. Unlike other twelfth-century rabbinic authorities who did not object to travel for various purposes and, in certain cases, even encouraged it, R. Judah he-Ḥasid held a uniform, consistent approach that opposed almost any journey beyond the local area. Some scholars have suggested that R. Judah he-Ḥasid’s opposition to undertaking a pilgrimage to the land of Israel reflects his opposition to messianic activism. However, this study suggests that R. Judah he-Ḥasid’s negative approach towards traveling to Palestine ought to be examined in light of his overall rejection of travel. In his writings, R. Judah he-Ḥasid laid out a new path to achieve redemption and atonement for one’s sins. This path does not depend on physical journeys to holy places or on the national redemption of the Jewish people, but rather aimed at achieving personal redemption, through the adoption of the pietistic way of life as detailed by R. Judah he-Ḥasid in Sefer Ḥasidim: repentance by confessing one’s sins before a sage and performing the prescribed mortification rites. This approach remained unique in Jewish thought, yet one can find parallels in Christian theology of the tension between stability and inner self-improvement, on the one hand, and the advantages of a physical journey to holy sites to achieve atonement for sins.

This article examines the content and structure of the manuscripts of Sefer Ḥasidim, engaging with ideas concerning its production addressed in Ivan Marcus’s recently published book on Sefer Ḥasidim. Marcus has argued that the book was written piece by piece and not as an integral book and further suggested that each and every manuscript of Sefer Ḥasidim should be taken as a distinct edition of the book prepared by Judah he-Ḥasid. The present study demonstrates that, notwithstanding the gradual process in which Sefer Ḥasidim was written and the great variations among the manuscripts, it is possible to reconstruct a textual process that led to the larger compilations found in the three well-known text editions of Sefer Ḥasidim, represented by MS Parma 3280, MS JTS Boesky 45, and the edition printed in Bologna in 1538. The analysis focuses on the distribution of the text in the manuscripts. While it is difficult to show linear relations among them, the different versions demonstrate a gradual process of growth and enlargement of the material around topical structures. Since most of the material is transmitted in more than one exemplar and few passages appear in one manuscript alone, it is argued that the manuscripts can be linked to show how the material grew from random collections of single paragraphs to topically ordered clusters and into the larger compilations of Sefer Ḥasidim.

Sefer Ḥasidim (The Book of the Pious) has long served as a crucial source for medieval Jewish historiography. Yet the dual question of who composed the anonymous text and how its varying recensions came into existence has been a contentious one among scholars of medieval Ashkenaz. In particular, opinions have been split on the issue of the book’s authorship. Ever since the 1538 publication of the editio princeps, Judah he-Ḥasid (“the Pious,” d. 1217) has been credited as the work’s singular “author,” but in the intervening years numerous theories of composite authorship have been proposed as well. The present article reassesses notions of “authorship” in medieval Ashkenaz and does so in dialogue with Ivan Marcus’s recent Sefer Ḥasidim and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (2018), a work that seeks to deconstruct the reductive category of unitary “books” in medieval Ashkenaz, but which simultaneously reifies Judah’s self-conscious “authorial identity.” In contrast, I argue on methodological and conceptual grounds that “authorship” is a problematic category in medieval Ashkenazic culture and suggest that in the case of Sefer Ḥasidim there are textual reasons to doubt that a single individual (Judah he-Ḥasid or anyone else) was solely responsible for “authoring” the text in its entirety.

This study presents a new manuscript witness for the hermeneutics gates that Eleazar of Worms apparently presented as the basis of the esoteric lore he received from his teacher, R. Judah he-Ḥasid. Eleazar of Worms has been widely acknowledged as the recipient of the secrets of German Pietism and the author of the library of texts that would represent the movement. Sefer ha-Ḥokhmah, the Book of Wisdom purports to be the first literary work he composed just after the death of R. Judah. All surviving manuscript copies of Sefer ha-Ḥokhmah were produced in a later period, and studies have shown that later Kabbalistic texts and themes were reworked into what was initially penned by R. Eleazar. Discovery of the gates in an early Ashkenazic manuscript free of any sign of Kabbalistic revision offers new evidence that grounds at least some of the writing and esoteric lore of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz prior to its later use and revision. This study further delves into the R. Eleazar’s self-awareness as the authoritative voice of German Pietism and proposes that scholars consider the role of rhetoric and the narrative function of Eleazar as the sole agent of literary production, whether or not that was indeed the case at the time he wrote this text. The tension between the scholarly suspicion about the historical veracity of the sources and the textual evidence available is thus highlighted for further consideration. The study concludes with a transcription of all the manuscript texts of the hermeneutic gates.