Composing Arugat ha-Bosem: How Piyyut Commentary Became Associated with Ḥasidei Ashkenaz

Based on Ivan Marcus’s concept of “open book” and considerations on medieval Ashkenazic concepts of authorship, the present article inquires into the circumstances surrounding the production of SeferArugat ha-Bosem, a collection of piyyut commentaries written or compiled by the thirteenth-century scholar Abraham b. Azriel. Unlike all other piyyut commentators, Abraham ben Azriel inscribed his name into his commentary and claims to supersede previous commentaries, asserting authorship and authority. Based on the two different versions preserved in MS Vatican 301 and MS Merzbacher 95 (Frankfurt fol. 16), already in 1939 Ephraim E. Urbach suggested that Abraham b. Azriel might have written more than one edition of his piyyut commentaries. The present reevaluation considers recent scholarship on concepts of authorship and “open genre” as well as new research into piyyut commentary. To facilitate a comparison with Marcus’s definition of “open book,” this article also explores the arrangement and rearrangement of small blocks of texts within a work.

Topics in the Ḥokhmat ha-Nefesh

This chapter focuses on Ibn 'Ezra's Ḥokhmat ha-Nefesh. Conflicting reports are to be found in the Ḥokhmat ha-Nefesh as to the origin of the soul. At times it is described as originating from the holy spirit via a process of inbreathing. On other occasions it is said to have been lit from the flames of the Kavod or of the heavenly throne. Other passages speak vaguely of its having been created from the place of the heavenly spirit. Whether any of these processes, or all of them, are genuine acts of creation or only emanations cannot be determined from the text. A prominent place in the Ḥokhmat ha-Nefesh is occupied by demuyot, mirror-images of man fashioned at the beginning of Creation and which stand in endless array before the Kavod, drawing their sustenance from the absorption of the heavenly light that streams forth from the Kavod, and in turn transferring this vitality to their earthly counterparts. The demut is a counter-shape and plays no role in the religious experience of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz.

Three Themes in Sefer Ḥasidim

This chapter discusses how R. Yehudah he-Ḥasid's sense of right and justice, what he termed din shamayim (heavenly law), had little in common with halakhic norms; it resembled instead the 'natural law' of the Stoics, a sense of justice imprinted in all men's minds that guided them to a common perception of the right and the equitable. The meaning often given to din shamayim, the centrality attributed to it in the German Pietists' thought, and the image of the-Ḥasid as torn (consciously or not) between two competing sources of authority reveal more about the outlook of modern Jewish historiography than about the thinking of those medieval German Jews who so aspired to the epithet 'Ḥasidim'. The chapter then questions whether the celebrated remarks of Sefer Ḥasidim about talmud Torah and talmidei ḥakhamim constituted a theoretical evaluation of these institutions and thus expressed a basic axiological critique, or whether these words arose from a distinct historical context and possessed a specific address. It is the tosafist movement that forms the backdrop to Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. Much of Sefer Ḥasidim, both good and bad, is a product of and a response to the disruptive effects of the new dialectic.

Collected Essays

Continuing the contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, this book's author focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Ḥasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provençal commentator Ravad of Posquières. In both areas the author challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published, and some are entirely new, but in all of them the author challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. The section on Sefer Ḥasidim brings together over half a century of the author's writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad's oeuvre, the author questions the widespread notion that Ravad's chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquières, and R. Zeraḥyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism: Sefer Ḥasidim I and the Influence of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz

This chapter investigates the the differences between Sefer Ḥasidim I (sections 1–152) and Sefer Ḥasidim. No less striking than the absence of retson ha-Borè (the Will of the Creator), asceticism, and other defining themes of the Pietist movement is the parallel absence in SH I of exempla, which abound in the other sections of Sefer Ḥasidim. Over the course of time, different editors appended SH I to various collections of material of Sefer Ḥasidim, always taking care that SH I opened the collection, ensuring that the reader would first encounter not the startling tenets of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz but rather page after page of conventional pietistic discourse on love of God, fear of God, humility, and so on. It is remarkable to what extent SH I and those passages in Sefer Ḥasidim that were in the spirit of SH I shaped the historical image of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. Study of the influence of Sefer Ḥasidim on the subsequent literature of Ashkenaz, whether halakhic or ethical, shows that not only were the new ritual world of retson ha-Borè or the book's radical social teachings wholly without influence, but also that they went literally unnoted.

Pietists and Kibbitzers

This chapter offers a reply to the criticism on the essay presented in the previous chapter. It focuses on Edward Fram's article, 'German Pietism and Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Polish Rabbinic Culture'. Fram's article shows that German Pietism as a radical religious and social movement was no more influential in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had been in medieval western Europe. In retrospect, it appears that it could hardly have been otherwise. The standard Sefer Ḥasidim, first published, as noted by Fram, in Bologna (1538) and quickly republished in Basel (1580) and Kraków (1581), is a compound work, opening with the conventional pietism of the first 152 sections and continuing with the radical one of the German Pietists. For every passage of radical pietism there is a counter-passage of the conventional sort, the result being that no one could infer from the work any coherent religious position. And, as Fram points out, Polish ethicists and thinkers were singularly uninclined to the distinctive doctrines of German Pietism and never reproduced those passages that expressed the idiosyncratic agenda of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. His conclusions simply extend those of the author about the Middle Ages to eastern Europe in the early modern period.

On Dating Sefer Ḥasidim

This chapter examines when Sefer Ḥasidim was written. German Pietism was not a mass but an elite movement, a group of spiritual virtuosi, small in numbers but still enough to constitute a movement. If Sefer Ḥasidim is the labor of writers that stretches on to the mid-fourteenth century, we are talking of a movement that lasted four or five generations, or, at the very least, that reflects ideas that gestated for decades and then developed into a movement of âmes d'élite. If, however, Sefer Ḥasidim is the product of the early thirteenth century, it would then appear to be a movement coeval with the lives of the two famous figures associated with it, for there is no mention of its existence at any later date. If so, the movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz — in contradistinction to some of the ideas it bequeathed to Ashkenazic Jewry — was a short-lived affair, lasting no more than a generation or two.