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.

Repairing Character Traits and Repairing the Jews

THE talmud torah in Kelm (Kelmė) was a yeshiva regarded by many of its students and admirers as offering a model of education that was unique in the world. Their pride in this model is well illustrated by the story that some told about a conference of German university chancellors at which one admitted that there was an important subject that was not taught in German universities: ‘the repair of human character traits’. In fact, the chancellor noted, the repair of human character traits was taught seriously in only one place in the whole world: at a Jewish school in the small Lithuanian town of Kelm....