Introduction: "A Splendid Outburst of Spirituality"

Abstract

Introduction:“A Splendid Outburst of Spirituality” Elliott Horowitz "At the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century," wrote Israel Abrahams at the end of the nineteenth, R. Judah he-Hasid "was responsible not only for a splendid outburst of spirituality, but also for a deplorable accretion of . . . superstitions."1 These same superstitions, of which Abrahams (then co-editor of this journal) was willing to name only the belief in amulets, were later paraded far less sheepishly before the English-reading public by Joshua Trachtenberg in his Jewish Magic and Superstition, published in the first year of the Second World War—a time when some Jewish scholars were trying hard to whitewash the weirdness out of medieval Judaism. Yet Trachtenberg was willing to acknowledge that Judah he-Hasid's Sefer Hasidim (hereafter SH), in which a "homely folk quality prevails," contained scores of "weird tales" and was a "veritable mine of folklore and superstition."2 Earlier, in his posthumously published essay "Jewish Saints in Medieval Germany," Solomon Schechter, who like Trachtenberg had also come to the United States from England, drew particular attention to the penitential practices of German Hasidism, "which are of a most severe nature, but at the same time full of the most humane precepts."3 Meanwhile, Yitzhak Baer of the Hebrew University, in his groundbreaking and still controversial article "The Religious-Social Tendency in Sefer Hasidim,"4 [End Page v] followed the lead of the Viennese scholar Moritz Guedemann in examining the teachings of Hasidei Ashkenaz, particularly those concerning penance, against the background of medieval Christian monasticism. Baer's article, which reverberates in some of the contributions to our forum, was cited approvingly by his Hebrew University colleague Gershom Scholem in the latter's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), in which one of the chapters was devoted to "Hasidism in Medieval Germany." Of SH Scholem wrote with characteristic insight: 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. No other work of the period provides us with so deep an insight into the real life of a Jewish community in all its aspects. For once we are able to study religion and theology not detached from reality . . . but in the closest and most intimate connection with everyday life.5 Scholem recognized the extraordinary degree to which SH reflected the everyday lives of medieval German Jews, but he, like Baer, was less aware of the connection between the pietistic direction pursued by Hasidei Ashkenaz and the intellectual revolution created by the Tosafists of Northern France and their German disciples. As Haym Soloveitchik commented caustically in 1976: "That so much of importance could be written about German Pietism without a reference to the Tosafists is a tribute to the brilliance of modern historiography."6 In the past three decades a new generation of scholars has examined the texts and teachings of Hasidei Ashkenaz, some revisiting the argument concerning Christian influences advanced by Baer, some focusing on the theosophic elements discussed by Scholem, some elaborating upon the contextual approach advocated by Soloveitchik, and some asking new kinds of questions relating to gender and "otherness." They have done so largely because this free-wheeling compendium of ethical teachings, religious guidelines, social habits, economic practices, and demonological directives offers extraordinary insight into the hearts and minds, as well as everyday life, of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry. In our forum Judith [End Page vi] Baskin represents both the first and last of the above-mentioned scholarly directions, examining both the "deep ambivalence toward women" that often appears in SH, and the "occasional envy" expressed by the pietists with regard to the monastic options that existed in the contemporary Christian world. Her essay is followed by Talya Fishman's discussion of the book in medieval hasidic culture as both material and sacral object, and how (as well as why) the pietists extended the stringent talmudic regulations applying to sacred books from biblical to post-biblical literature. Ephraim Kanarfogel continues the pioneering efforts of Soloveitchik in linking the world of the Tosafists with that of the...