A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz 9780812293975

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Wondrous Nature and Natural Wonders
2. The World Made Flesh
3. Between Body and Soul
4. The Pious Werewolf
5. Between Sewer, Synagogue, and Cemetery
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

A Remembrance of His Wonders

JEW ISH CULT URE AND CON TEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

steven weitzman,

series editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

A Remembrance of His Wonders natur e a nd the super natur al i n m e d i e va l a s h k e n a z

David I. Shyovitz

u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y lva n i a p r e s s

Philadelphia

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Shyovitz, David I., author. Title: A remembrance of His wonders : nature and the supernatural in medieval Ashkenaz / David I. Shyovitz. Other titles: Jewish culture and contexts. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016048007 | ISBN 9780812249118 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Hasidism, Medieval. | Nature— Religious aspects—Judaism—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Human body—Religious aspects—Judaism—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Soul— Judaism—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Judaism—History—Medieval and early modern period, 425–1789. | Ashkenazim— History—To 1500. | Jews—Germany— History—1096–1800. | Judaism—Relations— Christianity—History—To 1500. | Christianity and other religions—Judaism—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC BM316 .S59 2017 | DDC 296.3094/0902—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2016048007

Con t en ts

List of Abbreviations Introduction

ix 1

1. Wondrous Nature and Natural Wonders

21

2. The World Made Flesh

73

3. Between Body and Soul

114

4. The Pious Werewolf

131

5. Between Sewer, Synagogue, and Cemetery

161

Conclusion

205

Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

215 279 325 333

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‫אודה ה’ בכל לבב בסוד ישרים ועדה‬ ‫גדלים מעשי ה’ דרושים לכל חפציהם‬ ‫הוד והדר פעלו וצדקתו עמדת לעד‬ ‫ כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו‬. . . ‫זכר עשה לנפלאתיו‬ I praise the Lord with all my heart in the assembled congregation of the upright. The works of the Lord are great, within reach of all who desire them. His deeds are splendid and glorious; His beneficence is everlasting; He has created a remembrance of His wonders . . . He revealed to His people His powerful works.

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A bbr ev i at ions

BhM

Beit ha-Midrash

BT

Babylonian Talmud

EJ

Encyclopedia Judaica

Hokhmat ha-Nefesh

Sodei Razya, ed. Barzani, 327–442

JQR

Jewish Quarterly Review

M

Mishnah

PAAJR

Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research

Perush Sefer Yetsirah

Sodei Razya, ed. Barzani, 239–325

PL

Patrologia Latina

PT

Palestinian Talmud

SHB

Sefer Hasidim [Bologna], ed. Margaliyot

SHP

Sefer Hasidim [Parma], ed. Wistinetski

Sod ha-Merkavah

Sodei Razya, ed. Barzani, 155–215

Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit

Sodei Razya, ed. Barzani, 1–153

Sefer ha- Shem

Sodei Razya, ed. Eisenbach, vol. 2, 1–219

Sod ha-Yihud

Sodei Razya, ed. Kamelhar, 1–2

ZALN

“Kuntres ‘Zekher Asah le-Nifle’otav’ li-R. Yehudah he-Hasid,” ed. Ta-Shma

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A Remembrance of His Wonders

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Introduction Might it be that Judaism and nature are at odds? — Steven Schwarzschild, “The Unnatural Jew”

The Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were economically industrious and religiously devoted. They served at the courts of emperors and bishops, where they were prized for their commercial and financial acumen.1 They pored over the Bible, subjecting it to careful and critical literary scrutiny; engaged in intricate and highly abstract talmudic dialectics; and composed stirring and elaborately structured works of poetic verse. 2 The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were also obsessed with vampires, werewolves, and zombies. They dabbled in demonology and magical adjurations and used runic incantations to animate quasi-human Golems out of mud and clay. They dreamed of monstrous races, fought with dragons, and rode flying camels.3 This bifurcated perception of Ashkenazic Jewry—as simultaneously learned and benighted, critical and credulous— has generated a paradoxical historical image. Some scholars have extensively mined Ashkenazic Jews’ sophisticated legal and exegetical compositions while dismissing ostensibly superstitious beliefs and practices as mere incursions of contemporary folklore. Others have identified magic and mysticism as the very core of Ashkenazic culture, describing a mystical theology that pervaded Jewish society, and that was prized alongside— and sometimes above— the more mundane realms of religious ritual and law. But despite their differing emphases, these opposing depictions have converged on the question of medieval Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world. Whether because they were exclusively engaged in 1

2

Introduction

rabbinic pursuits, or because of their preference for the mystical and occult, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, it is assumed, had no interest in the rational or empirical exploration of their physical surroundings. Indeed, the Ashkenazic neglect of science and natural philosophy has long served as one of the linchpins of the dominant historical narrative about Jewish life in the European Middle Ages. Unlike the cultured, cosmopolitan Jews of Sepharad, who were deeply integrated into the Islamic and Christian cultures of Iberia and Languedoc, and who adapted regnant scientific and philosophical currents for their own Jewish theological ends, the Jews of northern France and Germany are thought to have been socially and culturally isolated, preoccupied by the otherworldly and supernatural, and ignorant of the intellectual developments in their surrounding culture. This isolation, it is often assumed, was born of persecution, and in turn bred fundamentalism—hence the famed Ashkenazic propensity for harsh asceticism, eagerness to embrace martyrdom, and extreme punctiliousness in observance of Jewish law. While their Christian neighbors were in the midst of the “twelfth-century renaissance,”4 with its attendant “discovery of nature,”5 the Jews of Ashkenaz were hunkered down in a defensive posture— ready to polemicize against contemporary culture but unwilling to adapt to it. Recent scholarship has done much to refine and revise these overarching paradigms. Historians have effaced the sharp boundaries between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, showing that Ashkenazic Jews were hardly uniformly pious, that Sephardic Jews embraced martyrdom just like their Ashkenazic coreligionists, and that people and texts migrated frequently between northern and southern Europe.6 At the same time, an abundance of research has revealed the profound embeddedness of medieval Ashkenazic Jews within their surrounding Christian context. Far from being isolated and oblivious, the Jews of northern France and Germany lived in close proximity to their Christian neighbors and interacted regularly in both the social and economic spheres; the periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the Middle Ages were the exception, not the rule.7 Recent studies of Jewish family and communal life, devotional practices, and artistic and literary production have convincingly illustrated that Ashkenazic Jews were consistently in dialogue with— and were at times indistinguishable from— their Christian contemporaries.8 Even anti-Jewish violence— seemingly the most ringing manifestation of the “otherness” with which these communities treated

Introduction

3

one another— could paradoxically serve to anchor the Jewish minority within their majority surroundings,9 and at times served as a conduit through which Jews and Christians learned about one another’s practices and traditions.10 And yet, it is still taken for granted that “mystical” Ashkenazic theology drew exclusively upon an autonomous, internal tradition that developed in isolation from its Christian setting. For reasons I survey below, the presumption remains that Ashkenazic Jews were nearly untouched by the intellectual and institutional culture of “the long twelfth century,” and particularly by the scientific and philosophical advances reshaping the worldviews of Christians and Sephardic Jews alike. Oblivious, if not hostile, to the systematic exploration of the natural world, the Jews of Ashkenaz instead fixated upon the wondrous, miraculous, monstrous, and occult—what scholars of medieval Ashkenaz have generalized under the rubric of “the supernatural.” The present book seeks to revise this entrenched paradigm, and argues that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz understood the physical world to be deeply imbued with spiritual meaning. A Remembrance of His Wonders uncovers and analyzes a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, and shows that investigation of the workings of nature and the body was a core value and consistent preoccupation of Ashkenazic theologians. While it is true that wonders, magic, and occult forces were central to Ashkenazic thought, these supposedly “supernatural” elements do not signify apathy or antipathy toward the natural world, but rather a determined effort to understand its innermost workings and outermost limits. Phenomena that modern scholars have sometimes labeled “supernatural” or “superstitious” were, during the high Middle Ages, anything but; after all, it was only over the course of the high Middle Ages that sharp distinctions between the natural and supernatural realms were being gradually formulated in the first place. When medieval Jews’ writings are analyzed inductively, rather than squashed by the retrojection of anachronistic terminology, it emerges that Ashkenazic interest in werewolves, adjurations, divination, and so on should be seen as markers of intellectual sophistication, and of integration into a broader European culture that was investing unprecedented energy into investigating the scientific workings and spiritual meaning of its natural surroundings. By integrating scientific, magical, and mystical currents into their exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural, the Jews of

4

Introduction

medieval Ashkenaz consumed and contributed to the naturalistic and scientific discourses of the twelfth- century renaissance. This book also seeks to shed new light upon the dynamics of Jewish- Christian relations in medieval northern Europe. Ashkenazic Jews’ attempts to derive spiritual meaning from the natural world and human body paralleled those of their Christian contemporaries— but these similarities were not merely analogous responses to some broader, external Zeitgeist. On the contrary, Jewish texts contain detailed knowledge of medieval Christian ideas and doctrines, knowledge that could only have resulted from direct exposure to, and overt incorporation of, the developing Christian “incarnational” worldview that sought theological and devotional meaning in the material, embodied world. These instances of doctrinal diffusion force us to reconsider the truism that Ashkenazic Jews engaged in polemics and disputations with Christian interlocutors, but had neither interest in nor facility to pursue contemporary Christian theology.11 Indeed, many direct linkages between Jewish and Christian theological developments can be accounted for precisely in light of polemical encounters. After all, in medieval Europe, explorations of the workings of embodiment and the natural world were inseparable from interreligious polemic. Christian sermons, theological tracts, and works of natural philosophy glided effortlessly between discussions of nature and the body on the one hand, and denunciations of “unnatural” Jews or “Carnal Israel” on the other.12 Jewish authors responded in kind, invoking anatomical data and empirical observations in order to dispute and disparage Christian views. Such polemical battles were not solely expressions of mutual estrangement and hostility (though they were that too); they also served as channels for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Religious disputes, no matter how impassioned or vituperative, paradoxically broke down confessional boundaries rather than reifying them. Supposedly “internal” currents of medieval Jewish thought can thus only be fully understood once they are read in light of the prevailing social and cultural currents on which they drew, and to which they responded.

“Ashkenazi Pietists” or Pious Ashkenazim? A Remembrance of His Wonders draws on a wide array of high medieval Ashkenazic writings, but it focuses in particular on the German

Introduction

5

Pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz), a school of moralists and speculative theologians who flourished in the Rhineland and in Regensburg during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.13 This group is best known for producing Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), a wide-ranging halakhic (legal), moralistic, and narrative compilation that has been widely studied, and that exercised considerable influence on subsequent generations of Jewish authors.14 But the most prominent Pietists, particularly Judah b. Samuel he- Hasid (“the Pious”; d. 1217) and his disciple Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. before 1234), also composed a vast array of other texts: moralistic tracts, biblical and liturgical commentaries, halakhic (legal) writings, exempla and sermons, travel narratives, magical and visionary texts, treatises on cosmology and human psychology, and so on. These texts have often been studied in isolation from one another (when they have been studied at all), but they are in fact united by common underlying themes and concerns that render them an important corpus of analysis. Texts like Sefer Hasidim depict the Hasidei Ashkenaz as an insular and idiosyncratic “sect,” whose members were despised and even persecuted by the broader Ashkenazic community. Generations of scholars accepted this self-image at face value and assumed that their “extreme patterns of behavior”15 and “pungent and acrimonious” rhetoric16 set the Pietists apart from their more moderate coreligionists, who considered them “saintly pests, or worse yet, reprehensible snobs.”17 But it is increasingly apparent that the contents of Pietistic writings represent not the communal fringes, but rather central spiritual and devotional trends in Ashkenazic culture as a whole. Recent studies by Joseph Dan and Ivan Marcus have persuasively argued that there never existed socially or institutionally discrete Pietistic groups— the Pietists’ social marginality and communal distinctiveness was a literary conceit rather than a reflection of lived reality.18 Ephraim Kanarfogel, meanwhile, has shown that elements of supposedly “Pietistic thought” in fact pervaded the writings of contemporary Ashkenazic authors; even the Tosafists— traditionally conceived of as bitter rivals of the Hasidei Ashkenaz— knew of and often embraced the asceticism, mysticism, and magic typically associated with the German Pietists.19 Thus, although circumscribed Pietistic communities were never present within Jewish society, characteristically Pietistic ideas were omnipresent. 20 Such widespread influence might account for the traces of Pietistic doctrines that scholars have located within an array of Ashkenazic literary and artistic texts, 21 and

6

Introduction

helps explain why Pietistic figures like Judah and his father, Samuel b. Judah he- Hasid, subsequently emerged as archetypal folk heroes in Ashkenazic legends and exempla. 22 And indeed, ideas associated with the German Pietists took root far beyond the towns of Speyer, Worms, and Regensburg. Prominent disciples and devotees of Judah and Eleazar included Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Abraham b. Azriel of Bohemia, Moses of Coucy, Jonah Gerondi, and many others, and Pietistic ideas may have taken root as far east as Russia. 23 By the mid- to late thirteenth century, the fame of Judah the Pious and Eleazar of Worms extended into southern France and across the Pyrenees into Castile. 24 As such, religious thinkers like Judah and Eleazar were not spokesmen for a discrete, sectarian “Ashkenazi Pietism”—rather, they were a subset of pious Ashkenazim, influential authors and religious leaders whose thought is representative of a mainstream spiritual orientation within the Jewish culture of Germany and northern France. 25 But even though the “sectarian” view of German Pietism as an insular social movement has been rendered untenable, this does not mean that the group had no distinctive identity whatsoever. Indeed, the term Hasidei Ashkenaz was in use as early as the thirteenth century to refer to authors whose writings were, while not outside the mainstream, nonetheless marked by distinctive, identifiable contents and methodologies. 26 As such, I use the term “Pietists” and Hasidei Ashkenaz throughout the book as a shorthand way of referring to the school of Judah, Eleazar, and the anonymous disciples who composed many of their otherwise unattributed works. It is important to note that determining the precise authorship and dating of those works has at times proven problematic. Over the past several decades, scholars have come to recognize that so- called “Pietistic texts” were in fact composed by various figures, known and unknown, whose chronological and geographic proximity to one another is very difficult to definitively reconstruct. Today, scholars distinguish between the “Kalonymide Circle” of Judah and Eleazar27 (both of whom were scions of the distinguished Kalonymus family), 28 the “Unique Cherub Circle,” the “Circle of Sefer ha- Hayyim,” the “Circle of R. Nehemiah b. Solomon,” and so on. 29 Much energy has been channeled into the textual and philological spadework necessary to distinguish between the writings of each of these groups, an effort that is still in its preliminary phases.30 This study focuses primarily on the texts that can be confidently attributed to the Kalonymide circle, whose

Introduction

7

members’ biographies and major texts have been more thoroughly vetted. Works from other circles, however, are frequently invoked for supplementary or comparative purposes.

How Much Greek in Jewish Germany? Ashkenazic Jewry’s reputation for superstition and obscurantism developed early and has proven difficult to shed. During the period of intra- communal controversy over the study of “Greek wisdom” in the 1230s, certain northern French rabbis banned the study of Maimonides’ philosophical writings and inveighed against the application of rationalist philosophy to Jewish tradition on both theological and hermeneutical grounds.31 To some observers, this antipathy toward rationalism signaled a deficiency in Ashkenazic culture as a whole. Later in the thirteenth century, for example, Isaac of Acre derided “the rabbis of France and of Germany, and those who are like them . . . [who refuse to examine] a rational argument or to accept it. Rather, they call one to whom God has given the ability to understand rational principles . . . a heretic and non-believer . . . because they do not have the spirit needed to understand a rational principle.”32 Late medieval and early modern Ashkenazic Jews had a more ambivalent perspective on rationalist philosophy, 33 but by the nineteenth century, German Jewish historians associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement embraced the caricatured depiction of their premodern forebears, and operationalized it for political and apologetic ends. Like many of their maskilic predecessors, wissenschaftlich scholars traced their own intellectual pedigrees and curricular interests back to medieval Sepharad, which they imagined to have been religiously enlightened, culturally open, and aesthetically sophisticated. The Jews of Sepharad served these scholars as models for the positive contribution Jews had made to European culture— and might still make, if only they were emancipated and allowed to integrate into the European social and intellectual spheres. The Prussian historian Salomon Munk, for example, argued that European culture would never have achieved its potential absent the decisive impact of medieval Sephardic Jews, who “unquestionably shared with Arabs the distinction of having preserved and disseminated the science of philosophy during the centuries of barbarism, and thereby having exercised on Europe for a long time a civilizing influence.”34 Munk’s contemporary, the Lutheran Hebraist Franz Delitzsch, similarly

8

Introduction

contrasted the “golden age” of Spanish Jewish culture with a stereotyped portrait of Ashkenazic backwardness: “Without civic freedom, without secure domicile, facing an ignorant, fanatic papal and monastic world, excluded from all public, useful activities and forced into the most menial and mindless occupations, Jews of the German Empire vegetated within the four ells of the halakhah or the talmudic study halls, and took refuge in the secret and mystical recesses of the Kabbalah. . . . Thus the Jewish literature of the time, in comparison with that across the Pyrenees . . . bears the character of dark seclusion, of sorrowful and esoteric impenetrability.”35 This so- called “myth of Sephardic supremacy” exercised a decisive impact upon modern Jewish scholarship, and singled out engagement with science and philosophy as key markers distinguishing medieval Ashkenazic from medieval Sephardic cultural models. 36 The British historian Israel Abrahams highlighted the modernizing agenda of this scholarship in his 1896 description of the German Pietists: “R. Judah Chassid, who at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, was responsible . . . for a deplorable accretion of superstitions, was in the latter direction entirely opposed to the spirit of contemporary Judaism.”37 More than a century later, historians far removed from the apologetic agendas of the nineteenth century have maintained the binary opposition between Ashkenaz and Sepharad. Thus the eminent historian of medieval science Gad Freudenthal prefaced a recent survey of medieval Jewish scientific activity with the categorical assertion that “the Jews of northern France and Ashkenaz remained thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy, and will be left out of consideration.”38 Haym Soloveitchik has gone so far as to argue that opposition to natural philosophy and other extra-rabbinic pursuits constituted the very raison d’être of Ashkenazic culture, and that much of the cultural ethos of Ashkenaz originally developed as an oppositional response to Babylonian Jewry’s embrace of contemporary rationalism.39 Conceptually, the broad, apparently self- evident claim that Ashkenazic Jews were “thoroughly opposed to science and philosophy” rests in part upon the implicit assumption that medieval “science” was monolithic, and identical to the Aristotelian, so- called “Greek wisdom” whose impact upon Sephardic culture was indeed profound. For example, in the proceedings of a 2008 conference on the role of science and philosophy in medieval Ashkenazic culture, article after article proves the case that Sephardic scientific texts and modes of

Introduction

9

thought had a negligible impact upon medieval Ashkenazic thinkers and ideas.40 Gad Freudenthal, the volume’s editor, rightly cautions that “when asking whether there was interest in science and philosophy in Ashkenaz and Tsarfat, we should not reduce this question to one about the attitude toward science and philosophy in the rationalistic, that is Greco-Arabic tradition. The absence of reception of the rationalist tradition does not imply a lack of interest in nature and its workings.”41 Yet having demonstrated that the kind of science that appealed to Maimonides or Gersonides did not appeal to Ashkenazic thinkers, the contributors to this volume seem uninterested in exploring what kinds of attitudes toward nature did appeal to them.42 Were there perhaps writings on the natural world that reflect a different approach, which sets Ashkenazic culture (or even “Ashkenazic science”) apart from that of Sepharad? In focusing on a single exclusive approach to the natural world, and using it as the sole standard of attitudes toward “science” and “nature,” these scholars demonstrate convincingly what medieval Ashkenazic thinkers were not, but miss an opportunity to explore what they were.43 The notion that the Greek wisdom that appealed to Sephardic thinkers should lay exclusive claim to the label “medieval science” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that it was only relatively recently that historians of science deigned to acknowledge that there was such a thing as “medieval science” altogether.44 It was only with the “revolt of the medievalists” that historians like Charles Homer Haskins and Lynn Thorndike rejected periodizations that sharply distinguished the credulous and casuistic medieval scholastics from their more rational and “modern” descendants. Thus, the history of science has transitioned in recent decades from a field rooted in positivistic, teleological assumptions, concerned exclusively with “discoveries and discoverers,”45 to one that has “[abandoned] altogether the preoccupation with positive discoveries, and [instead] examine[s] the theoretical webs of beliefs of a given society, quite irrespective of whether or not these beliefs happened to give rise to noteworthy discoveries.”46 Rather than narrowly focusing on the precursors of the present-day scientific worldview, scholars are considering the broader question of “the place which science, taken as a set of beliefs and practices, occupies in a given society.”47 Thus, as the historiography of medieval science has grown, scholars have shown that scientific acumen, technological advancement, and sophisticated, critical thinking about the natural world were by no means lacking among medieval thinkers. Recent scholars of ancient and late antique

Introduction

10

Judaism have similarly emphasized that Jewish engagement with “science” long predated their exposure to rationalist philosophy during the Geonic period.48 The same approach might be applied to thinkers in medieval Ashkenaz, who hardly neglected the natural world, even if they showed little interest in contemporary “rationalist” scientific and philosophical inquiry. The decisive impact of a priori definitions is particularly apparent when it comes to the subjects of scientific exploration: “nature” in general, and “the body” in particular. Just as “whiggish” metanarratives of the history of science have been dismantled in recent years, so too have essentialist, transhistorical conceptions of nature and the body. Each of these constructs, and their roles in medieval Jewish thought in Ashkenaz and beyond, will be examined in detail in the chapters that follow.

“Jews Act Just Like Christians” If overly restrictive definitions of “science” and “nature” have prevented scholars from analyzing Ashkenazic engagement with the natural world, so too have overly exacting interpretive requirements stymied attempts to situate Ashkenazic thought in its Christian setting. In spite of the now widespread acknowledgment that medieval Ashkenazic norms and ideals developed in dialogue with medieval Christianity, Jewish theology is believed to have been sacrosanct— particularly the mystical writings of the German Pietists. Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Dan noted that the dimension in which the investigation of Christian influence upon the writings of the German Pietists is most important is the dimension of speculative theology. . . . Almost nothing has been done in this area by scholars, and the possibilities and questions are numerous. It is difficult to dispute that many important ideas in the realm of astrology, natural philosophy, the structure of the celestial worlds, and even actual theological doctrines entered the thought of the German Pietists from the Christian environment—whether from the Christian theological literature and the scientific writings associated with it, or whether via oral transmission. . . . However, since no comprehensive research has been conducted yet, and the Christian sources of this period have not been investigated in careful comparison with the writings of the Pietists, it is currently impossible to draw any definitive conclusions regarding these questions.49

Yet in the interim, little progress has been made. 50 For instance, while a plethora of recent scholarship has analyzed Pietistic involvement in

Introduction

11

the contentious medieval Ashkenazic debates over whether God has a physical body, these debates have rarely been situated in the context of medieval Christian debates over the Incarnation— a comparison that would appear to be heuristically useful at the very least. 51 Ephraim E. Urbach’s half- century-old suggestion that the Tosafist enterprise be analyzed in light of the contemporaneous rise of scholasticism, a notion that generated no small amount of controversy at the time, also has yet to be studied in any comprehensive manner. 52 The chapters that follow demonstrate that numerous other dimensions of medieval Ashkenazic theology profit from such comparative treatment. In part, the neglect of comparative attention to Ashkenazic theology is due to the very high evidentiary bar that scholars have needed to clear in order to demonstrate that Christians “influenced” Jews. For instance, after noting a detail of Pietistic theology that seemed to parallel a concept found in John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Elliot Wolfson dismissed such a comparison, deeming it “highly unlikely that the Haside Ashkenaz had direct access to or had the facility to utilize the aforementioned philosophical text.”53 The few scholars who (decades ago) explicitly argued for the cooption of Christian theology by medieval Ashkenazic authors operated under the same methodological assumptions. Yitzhak Baer could confidently point to Christian influences upon German Pietism because he had no doubts that the Pietists read Christian theological works in the original Latin;54 the same belief informed Georges Vajda’s work on Elhanan b. Yakar of London. 55 This assumption that linguistic facility and access to written texts is the sine qua non for the transfer of theological ideas is based in part on an implicit comparison between Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultural models. Jews in southern Europe spoke and read the dominant elite languages (Arabic, and to a lesser extent Latin), and had unfettered access to influential scientific and philosophical texts in their broader culture. 56 Because the same cannot be said for Ashkenazic Jews, who were by and large not conversant in Latin, it is assumed that, at best, they were impacted by the orally transmitted “folk culture” endemic to the unlearned classes of northern European. This ascription of ignorance and provincialism has seemed particularly appropriate with regard to the German Pietists, whose writings are rife with “superstitious” discussions of werewolves and vampires, incantation and conjurations, demons and occult forces. 57

12

Introduction

But this binary distinction between “folk” and “elite” cultures has been destabilized in recent years by scholars who have argued for a far more integrated and reciprocal relationship between learned and unlearned strata of society. Eamon Duffy, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Brown, and a host of others have pushed back against the so- called “two tier model,” arguing that medieval “low” cultural production shaped, and was shaped by, “high” intellectual discourse.58 Recognition of this fluidity may well obviate the need for restrictive models of intra- cultural interaction, and recent scholarship has increasingly jettisoned the linear “influence” model, which “is largely predicated upon a view of Jewish culture as foreign to its local environment.”59 As Peter Schäfer has put it, “To regard direct textual evidence as the only conceivable proof for any kind of religious exchange between Christians and Jews” is “as positivistic as it is naïve”: “The Jews certainly did not convene in their synagogues or schools to hatch out ideas that they had heard from their Christian neighbors, which they liked so much that they set out to imitate them consciously and purposefully. This is quite a naïve model of cultural interaction. But Jews and Christians did live in the same world, rather than in two separate worlds rigorously sealed off one from the other. Jews could not avoid seeing and hearing their Christian fellow- countrymen, and even if they did not report to us what they saw and heard, we can assume that they did see and hear a lot of what was happening on both sides.”60 Thus Ivan Marcus has accounted for similarities in religious rituals through a model of “inward acculturation”;61 Sarah Stroumsa has used the symbol of a “whirlpool” to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which ideas circulate within and between cultures;62 and Steven Wasserstrom has unpacked and nuanced the model of interreligious “symbiosis,” subtly distinguishing it from both “influence” and “borrowing.”63 Most recently, Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman has outlined a “specular-relational model,” based on the work of Rina Drory, Robert Bonfil, and others, that situates Jews within their surrounding culture on the structural, holistic level, and argues that aspects of medieval life could be “specifically Jewish” without necessarily being “exclusively Jewish.”64 Scholars of late antique Jewry have also developed a rich scholarship on Jewish- Christian (and Jewish-Roman, and Jewish-Zoroastrian) relations that supersedes the “influence model.”65 Given these more nuanced methods of locating points of contact between Jews and the hegemonic cultures within which they lived, we need not limit ourselves to a search for Jews sitting down to read

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13

Christian theological treatises (though I agree with Baer and Vajda that this was not entirely out of the question).66 Indeed, in Sefer Hasidim Judah the Pious himself articulated the seamless way in which Jews were both distinct from and inseparably part of their broader culture: “When [Jews] look around for a place in which to live, they should take stock of the residents of that town— how chaste are the Christians there? Know that if Jews live in that town, their children and grandchildren will also behave just as the Christians do. For in every town . . . Jews act just like Christians.”67 Judah’s forthright acknowledgment of the unavoidable nature of interreligious entanglement is striking. Aware that Christian townspeople might exercise a bad influence on Jewish inhabitants, he does not instruct his readers to avoid contact with their neighbors, much less to live in isolated segregation. Rather, he advises that they pick righteous Christians to live among, in order to ensure that the ineluctable interactions yield positive spiritual results. Judah’s own nonchalance on the subject makes it all the more surprising that so many scholars have been loath to apply a comparative analytical lens to Judah’s own theology.68

Were the German Pietists “Jewish Mystics”? One final factor that has surely precluded research into Ashkenazic attitudes toward the natural world centers on the German Pietists specifically— namely, the tendency to view the group as a single link (or a “major trend”) in a self- contained chain of “Jewish mysticism.”69 Medieval Jewish natural philosophers and kabbalists have traditionally been depicted as locked in perpetual battle with one another, and so it should come as no surprise if we tend to assume that “mystics” were opposed to scientists and philosophers, and vice versa. Moreover, while the early Jewish taxonomies of esoteric knowledge singled out for attention both ma’aseh bereishit (“the act of creation [of the natural world]”) and ma’aseh merkavah (“the act of the [divine] chariot”),70 the former tended to be neglected in favor of the latter by those we tend to think of as Jewish “mystics.”71 Indeed, the kabbalistic tradition has come to be associated not with engagement with nature, but with the desire to transcend or spiritualize it. For medieval kabbalists, argues Elliot Wolfson, “nature is not adored as a goddess; it is treated as that which must be conquered and subdued, not in the sense of abusing nature but in the sense of transforming the corporeality of nature and elevating it to the higher, spiritual level.”72 In the

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view of Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, this lack of interest in nature among medieval kabbalists has been internalized by those who study them in the modern period: “To my knowledge there is no study of the esoteric theology of German Pietism in relation to ecological thinking, because the scholars of German Pietism (all of whom are historians of Jewish mysticism) are not interested in ecology.”73 Yet scholars of medieval and early modern Christian thought have increasingly come to realize that mysticism and esotericism were often inseparable from scientific engagement with the natural world;74 in the Jewish sphere, too, historians have shown that many early modern “scientists” were simultaneously “mystics,” and vice versa.75 Medievalists have begun to incorporate these insights into work on medieval Jewish thought as well, showing the fluidity between such seemingly rigid categories as “magic,” “science,” and “mysticism.”76 The categorization of the Pietists as “mystics” has not merely associated them with disdain for the natural world— it has served to preclude synchronic analysis of German Pietism altogether. Scholars of Jewish mysticism have often treated their subject transhistorically, or “phenomenologically,” comparing mystical texts from widely divergent periods and regions in search of an underlying “universal mystical experience.”77 It is common for contemporary scholars of Kabbalah to read earlier movements in light of later ones, positing the existence of “subterranean currents” that silently transmit doctrines over the course of centuries.78 No wonder, then, that when the Pietists state emphatically that their ideas have descended to them through an unbroken chain of transmission, originating in Babylonia and transmitted via their forebears in Italy,79 many scholars have been content to take them at their word. In fact, much of the recent research on the German Pietists has come either from scholars of merkavah mysticism interested in the medieval “afterlife” of late antique heikhalot texts,80 or from scholars of late thirteenth- century Kabbalah searching for precursors to theological developments that were first articulated decades later.81 To be sure, such diachronic research is intrinsically valuable— but conceiving of the Pietists as solely a segment of a unified, relatively homogeneous whole makes it all the more difficult to engage in the kind of comparative analysis that I am advocating, and hence to recognize that their distinctive approach to the natural world is indeed something new and worthy of attention.

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While the phenomenological approach to the study of Jewish mysticism remains extremely influential, challenges to its methodological groundings have emerged in recent years. In fact, a growing cadre of scholars has expressed doubt as to the usefulness of the analytic term “Jewish mysticism” altogether. Joseph Dan (who embraces the term) has long acknowledged that “mysticism” is an anachronistic label, which the Pietists themselves would not have understood: “Hebrew . . . does not have a word equivalent even partially to the Latin- Christian term ‘mysticism.’ Any identification of a certain Jewish religious phenomenon as ‘mystical’ is a modern scholarly decision, which relies on the modern scholar’s understanding of the term: there is no intrinsic demand in the texts themselves for such a usage.”82 But more recently, scholars like Boaz Huss have gone even further, claiming that the study of “mysticism” is not only anachronistic from the perspective of the Jewish Middle Ages, but is methodologically inappropriate even for modern scholars. Huss has been especially critical of the prevailing phenomenological approach, which he argues “is based on a theological assumption concerning the universality of the mystical experience”:83 “Not only does research into ‘Jewish mysticism’ artificially link phenomena that are in reality unrelated, it also serves to wrench these phenomena from the actual contexts within which they originated and developed. Most scholars of mysticism agree that so- called “mystical” phenomena existed in specific sociohistorical frameworks; but the claims that these phenomena are expressions of a universal mystical experience, and that they are best analyzed through comparative and phenomenological methods, leads to a disjuncture between these phenomena and their historical contexts, and to a blurring of their social and political characters.”84 Annette Reed has noted the same problem in her study of the connections between Enochic, Apocalyptic, and Heikhalot sources: “It is indeed tempting to believe that we need only to label a text ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ to be exempted from the burden of proof normally required in reconstructions of social, literary, and religious history. Likewise, a surprising number of scholars accept that an appeal to ‘mystical experience’ suffices to support otherwise ungrounded speculations about Jewish movements, beliefs, and practices stretching back to time immemorial, even though scholarship on better attested mystical movements has shown mystical practice to be anything but an ahistorical phenomenon.”85 Most recently, Peter Schäfer has lamented that the phenomenological approach “runs the risk of

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dehistoricizing the phenomena it is looking at and establishing an ahistorical, ideal, and essentialist construct. . . . Methodologically it presents a breathtakingly ahistorical hodgepodge of this and that, quotations from many different periods and literatures pressed into scholarly sounding categories.”86 By “re-historicizing” texts and figures whose writings have been studied predominantly from an internalist, diachronic perspective, the present book seeks to put Huss’s, Reed’s, and Schäfer’s methodological appeals into practice.

Trigger Warning: “Coherence,” “Eclecticism,” or “Complexity”? The argument presented in this book is based on a wide array of medieval Ashkenazic writings, which are read against both the diachronic backdrop of prior Jewish traditions and the synchronic backdrop of contemporaneous northern European culture. By focusing on Pietistic writings in particular, the book draws on a representative sampling of most of the genres that were most widespread in Ashkenazic culture— the German Pietists were extremely prolific, and this book ranges widely across their moralistic tracts, biblical and liturgical commentaries, halakhic (legal) writings and responsa literature, exempla and sermons, travel narratives, magical and visionary texts, and treatises on cosmology and human psychology. In analyzing such a wide range of texts, however, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that a single underlying theology or coherent set of doctrines united all Pietistic writings, much less all of medieval Ashkenazic spiritual life. One of the recurring difficulties in studying Pietistic writings is what Haym Soloveitchik has called “the congenital inability of the Hasidey Ashkenaz to adhere to any fixed scheme or terminology”;87 or, as Elliot Wolfson has somewhat more diplomatically stated, “consistency is rarely the measure of human creativity, and it is surely not so in the case of Judah the Pious, Eleazar of Worms, and other colleagues or disciples who belonged to their circle.”88 Gershom Scholem’s formulation in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism has remained quite influential; gesturing toward the many, often conflicting texts and traditions upon which the Pietists drew, he suggested the following: “All these elements are intermingled in the richly varied literature of Hasidism, but rather in the form of an amorphous whole than as elements of a system. Its authors . . . showed themselves unable to develop these elements of thought or to produce

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anything like a synthesis; possibly they were not even conscious of the manifold inconsistencies among the various traditions, all of which were treated by them with the same reverence.”89 Subsequent scholars have sought to impose order on this textual “amorphousness,” and have sought and found an array of interpretive “keys” that, via comparison, reconstruction, and reconciliation, unlocked the “esoteric doctrines” of the German Pietists. In this view, the Hasidei Ashkenaz did have underlying, esoteric “theological” commitments— they simply need to be carefully rescued from within the sea of extraneous or unrelated surrounding material.90 Thus Joseph Dan has highlighted particularly the philosophical dimensions of Pietistic writings,91 while Elliot Wolfson has argued that the Pietists embraced the eroticized, imaginal theosophy characteristic of the later school of Spanish kabbalists.92 But in a recent impassioned, programmatic essay, Moshe Idel has subjected much of this scholarship to withering criticism, arguing that the search for an underlying, unified Pietistic “theology” has not only been unsuccessful, but methodologically ill conceived. The writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, he argues, are simply rife with inconsistencies, and the efforts to impose order on them reflect the commitments of contemporary scholars rather than those of their historical subjects. The Kalonymides stood at the crossroads of incompatible textual currents—piyyutim and midrashim, magical and theurgical texts, philosophical and rationalist sources— and no amount of analysis or harmonization will reconcile these fundamentally incompatible traditions. And yet, Idel cautions that a lack of coherence is not the same as the kind of incoherent “amorphousness” or “eclecticism” described by Scholem. Rather, he suggests that Pietistic thought is best characterized as “an encounter between different theoretical and religious movements, each possessing a depth of its own. The encounter between them creates complexity (murkavut).”93 Idel never explains precisely what distinguishes “complexity” from “eclecticism,” nor what kinds of generalizations are possible when dealing with authors who did not engage in the kind of systematic writing (not to say thinking) that rewards the search for consistency. In the present book, I attempt to tread a fine line between reductive harmonization on the one hand and a despairing acknowledgment of incoherence on the other. The approach I take is a thematic one, which is predicated on the search for “triggers.” What issues, or concepts, or anxieties provoke the Hasidei Ashkenaz to write (voluminously and

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sometimes inconsistently) throughout their corpus?94 What specific words or verses or symbols trigger their characteristic outpourings of exegetical and numerological and moralistic reflection? Wide and deep reading in an array of neglected and unknown sources reveals that the theological statuses of the natural world and of the human body are two such triggers, analysis of which allow us to discern an overarching Pietistic worldview, which can in turn be situated within the social and cultural milieu in which it was crafted. In surveying the varied genres of Pietistic writing, Joseph Dan and Ivan Marcus have noted that they can be roughly divided on the basis of their presumed reading audiences. Texts Dan labeled sifrut ha- yihud (texts on “God’s unity”) were intended to be “exoteric”— geared for mass consumption, and often focused on basic, foundational theological tenets and accessible moral instruction. Esoteric writings, in contrast, expressed the secret doctrines that the group never intended to widely circulate.95 This book treats both the Pietists’ exoteric writings, such as Sefer Hasidim and the sifrut ha- yihud, and esoteric works like Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razya. Indeed, by seeking out thematic “triggers” rather than doctrinal coherence, this book destabilizes the very boundaries between restricted, elite theological discourses and outwardly directed popular teachings. The questions and interpretive strategies that the Pietists utilize in their exploration of the theological meaning of the natural world are quite similar, if not identical, across the genres in which they write. Elisheva Baumgarten has recently called for scholars of medieval Ashkenaz to move beyond the prescriptive, rarified texts composed by rabbinic elites, and to reconstruct descriptively the “everyday observances” of pious laypeople who did not leave behind written records of their pious practices.96 Such renewed attention to medieval Ashkenazic “lay piety” can be complemented by this book’s attempt to interrogate how ostensibly naïve “folk” beliefs functioned within the broader theological discourse, in which the boundaries separating elite theology from, say, popular preaching were far less restrictive than the typical focus on Pietistic “esotericism” might suggest. The main body of the present book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is structured around an extended case study of the Pietists’ interpretation of Psalms 111:4 (“He has created a remembrance of His wonders”), a verse they return to obsessively throughout their esoteric and exoteric writings. This chapter argues that the Pietists prized, and

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saw theological meaning in, the workings of the natural world— both the marvelous and the mundane. In both their popularizing and esoteric theological writings, the Pietists explored the empirical workings of the predictable, consistent natural order, while simultaneously ruminating upon the meaning and causes of ostensibly “wondrous” exceptions to natural causation. The Pietists’ attempts to explore the meaning and limits of the natural world were in keeping with the scientific and theological interests of their Christian neighbors— interests they were aware of in part due to the polemical uses for which they were not infrequently marshaled. Chapter 2 links the Pietists’ general engagement with the natural world to their specific preoccupation with the meaning and workings of human embodiment. It argues that the Pietists understood the human body to be a microcosm of the created order in its entirety, and that their liturgical, embryological, and even physiognomic writings appropriate medieval scientific notions about the human body in the service of their overarching theological agenda. Like their Christian contemporaries, whose incarnational theological commitments increasingly privileged the human body as a site of spiritual meaning, the Pietists understood the body to be key to human identity— a view that helps explain their novel attempts to create Golems, microcosmic human bodies animated via theurgic means. Chapter 3 explores the role of the human soul within this microcosmic worldview, and shows that the Pietists saw the human person as essentially a psychosomatic unity—which led them to conceive of the soul itself as having some fundamentally corporeal qualities. Their simultaneous focus on the embodiedness of the soul and on the spiritualization of the body sheds new light upon Pietistic penitential theology, which has often been understood to reflect a disdain for or flight from the body. Chapters 4 and 5 explore Pietistic understanding of human physiology, in particular the body’s outer limits and eventual breakdown. Chapter 4 looks at Pietistic discussions of lycanthropy (werewolves) and argues that Jews appropriated contemporary Christian notions of monstrosity in an effort to engage with the theological meaning of corporeal mutability. Some Pietistic authors linked monsters with demons, and this chapter shows that discourses of demonology provided the Pietists with another means of thinking about the limits and possibilities of the physical body. Chapter 5 reconstructs the Pietists’ anxieties over the decomposition and future resurrection of the body by investigating their surprisingly extensive writings on human

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excrement. “Waste treatment” was a pervasive topic in Sefer Hasidim and many other Pietistic texts, and this chapter shows that lowly excrement was invested with lofty theological significance in eschatological and polemical contexts. The book’s conclusion selectively surveys the reception of medieval Ashkenazic ideas about nature and the body in the later Middle Ages, and suggests some directions for future research.

Chapter 1

Wondrous Nature and Natural Wonders Heir to all the fantastic notions concerning the universe that were current in the ancient world, with equal title to the wild and wonderful tales that swept medieval Europe, it is a source of surprise not that Jewish literature laid claim to these ideas and stories, but rather that it made so little of them. Compared with the intense popular interest that was focused upon the curious and weird phenomena of nature in the Europe they inhabited, the Jews may be said almost to have neglected the subject altogether— allowing for the circumstance that Jewish writings, with their juridical and exegetical orientation, did not fully reflect the state of popular credulity. Nonetheless, the “facts” that may be culled from them make strange reading enough. —Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition

In his theological treatise Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u-Penimiyot (Pure Utterances Revealed and Hidden), Judah the Pious offers a fascinating argument for the plausibility of God’s existence: “If one places hot ash on hot excrement, it will cause harm to the one who produced [the excrement]. And although we cannot see any connection between the excrement and the person’s body, nonetheless the body will be harmed by the power of the excrement. Thus, there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see. . . . Just as [this connection] is real, even though it cannot be seen by the eye, so too our Creator, may his Name be blessed, is a real entity, whose power is in everything, even though we have never seen Him.”1 In this passage, to which we return in detail below, Judah justifies a common Jewish doctrine— God’s existence and omnipotence—using a decidedly uncommon interpretive strategy. The ability to apply heat to and hence “weaponize” human excrement somehow lends credence to a seemingly unrelated theological tenet. Indeed, the invocation of excrement and its magical properties is of a piece with a broader tendency in Pietistic writings to engage intensively with a wide array of fantastic creatures, objects, 21

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and phenomena. In Pietistic works like Sefer Hasidim, for example, men turn into wolves, demons work mischief with impunity, magical spells are routinely, sometimes dangerously, effective, and wearing the proper amulet can mean the difference between life and death. If one focuses on these passages—and there are many of them—it is easy to understand why generations of scholars have sought to situate the Pietists exclusively within the “superstitious” worldview of medieval Germanic folk culture. Joshua Trachtenberg’s analysis of the “wonders of nature” in medieval Ashkenazic culture is typical in this regard. In the epigraph that begins this chapter, Trachtenberg diagnoses the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz as suffering from a double malady. First, their “juridical and exegetical orientation”—which later scholars would dub “talmudocentrism”2—prevented them from engaging with the workings and meaning of their natural surroundings. Second, to the limited extent that they did appreciate or seek to understand the natural world, they were boxed in by the “fantastical notions” and “wild and wonderful tales” that predominated in their northern European surroundings. The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, in this telling, labored under an ignorance compounded by isolation. Trachtenberg’s generalization has been accepted, and extended, by an array of subsequent scholars who have contended that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were at best apathetic and at worst overtly hostile toward exploration of their natural surroundings. Joseph Dan, for instance, has contrasted the approach of Ashkenazic thinkers like the German Pietists with that of their Sephardic contemporaries: [Medieval Jewish] rationalist thinkers presented their readers with the wonders of Creation as a testimony of God’s power and glory. . . . Kabbalists discovered in Creation reflections of divine forces, and saw its components as paralleling the structure and internal dynamics of the divine realm. This simple, understandable approach was inaccessible to R. Judah the Pious, because its fundamental assumption is that God created the world as an expression of His inner goodness, and that the laws of existence reflect God’s goodness, and His love of His creations. . . . Rabbi Judah the Pious and R. Eleazar of Worms developed a different teaching. . . . The laws of existence . . . are designed to create a situation that is difficult for human beings. That is to say, investigation of the laws of the cosmos does not bring man to recognition of God’s goodness, but on the contrary, reveals the ways in which God lays burdens on man, and makes things difficult for him.3

Nature, in this reading, is an intrinsically antagonistic force, concerning which the Pietists are uniformly pessimistic;4 Judah and Eleazar

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“thus distance the Creator from the world, and from the laws of nature that govern it—for they do not see nature as a reflection of God’s attributes.”5 Elliot Wolfson has argued in a similar vein that “the truly esoteric dimension of Rhineland Jewish pietistm . . . is . . . rooted in an essentially negative view about the physical world,”6 while Haym Soloveitchik has claimed that “the universe, in Hasidic thinking, is empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning. No image of God is to be found there, nor does it reflect His wisdom.”7 This chapter interrogates and ultimately seeks to dispel this general characterization. It argues that the German Pietists saw the natural world as profoundly imbued with theological meaning, and that they invested considerable energy in attempting to understand its workings. The Pietists manifested this preoccupation particularly through their exegesis of a single biblical verse: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders” (zekher asah le- nifle’otav— Ps. 111:4), a verse they marshal consistently, and somewhat formulaically, in an array of their writings. In their reading, this verse refers to observable phenomena that attest to theological truths about God and His attributes. The Pietists believed that the created world contains “remembrances” (objects and phenomena discernable to the careful observer) which shed light upon God’s “wonders” (namely, theological truths about His nature and attributes). Dan, who was the first to treat this doctrine of “remembrances” in his pioneering work on the German Pietists, understood it in light of his broader sense that the Pietists “do not see nature as a reflection of God’s attributes.” In a series of studies, he has argued that the only remembrances of interest to the Pietists were those that deviated from, and hence undermined the typical workings of the natural order:8 “The Creator has, in his kindness and goodness, implanted within reality wondrous and unnatural things that cannot be comprehended according to the laws of nature, in order to enable His pious followers to comprehend Him, and to learn about the wondrous, supernatural capabilities of the Creator Himself, which similarly cannot be understood according to the laws of nature. . . . The true nature of God can be discerned, in their view, only from the supernatural, from phenomena that are exceptions to the conventional laws of nature.”9 This sense that the Pietists prized “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural” has been widely adopted by scholars writing in Dan’s wake, who have agreed that, for the Pietists, “only in the marvelous and the anomalous does one

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find the Divinity reflected.”10 The claim has been further extended to Ashkenazic culture as a whole by scholars who have contended that “reliance on natural phenomena as a means of comprehending [theological matters] was an uncommon characteristic” in medieval Ashkenaz.11 Now, it is true that discussions of “nature” are conspicuously lacking in Pietistic theological texts—but this is not due to a supposed Ashkenazic antipathy toward the natural world. Rather, it results from the fact that, as far as Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were concerned, “nature” as such did not exist— at least not lexically. The standard medieval Hebrew term for nature, teva, was a neologism coined in the mid-twelfth century by Samuel Ibn Tibbon in his Perush ha-Milot ha-Zarot (Explanation of Foreign Terms), a philosophical dictionary intended to supplement his Hebrew translations of Judeo-Arabic rationalist texts.12 In earlier Jewish sources, teva was used to denote either the building blocks of which physical objects were composed— the four elements, for instance, or the four humors— or else, relatedly, the “natures,” or specific qualities of things.13 Ibn Tibbon used teva in his translations as a replacement for the Arabic words tab and tabi’a, to denote “nature” as a systematic and unified construct. The German Pietists did not have access to Ibn Tibbon’s translations or dictionary, and so their neglect of “nature” reflects not a principled theological opposition, but simply a lack of conceptual vocabulary. Ashkenazic Jews did have other, related terms at their disposal, such as hokhmat ha-toladot for “science,”14 and of course ma’aseh bereishit, which could mean both the process of creation and the created order as a whole. But whether these semantic terms approximated or differed from the Tibbonite teva in their meanings can only be discerned if Pietistic discussions of the workings of their physical surroundings are analyzed from the ground up. The fact that the Pietists were exploring God’s “remembrances” at precisely the moment when Jewish (and, as we shall see, also Christian) conceptions of “nature” were being consolidated is of crucial importance. For Pietistic ruminations upon Psalms 111:4 in fact reveal a spectrum of attitudes toward the created world and natural order. On the one hand, the writings of Judah and Eleazar recurrently locate theological profundity specifically in the routine, mundane components of the natural order. In these instances, the Pietists seem to take for granted, and to derive spiritual meaning from, the stability and predictability of the laws of nature. Thus, while the “remembrances”

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that they see as meaningful do attest to God’s wondrous nature, they are often not themselves wondrous. Indeed, the prosaic quality of these “remembrances” is key to the very workings of the Pietists’ argumentation, revealing not only an awareness of and appreciation for the conventional workings of nature, but a theological dependence upon it. On the other hand, the Pietists not infrequently invoke Psalms 111:4 in their discussions of decidedly non-mundane phenomena— fantastic, extraordinary marvels such as the malevolent potentialities of excrement described above. In these cases, the “remembrances” highlighted are themselves “wondrous,” and would seem to destabilize the consistency that the Pietists at other times prized. But while these divergent approaches seem contradictory at first glance, they are in fact of a piece with a broader tension in high medieval thought— how to make sense of apparently inexplicable phenomena, and integrate them into the broader natural order. This challenge was increasingly taken up by high medieval Christians and Jews alike—not only by the superstitious “folk” but by influential theologians and natural philosophers, who were both fascinated by and suspicious of the mirabilia that featured prominently in the literary texts, magical treatises, and travel narratives introduced into Europe over the course of the high Middle Ages. These thinkers arrived at diverse solutions to the tension between natural order and disorderly wonders of nature. But on the whole, their discourses of “science” and “nature” were far more capacious than modern, binary distinctions between nature and the supernatural would lead one to believe, and could include and account for the magical and marvelous alongside the mundane. By analyzing Pietistic discussions of God’s “remembrances” both synchronically and diachronically, this chapter shows that the natural order was indeed a source of theological meaning for the German Pietists. Attention to this dimension of medieval Ashkenazic theology will also allow us to draw linkages between their esoteric works of elite theology and the more popular, outwardly directed genres that conveyed these ideas to a wider audience. Moreover, the very ways in which they conceived of the character and boundaries of the natural order drew upon developments in the Christian setting in which they lived, and with which they were varyingly and substantively engaged.15

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“He Has Created a Remembrance of His Wonders” The German Pietists were hardly the first readers of the Bible interested in identifying the precise “remembrances” and “wonders” alluded to in Psalms 111:4. This verse was the subject of a lengthy tradition of Jewish exegesis long before the Pietists came on the scene. The interpretation most common during the medieval period approached the verse from a historical perspective, identifying God’s “wonders” with His miraculous interventions in human history. The “remembrances” of these events could vary. One approach was to define the remembrances as the practices and rituals that the Jews were commanded to observe as a means of commemorating God’s wondrous deeds. Thus, the mid-twelfth century midrashic compilation Sekhel Tov jointly lists the prohibition of eating an animal’s sciatic nerve (gid ha- nasheh), the commandment of remembering the exodus from Egypt, the prohibition of eating leaven on Passover, and the commandment of dwelling in sukkot on the Feast of Tabernacles as “remembrances” of “wonders” that God performed for the biblical Israelites.16 Passive remembrance is here allied to specific ritual imperatives, since human beings bear the responsibility of maintaining the practices that commemorate God’s miracles and activities. A wide range of biblical exegetes— both predating and postdating the compilation of Sekhel Tov—read the verse similarly. The eleventh- century French exegete Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi), for instance, explains that the verse refers to “the Sabbath and holidays [which God] established for the Jews, about which it is written ‘and you shall remember (ve-zakharta) that you were in Egypt.’”17 The twelfth- century itinerant Spanish rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and the thirteenth- century rabbi Moses b. Nahman of Barcelona incorporate similar readings into their own biblical commentaries.18 The motif was utilized in other genres as well— a sermon attributed to the fifteenth- century halakhic authority Jacob Molin of Mainz (Maharil), for instance, consists of an expanded, homiletical rendering of Psalms 111:4 that takes the same historicalritualistic approach.19 A related interpretation of this verse linked God’s historical “wonders” not with practices, but rather with objects that served as “remembrances.”20 Thus, a variety of midrashim invoked Psalms 111:4 in their discussions of Lot’s wife’s metamorphosis into a pillar of salt in Genesis 19: “When Sodom and Gomorrah were overturned, it is written ‘And [Lot’s] wife looked back’ (Gen. 19:26), and

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she remains a pillar of salt to this day. Why? ‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders,’ so that the generations will recite the praises of the Holy One, blessed be He.”21 Other midrashim make a similar claim regarding Noah’s ark, which they claim was preserved as a sign, lest people forget God’s miraculous flooding of the earth. 22

“The World Follows Its Customary Course” This focus on God’s role in human history, and the objects and rituals that serve to commemorate it, is dramatically different from the Pietists’ interpretive approach; indeed, their reading of the verse seems to be wholly sui generis, without precedent in earlier Jewish literature. 23 Psalms 111:4 is invoked dozens of times in the writings of Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Eleazar, in a variety of different contexts. 24 Generally speaking, the argumentation based on this verse is constructed in the following manner: first, a question about some theological proposition is laid out; next, a “remembrance,” an object or phenomenon found in the natural world, is presented and briefly described; finally, a correlation is drawn between the remembrance and the “wondrous” theological truth, thus answering the question presented in the first step. In many instances, the remembrances described in the second stage of the argument are not rarities, or deviations from the natural order; rather, they are common, even mundane components of the physical world. For example, Judah argues that God’s omniscience is a tenable possibility in light of the fact that “man’s mind can think two thoughts at once, or see in one instant many different colors. He does not comprehend these things in succession, but rather simultaneously. Certainly the Creator, who sees and remembers all things [can do likewise]!”25 This passage locates spiritual resonance in the routine and prosaic, not in some wondrous exception to the rules of nature. Just as it is empirically obvious that man can think two thoughts or see two colors simultaneously, Judah suggests, it should pose no problem to accept that God can exercise omniscience. A similar line of argument is used to justify belief in God’s all-pervasiveness: “The Creator is everywhere. And if one were to ask, “‘How can I believe that He is found everywhere, and that nothing is hidden from Him?’ . . . He has created a remembrance of His wonders. The glass that is in a window does not block out the lights. . . . How much more ought we to believe in the Creator of everything, that nothing blocks Him.”26 Here, too,

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the mundane property of the transparency of glass is used to make sense of the fact that God can be ever-present, even if unseen by the naked eye. God’s pervasiveness can be demonstrated on the basis of other common phenomena as well. Thus, Eleazar explains that God’s supernal light can be shared among many divine beings simultaneously, “in the same manner that one can make both cheese and butter from milk, and one can boil milk and separate the curds from the whey.”27 Judah, too, compares God’s pervasiveness in the universe to the way that a liquid which is placed in one part of a block of cheese will distribute itself equally throughout the entire block. 28 In other instances, the Pietists not only describe routine phenomena, but also take pains to give naturalistic explanations for why they occur: “If one were to ask: How can one believe that God exists in the world, given that no eye has ever seen Him? It is possible to respond that . . . in the winter, when one is indoors, or in a warm bathhouse, no one can see the breath that one exhales from his mouth and nostrils. Similarly, during the summer the warmth of one’s breath is not visible. For during the winter, man’s breath is warm and the air is cold, and when [these] two unlike things [meet] the warmth is visible; but warm air eliminates [the visibility of a person’s breath].”29 Once again, the fact that something discernable in nature can be present even though it is invisible proves that an invisible God can exist as well. Both Judah and Eleazar use similar logic in explaining another natural phenomenon, namely that dust can be seen in a beam of light coming in through a window, while dust is invisible outdoors in broad daylight. In discussing this “remembrance,” they offer up a programmatic statement about the necessity of the careful investigation of nature: “Since [the outdoor dust] in invisible, should we deny, heaven forbid, that it exists? We must not say this but rather compare one situation to another until we discover the truth.”30 Elsewhere, this same “remembrance” attests to a different theological truth, and is linked to another, equally common natural phenomenon: “I have heard concerning angels . . . that there are those who say they are invisible on account of the subtlety of their bodies. Behold, the fine dust that can be seen in a beam of light that enters a house through a window or crack cannot [otherwise] be seen, on account of its subtlety. Similarly, if one is far away from a spider web, one cannot see it— how much more so [angels], which are even more subtle. And [even] if a spider web is extremely large, when you gather it together it becomes very small— how much more so can spirits contract themselves and

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become small [as well].”31 Like the dust in a beam of light, a spider’s web is invoked not because it is wondrous, but precisely because it is not—its ubiquity allows the reader to appreciate that the existence of invisible beings is indeed a tenable proposition. This location of theological meaning within the physical world is also evident in passages where the Pietists derive their information not from direct observation, but rather from earlier sources. In a number of contexts, the Pietists describe the visible signs that confirm the rabbinic teaching that God issued 613 commandments to the Jewish people:32 “‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders’— [the numerical value of] ‘of his wonders’ is 613, corresponding to the [365] positive and [248] negative commandments. The 365 tendons and the 248 limbs of the human body are a remembrance of this.”33 According to gematriyah, the system of letter-number equivalency that was a mainstay of Pietistic hermeneutics, the 613 commandments are encoded in God’s “wonders” (nifle’otav)— a word whose own numerical value is 613.34 And these “wonders” are literally “embodied” in the tendons and limbs of the human form: the physical constitution of the human body broadcasts a theological message to those who are attuned to it. 35 Although the link between the 248 limbs in the body and the 248 negative commandments derives from precedents in rabbinic literature, 36 the invocation of the 365 tendons in connection with the 365 positive commandments is apparently original to this Pietistic source.37 A somewhat more complex use of this type of argumentation appears in Judah’s and Eleazar’s discussions of emotion and cognition. Eleazar, for instance, argues, “The Creator is in everything, and all things derive from Him. And should one’s heart say, ‘How can I believe that there is a God in the world, when no eye has seen Him?’ . . . The very intellect and thoughts in one’s heart—were one to dissect a person limb from limb, one could not find the intellect. How much more so does the Creator of all exist even though He cannot be seen. Similarly, how connected is a man’s heart when he sees a woman and desires her!”38 The somewhat cryptic final line of this passage is explicable based on a parallel in the writings of Judah: “A man sees a woman from afar, and love is awakened in his heart, even though no ties of love connect her to his heart.”39 Love and desire, the Pietists explain, are invisible forces, like the intellect; nonetheless, they can act at a distance, and still impact the human body physically: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders. . . . Thought alone can

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cause a person to fatten or to deteriorate, as it says, ‘Good news fattens one’s bones’ (Prov. 15:30), and depression weakens a person. . . . These [physical consequences] are dependent on thought, without evidence of any action.”40 Other emotions, too, confirm that invisible forces can have powerfully visible effects: “Laughter and anger are dependent upon thought, and we never see any [physical] thing that brings one to anger or laughter— only thought and reflection and contemplation.”41 Perhaps the clearest articulation of the naturalistic worldview underlying the doctrine of zekher asah le- nifle’otav can be found in Judah’s and Eleazar’s repeated references to the regularity and consistency of phenomena such as the progression of the celestial bodies, or the duration of the reproductive process. Judah, for instance, argues, He has created a remembrance of His wonders. . . . “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), so that man should never think that something occurs against God’s will, or that maybe a second [divine] power can abrogate the actions of the first one. It is for this reason that [God] set the time and duration of reproduction, each animal and plant species as is customary for it, and the times of planting and harvesting, each in its proper time. And He has never changed and never will change these customs. . . . This is in order that one not think that there is a second God who can contradict the first God. Thus, our sages have said, “The world follows its customary course” (olam ke- minhago noheg) in all matters.42

The “supernatural” abrogation of the natural order, in this view, would threaten rather than reinforce knowledge of God’s “wonders.” This privileging of the “customary course” which the world follows has surprising implications for the Pietistic conception of miracles, deviations from the natural order that overturn the regularity imposed by God on the physical world. With few exceptions,43 Pietistic sources minimize both the frequency and theological significance of direct divine interventions in the functioning of the natural order. Thus, Sefer Hasidim cautions that “one should seek to avoid miracles,”44 and that if one does experience a miracle, it should not be publicized to others.45 Similarly, the Pietists express discomfort with apparently miraculous events described in the Bible, and seem more comfortable with figures like Joshua and Samuel, who rarely performed public miracles, than with prophets like Elijah and Elisha, who were constantly the cause or beneficiary of interventions in the natural order.46 Indeed, in contrasting these figures with one another, Judah categorically asserts, “In times of great need, prophets may

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perform miracles, but only when the desired end cannot come about via non-miraculous means. When it is possible for it to come about by some other means, one must not perform a miracle. And when a minor miracle will suffice, one must not perform a great miracle.”47 Eleazar sums up this approach with a programmatic assertion: “It is not the way of God to effectuate the decrees that He is constantly effectuating through open miracles. Rather, [He brings his decrees about] through guidance of the world.”48 In cases where miracles do prove necessary, Judah emphasizes that God generally chooses to perform them in private, so as not to visibly interfere with the (spiritually resonant) typical workings of the natural order. The destruction of Dagon, the idolatrous god of the Philistines, recounted in I Samuel 5 takes place at night when no witnesses are present, as does the plague of the firstborns in Exodus 12. Even Elisha only resurrects the son of the Shunamite woman in II Kings 4 after first closing the door to his bedroom, ensuring that no one would observe the actual workings of the miraculous event. Judah interprets God’s criticism of Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 18 in this manner as well— laughing upon finding out that she would bear a son in her old age was her way of publicizing the miracle, which God in turn instructed her to avoid.49 The angelic instruction to Lot’s wife not to look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an expression of the same desire to keep miracles hidden— her transformation into a pillar of salt was thus a punishment for her having violated the bounds of secrecy. 50 The contrast with non- Pietistic interpretations of Psalms 111:4 is here particularly stark— in earlier sources, the pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was transformed was precisely intended to commemorate and publicize God’s miraculous deeds. 51 Discomfort with miraculous intervention also explains the Pietists’ conspicuous attempts to minimize the wondrousness of certain scriptural miracles. For example, the inexplicable blossoming of Aaron’s staff in the Tabernacle during Korah’s rebellion in Numbers 17 is described by the Pietists as rather mundane. In the context of a discussion of the rapidly blossoming trees of the Garden of Eden, Eleazar notes, “You should not be surprised— for Aaron’s staff produced fruit in a single night, without being planted. And truffles and mushrooms [grow] in a single day, without being planted or drawing [sustenance] from the ground. And cabbage produces sprouts, even when not [planted] in

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the ground.”52 Eleazar here takes an ostensibly miraculous occurrence and diminishes its significance by equating it with commonplace horticultural phenomena. When it comes to prayer, too, miracles should neither be requested nor invoked as a means of praising God. According to Sefer Hasidim, one is prohibited from praying for miraculous interventions in the natural order53 and should not praise God for performing miracles with impunity: “‘Rejoice, oh righteous, in the Lord’ (Ps. 33:1)—but not in other joys. . . . This verse does not explain—what ‘joy’ is [accurate with regard to] the Holy One, blessed be He? Truth— one should not speak lies, [such as], ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, makes the heavens into earth, or the earth into the heavens, turns water into wine or honey into wormwood or wormwood into honey.’ Anything that does not usually happen should not be used to praise God.”54 In a similar passage elsewhere, Judah echoes this line of reasoning further, claiming that attributing wondrous miracles to God is not only unseemly, but also untrue. In other words, his commitment to the immutability of the natural order leads him to implicitly place limitations on God’s omnipotence. In addressing the talmudic prohibition on praising God in overly extravagant language, 55 he writes: “If one were to ask: Since God is omnipotent . . . let us praise Him with all manner [of praises]. It is possible to respond that we ought to praise Him for those things he regularly, visibly does for humanity. . . . For it would not do to say that God can do anything, lest one think of things which are illogical, and thereby blaspheme the Exalted One. For instance, one might think, ‘Since He is omnipotent, why can he not make today precede yesterday, or [tomorrow] precede today?’56 For it is impossible for the past to follow the future [chronologically].”57 It is clear from these passages that both Judah and Eleazar much prefer the regularity, and even constraint, imposed by consistency and predictability over a worldview in which miracles play a destabilizing role. This antipathy toward changing the natural created order is predicated on the belief that that order is hardly haphazard— much less maleficent or antagonistic—but that it rather reflects God’s wisdom and desires. Indeed, this conception of a consistent natural order is evident not only from the specific phenomena that the Pietists cite— the transparency of glass, the steam of one’s breath, and dust visible in a ray of sunlight—but, more broadly, from the very rhetorical agenda that their invocations of Psalms 111:4 are intended to further. In their discussions of God’s “remembrances,” the Pietists were engaged in

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a pedagogic and exhortatory strategy aimed at a specific audience. Particularly in the sifrut ha- yihud, Psalms 111:4 is invoked in reference to an imagined interlocutor, who raises a succession of skeptical queries regarding the nature of God. “How can I believe that there is a God in the world, when no eye has seen Him?” “How can I believe that He is found everywhere, and that nothing is hidden from Him?” and so on. The goal of the Pietists’ exoteric writings— aimed at a “lay” audience rather than a select group of initiates— is to offer convincing answers to these questions precisely by listing examples of mundane substances that, though invisible, undoubtedly exist. That is, it is the very ordinariness of the objects and phenomena, their tendency to be taken for granted, that lends the argument its weight. Drawing linkages between, say, God’s invisibility and inexplicable, supernatural phenomena would not meet the needs of the consumers of the Pietists’ writings, who were interested in comprehending theological truths about God, not in begging the question through the marshaling of even more unbelievable phenomena. The notion that the Pietists were concerned with the spiritual edification of those whose faith was less than perfect runs counter to the conventional depiction of the Hasidei Ashkenaz as elitist and withdrawn, closed off from the broader Jewish community and its manifold spiritual failings. Indeed, the possibility that there existed medieval Ashkenazic Jews who were capable of theological skepticism altogether belies the tendency to depict Ashkenazic Jewry as a “pious community,” unshakeable in their faith and religious commitment.58 And yet, there is ample evidence in Pietistic sources that facts on the ground were considerably more fraught than the idealized Ashkenazic self-image would lead us to believe.59 Sefer Hasidim, like the sifrut ha- yihud, is rife with discussions aimed at Jews doubtful about basic theological tenets, including God’s incorporeality,60 theodicy,61 divine omniscience,62 providence,63 and so on. As in the examples cited above, the dialogic structure is consistently marshaled in these discussions, suggesting that real conversations about these issues actually could, and did, take place. Hence the following programmatic statement: “People should not harbor doubts about their Creator. Rather, if they have any doubts about the Creator, they should speak with a sage (hakham) who is expert in theological matters . . . and who will give a wise and fitting answer to the doubter’s words.”64 The Pietists also discuss skepticism explicitly in their writings on pedagogy. Thus Sefer Hasidim at one point counsels, “One

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must not reveal wondrous teachings to children, lest they say, ‘This is nonsense, and since this is false, so are the others [teachings of Judaism].’”65 Elsewhere, the opposite approach is considered: “Children’s minds are like the minds of adults who are dreaming— they accept the truth of everything. So, too, children believe that everything they are told is true, until they are led astray by evil acquaintances.”66 In any event, it is clear that doubts about theological teachings were by no means uncommon during this period, thus necessitating the kind of exoteric response contained especially in the sifrut ha- yihud. In sum, it is crucial to examine not only the content, but also the context of Pietistic invocations of Psalms 111:4. The Pietists’ analyses of the relationship between God and the natural world were not abstract or theoretical— they were rather aimed at real-life skeptics, necessitating argumentation that was rhetorically compelling. This need could be met by linking apparently unbelievable claims about God’s capabilities with common, prosaic natural phenomena, like steam, the rising and setting of the sun, and so on. The world’s “customary course” was not, per Soloveitchik, “empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” Rather, as Eleazar puts it, God “created the world to reveal the power of His actions to His nation”67— the spiritual resonance and theological profundity imbued within the created world can be uncovered via careful study and observation. Or, as Judah states categorically elsewhere, at Creation, “God said in his heart: ‘Let Me create the world, not because I have any need of it, but in order that my creations might rejoice when I reveal My wisdom to them.’”68

Empiricism and Esotericism Significantly, the Pietists invoke empirical observations not only to confirm basic theological truths such as God’s existence, invisibility, and omniscience, but also to validate the more rarified teachings of the Jewish esoteric tradition. Beginning in late antiquity, Jewish texts identified the creation account in Genesis (ma’aseh bereishit) and Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot (ma’aseh merkavah) as two major loci of secret knowledge,69 and the Pietists subject both of these categories to extensive commentary and interpretation— particularly in Sodei Razya (Secret of Secrets), Eleazar’s massive five-part compilation of esoteric traditions. Sodei Razya and related texts were aimed at an audience of initiates, elite disciples who could be entrusted with

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secret traditions whose transmission was strictly regulated. In these writings, too, the Pietists invoke and explore the routine workings of the natural order, marshaling an array of naturalistic “proofs” that render their esoteric teachings convincing or comprehensible. As such, the theology of nature they lay out in their exoteric teachings mirrors, and must be understood in light of, the approach to the natural world undergirding their more recondite doctrines. In Sodei Razya, empirical proofs are often marshaled with reference to Sefer Yetsirah, a cryptic cosmological text that the Pietists cited from frequently and reverently.70 Sefer Yetsirah focuses in part upon God’s creation of the universe, and details the precise sequence in which the primordial elements were formed— God first created air (ru’ah), derived water from air, and then fire and earth from water. Eleazar justifies this order using an array of confirmations from the natural world—what the Pietists elsewhere call “remembrances”— some original to his writings, others culled from a range of earlier sources:71 “There is an example in the world: If one breathes into the palm of his hand, it will become wet, and thus we know that water emerged from air. Fire emerged from water—for if water is heated in a clean glass vessel, and placed in the sun during the summer time, it can be used to light bits of flax. And stones [come from] fire [and water], for if you fill a pot [with water] and boil it for many days, the vessel will produce something like a piece of stone. All this is intellectually logical (sevarat ha- da’at).”72 Man can thus comprehend the order of God’s creation of the elements by being attentive to the moisture in one’s breath, the ability of a water-filled glass vessel to focus sunlight and kindle a fire, and the crystallization of minerals that have been boiled in water for an extended period.73 Using such observable phenomena, as filtered through sevarat ha- da’at, as a way of making sense of the order of creation, clearly comports with the Pietists’ instructions to “compare one situation to another until we discover the truth.”74 Eleazar similarly justifies the creation of water from air by invoking “the wet moisture of speech,” observable in the steam that comes from one’s mouth during the wintertime, “when the air is cold and the body is warm, and steam comes out of one’s mouth like smoke.”75 The same “smoky” steam allows Eleazar to verify that God could indeed speak at Sinai “from within the fire” (Deut. 4:13), since “the steam [of one’s breath in winter] resembles thin pillars of smoke.”76 That water originates in air is also proven by the fact that dew collects on the ground overnight, even when it does not rain.77

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Experimental data is marshaled in Pietistic sources not only to justify the creation process according to Sefer Yetsirah, but also to shed light on such scientific topics as the workings of meteorology and the structure of the cosmos. Thus Eleazar explains the way in which winds separate raindrops from one another by advising his reader to “take light feathers, and place them into a vessel, and blow into it, and the feathers will be separated from one another.”78 Elsewhere, he describes a similar experiment, which can be marshaled to justify the fact that the earth is suspended in the center of the universe: “The earth is suspended in mid-air with the spheres rotating around it, and the earth does not move from its place. This is analogous to a wide glass vessel with a narrow opening, in which one places . . . dry leaves, or birds’ feathers, or garlic peels. [If] one places his mouth by the opening of the vessel, and blows forcefully till the entire vessel is full of his breath, then whatever is inside the vessel will rise to the middle of the air on account of the wind within—so too the earth is suspended in mid-air.”79 An array of other meteorological phenomena are explained by analogy with everyday observations. Thus the appearance of lightning can be attributed to the “heavenly water jars” (following Job 38:37) striking one another, which produces lightning in the same manner that hitting rocks together creates sparks.80 The origin of rain can be traced to the heavenly waters, which were separated by God from the lower waters on the second day of creation, and which are now in close proximity to the heat of the sun. That this contact causes rain to fall can be understood in light of “a man who brings a vessel full of water into a bathhouse—because of the heat, [the vessel] will start to sweat” and to drip due to condensation.81 The role of water in the Creation account is explored empirically elsewhere as well. Eleazar argues that the water that God initially created was fresh water, not salt water; the latter came into being only later, when “pure” water mixed with the “mountains of salt” that were made later in the process of Creation: “And anyone who wants to understand the truth, [which is] that the oceanic waters were initially sweet, and became salty on account of the mountains of salt, should construct a glass vessel, like those used by artisans to distill rosewater, and [use it to] separate out the sweet water, leaving the salt by itself. The moisture of the water rises within the vessel due to the heat of the fire, just as it rises upwards from the earth, leaving the salt behind in the bottom of the vessel.”82 Eleazar’s familiarity with the mechanics of distillation allows him to

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explicate— and in theory, to experimentally recreate— the workings of God’s creative activities. Analyzing the process and workings of ma’aseh bereishit— the created world—by means of empirical proofs from the natural order seems fitting, and is in keeping with the theological value attributed to observable “remembrances” described above. But significantly, the Pietists harness natural phenomena even in their discussions of ma’aseh merkavah, the most recondite and transcendent contents of Jewish esotericism. As scholars have long noted, the Pietists transmitted (and perhaps even originated) the sod ha- egoz (“secret of the nut”), a cryptic motif in which the spatial structure of the divine chariot (merkavah) corresponds precisely to the anatomy of a walnut: the exterior shell and interior membranes and chambers are laid out in the same intricate configuration as the fire, electrum, and angels that Ezekiel observes in his famous vision.83 In one passage attributed to Eleazar, this secret is explicitly linked to Psalms 111:4, again indicating that, for the Pietists, theological truths can be derived from routine objects and phenomena found in the natural world.84 But structural analogies of this sort are complemented elsewhere by passages in which elements of the merkavah can be comprehended on the basis of experimental data. In Ezekiel’s prophecy, for example, the angelic “wheels” (ofanim) of God’s chariot are described as “crystalline” (ke- ein tarshish). Eleazar explains that this means that they are transparent, a conclusion he draws in light of empirical verification: “If you place crystals (even tarshish) in clear water in the sunlight during the summertime, the stone, which is [itself] clear and transparent, will not be visible.”85 The nature of prophecy itself can be understood by analogy with yet another sensory observation: “The voice [heard by the prophets] is audible but not visible . . . and is similar to when a man walks through a valley in a mountainous area, where the mountains around him are jagged. When the man speaks, his words mix with the air in the crevices, and when he ceases speaking the mountains echo his words back to him. If he spoke in a loud voice, the echo is loud, and if [he spoke] quietly [the echo is] quiet. [This happens] even though there is nothing there but air— and this is similar to how a bat kol is heard.”86 The workings of echoes thus shed light on the workings of divine aural revelation. Other natural phenomena are marshaled to identify the locations of sacred spaces. The fact that the Garden of Eden is in the east is demonstrable in light of the fact that “the sky is red in the [morning] due to the splendor of

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the flowers and fiery stones that are in Eden,” while Gehenna’s location in the west explains why “from the fiery flames, the sun is blood red when it is in the [west].”87 Eleazar discusses other elements of the throne world by reference to artisanal knowledge, reminiscent of his discussion of distillation above. For example, in describing the intensity of the Dinur River, which is referred to in the book of Daniel and which, according to the Talmud, consists entirely of flowing fire,88 Eleazar avers that “when gold is boiling in the melting pot, its fire is larger than a fire of [burning] wood. Know, that if one places lead into a fire, it will not melt quickly, but if you place it into boiling silver or boiling gold, it will melt instantaneously.”89 Knowledge of metallurgy is also brought to bear in a cryptic discussion of what happens when different angelic legions go to war with one another. He explains: “If one were to ask: ‘Who can harm an angel in war, since they live eternally?’ . . . An example is iron which is being heated in a fire—when one hits it with a hammer, sparks fly [but the iron is not shattered]. . . . So too one angel cannot kill another.”90 Here and elsewhere,91 metallurgical knowledge is invoked for theological ends, as are an array of empirical observations drawn from other artisanal crafts. These technological discussions indicate that the Pietists’ general interest in the natural order was complemented by at least some technical knowledge in those fields in which empirical observations regarding the workings of the natural were harnessed and applied.92 A final example of the invocation of natural phenomena to lend credence to esoteric theological teachings can be found in Eleazar’s discussion of the angel Yorkmi, whom the Talmud had identified as the angel appointed over hail (sar ha- barad).93 As Eleazar explains: “All angels are named after the mission to which they are appointed. For example, Yorkmi is the angel appointed over hail, for when sunlight strikes hail it appears to be green (yarok), as though green fire is being kindled within the hail. [Similarly,] moist tree-branches produce green fire [when they are burned], because of the mixture of water and smoke. Thus Yorkmi [is named on account of the] greenness of water (yorkei de- maya).”94 The “greenness of water” is expanded upon in another context, where Eleazar invokes experimental knowledge in discussing the colors of plants: “You will never find buds [of plants] that are any color other than green, like the color of leeks, because water is the ‘master’ of the earth, and the earth desires it.95 Thus it produces plants that are green, like [water]. For if you put

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rainwater in a stone vessel, and wait for many days, it will turn green. But during the summer the planets rule alongside the sun, and the rainbow, which has many different colors, is present during the summer, thus the buds turn into a variety of different colors.”96 For Eleazar, the green algae that forms in standing water is taken to be the culmination of a process in which water’s true color reveals itself. This empirical confirmation of water’s “greenness” not only undergirds his efforts to understand plant botany, but even to shed light upon the nature of God’s angelic messengers. It also allows Eleazar to explore the nature of tohu (nothingness), the term used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the formlessness of the world prior to Creation. Rabbinic sources had cryptically defined tohu as “the green line (kav hayarok) which surrounds the entire world.”97 In Sodei Razya, Eleazar explains that this green line is “like the green that is on the surface of the water.”98 And in another, somewhat obscure passage, he seems to explain that tohu’s description as a green line links it to the horizon—if one wants to visually apprehend tohu, he says, one should go out to sea in a boat, wait to be lifted up by a wave, and then look around in all directions at the line where the land meets the sky.99 The angel Yorkmi, the nature of tohu, and the biological workings of plants are all newly comprehensible once the fundamentally green nature of water is understood. The empirical observation of physical “remembrances” thus sheds light upon— and inextricably connects— the “natural” and ostensibly “supernatural” realms, in both the exoteric and esoteric writings of the German Pietists. Far from deriding natural causality or seeking to suspend its dictates, the Pietists prized the workings of the material world as a valid source of knowledge about God and His actions.

“The Power of Incantations, and the Power of Herbs, and the Power of Stones” And yet, the Pietists at times invoked Psalms 111:4 regarding “remembrances” that are anything but prosaic. Indeed, in his liturgical commentary Arugat ha-Bosem, Abraham b. Azriel— a student of Eleazar of Worms, and compiler of Ashkenazic and especially Pietistic traditions— offers a categorical description of the “remembrances” found in the world: “Everything the Holy one created in his world is a remembrance of His wonders; he created the power of all kinds of incantations, and the power of herbs, and the power of stones.”100

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Each of these subcategories is well represented in Pietistic writings, and is utilized in contexts that seem prima facie to undermine the notion of a stable, theologically resonant natural order. The “power of incantations” refers to apparently inexplicable phenomena like the one with which this chapter began: “If one places hot ash on hot excrement, it will cause harm to the one who produced [the excrement].” This remembrance, which sheds light upon God’s wondrous invisibility, is accompanied in Pietistic texts by an array of remembrances that are themselves wondrous. For example: “If one were to ask: How can [God] be present everywhere, yet remain invisible to the eye? It is possible to respond that He created an example in His world. . . . If one’s nose is cut off [of his face], and he attaches another person’s nose [to his own face] using a potion, the nose will fall off when the man [who owned it originally] dies, for it smells the death of its [original] body. Some substance must have come in contact with [the nose], though it is too subtle to see.”101 Not only potions serve as wondrous remembrances, but also spells and adjurations: “If one were to ask: How are we to believe that [God] is omnipotent, since He cannot be seen? I will offer you an example: one can adjure a sword so that it will not cut him, or a piece of white-hot iron so that it will not burn him. And even though we see no boundary between the sword or the iron and the body, we know that there is something in the way, preventing the cutting or the burning, even though it is too subtle to see.”102 Or again, “if one places upon oneself a dead snake, and ties it as a belt around himself, no sword will [be able to] harm him.”103 In a similar vein, Eleazar refers to certain varieties of charcoal which can serve as charms that will protect one from magical attacks.104 The “power of herbs” is represented in these contexts as well. Judah discusses a type of grass which can cut iron, again suggesting that there is some force “too subtle to see” in operation, which in turn validate belief in an invisible God.105 But the wondrous remembrance that is most frequently invoked is the “power of stones.” Judah and Eleazar describe an array of stones whose seemingly inexplicable properties point to an array of divine truths. For instance, Judah recurrently discusses the even tekumah (“preserving stone”), an amulet mentioned in rabbinic literature that was purported to prevent miscarriages.106 According to Judah, its workings can be attributed to the power of scent: “The even tekumah . . . has a scent that enters a woman’s belly and [reaches] the fetus. The belly does not block the [scent of the] stone from the fetus,

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and the fetus remains in place until the woman’s pregnancy is complete. This is done through the power of the scent of the stone.” The even tekumah, like the more mundane phenomena traced above, sheds light upon God’s attributes: “Therefore, do not wonder at the actions of God (ha-tsur, lit., “the Rock”), for he does everything through His power even though we do not sense how he does them.”107 The Pietists seem to have been particularly preoccupied by one stone in particular— the magnet or lodestone, which they varyingly identify by its Hebrew, Latin, and German names (even sho’evet, magnet, and Augstein, respectively). “God created an example in his world: a stone which attracts . . . iron to itself, known in German as a magnet or Augstein. We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.”108 Like so many of the natural phenomena we have encountered thus far, Judah utilizes this object for theological ends: “The wondrous proof that God can cause the righteous to cleave to Him is the stone that attracts iron to itself, despite the fact that no one can see by what means it pulls it. It is intended to show that God knows those who trust in him—‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’”109 The Pietists were interested in the practical applications of magnetism as well, and invested these, too, with spiritual significance. Judah provides a lengthy (if confused) description of the nautical compass in his discussion of how the souls of the dead “navigate” the next world: Now if one were to ask, “How will [the souls of the dead] be transported immediately [to Heaven or Hell]?” The stone that attracts iron can demonstrate this, for it attracts a needle to itself in an instant. And the captain of a ship can even use it to discern in which direction his ship is traveling. He brings the magnet in a bowl of water, and places a needle next to it, and asks his fellow: “Where should the ship travel?” If he answers, “east,” and the ship is pointing west, the needle will travel round the magnet via a circular path . . . and if the ship is pointing east, [the needle] will remain straight. “He has created a remembrance of His wonders,” so that we may believe that in an instant the soul can cleave to Heaven or to Hell, via a straight or circular path.110

In addition to these stones, herbs, and magical incantations, Judah and Eleazar also located “remembrances” in the animal kingdom. At times, they recount the properties of mundane animals that they would have had occasion to encounter in daily life. For instance, “a dog can smell the footsteps of a thief, although we cannot see anything of the thief

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remaining in the place of his footsteps, and his footsteps are not marked in the ground. Nonetheless, there is some fine, invisible substance in the place of his footsteps, which the dog uses to recognize the thief.”111 But often the animals in question manifest wondrous and apparently inexplicable qualities. Thus the salamander, “which is not ruled over (i.e., harmed) by fire,” proves that “God’s will and existence” should not be doubted despite the inability of human beings to perceive of them.112 Elsewhere, in discussing God’s restorative powers, Eleazar argues similarly: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders: There is a certain kind of fish . . . which, if it is chopped into pieces and thrown into the water while it is still convulsing, will reattach its components to one another and live. The tail of a lizard does something similar. [The lizard] can remove its tail, and return later on and reattach it to itself.”113 An additional confirmation of the plausibility of resurrection, Eleazar asserts, can be derived from “the weasel, which resurrects its fellow using a certain plant.”114 Another invocation of wondrous phenomena in the animal kingdom appears in reference to the lion; in a yihud text, Judah argues: ‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’ . . . A lion can make a circle like this ○ and move on, and any animal that enters it is unable to leave the circle, till it dies. Behold, the lion can seal and unseal this circle, and allow an animal to leave it, for [the lion] understands every language, and if one goes and beseeches it, [the lion] will understand and indicate what its will is. . . . Behold this wonder. . . . Who taught [the lion] to draw a circle in the earth? Is [the lion] a magician?! Moreover, how is it that by drawing a circle animals become trapped within it? . . . And how does it know every language? Who created animals that are possessed of such wisdom? We cannot help but believe that “there is wisdom on high” (Ps. 73. 11)— that ‘the Lord is a God of wisdom’ (I Samuel 2:3). The lion knows how to draw a circle and trap animals within it, even when he is not present— certainly the Master of All . . . even though he cannot be seen.115

Elsewhere in Pietistic writings, other wondrous animals, such as the phoenix and the barnacle goose, are invoked to similar effect.116 Finally, the Pietists recurrently locate wondrous remembrances in the written sources they had before them. One figure who features prominently in such citations is Alexander the Great, whose legendary exploits were recorded in an array of rabbinic texts.117 Several times, Eleazar invokes a talmudic story in which Alexander revived some salted fish by dipping them in water flowing from the Garden

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of Eden: “It says in Tractate Tamid [that] Alexander the Macedonian washed the [dead] fish [in the waters of the Garden of Eden] and they lived.”118 For Eleazar, this story proves the reasonableness of God’s ability to resurrect the dead. Another marvel described in the same talmudic sugya is mined for theological meaning as well, namely an eyeball that alternates between being extremely heavy and extremely light. Judah proves the theological notion that the entirety of Creation praises God119 by referring to a midrashic tale in which Alexander descends under the sea in a kind of proto-submarine, and hears the water singing God’s praises.120 Alexander is also invoked in reference to other wondrous theological tenets, such as the location of the Garden of Eden and Gehenna.121 As I noted at the outset, scholars have focused on inexplicable “remembrances” of this sort in claiming that in medieval Ashkenaz “the universe [was] . . . empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” I have argued that such a claim is belied by the consistent tendency to invest natural causation, empirical observation, and prosaic objects and phenomena with spiritual profundity. But even the incantations and wondrous objects just surveyed should not be read as pointing to an exclusive concern for “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural.” In order to understand their manifest interest in the wondrous powers of incantations, herbs, and stones, it is necessary to briefly survey the intellectual landscape in which the Pietists, along with their high medieval neighbors, were operating.

Nature before “Nature”:

nifl a’ot

and

m ir a bili a

The once common notion that mechanistic, comprehensible “nature” can be sharply distinguished from the arbitrary and inexplicable “supernatural” has not fared well in recent decades.122 Just as historians and philosophers of science have problematized the traditional opposition between “science” and “pseudoscience,”123 an array of philosophers and critical theorists have demolished the edifice of an unchanging, essentialistic “nature,” instead emphasizing that conceptions of nature are historically contingent and culturally constructed. Thus post-structuralists, feminist and queer theorists, political ecologists, and others have noted that what gets defined as “natural” often has less to do with any intrinsic properties than it does with the specific power relations that are enacted through the very process of crafting definitions. Rather than conceptualize nature vaguely as a

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“jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks,”124 these scholars are far more likely to interrogate the manner by which “nature” (and, concomitantly, “science”) are produced, and the agendas they further, than they are to unquestionably accept their transhistorical existence.125 “Nature,” in this view, “is a meaningless term apart from our will to define it.”126 Defining “nature” was no less fraught during the Middle Ages. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources lists twenty-five distinct meanings for natura (“nature”) and twenty-nine for naturalis (“natural”)— and this in British sources alone.127 Arthur Lovejoy, for his part, famously identified sixty-six distinct definitions of nature.128 There is no question that in the high Middle Ages, European theologians and philosophers, artists and poets, were increasingly preoccupied by the meaning and functioning of the phenomenal world— a process M. D. Chenu famously termed “the discovery of nature.”129 But the precise category of “nature” underlying these pursuits was (like the phenomenal world itself) shifting and mutable: “The term nature could stand for the general order of all creation as a single, harmonious whole, whose study might lead to an understanding of the model on which this created world is formed. It could stand for the Platonic intermediary between the intelligible and material worlds; or for the divinely ordained power that presides over the continuity and preservation of whatever lives in the sublunary world; or for the creative principle directly subordinated to the mind and will of God.”130 Such multifaceted approaches to nature were often personified in the goddess Natura, a character who took on increased centrality in an array of medieval literary texts. Natura was varyingly employed to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts, to represent theological hierarchies through her mediation between the divine and the physical, or to firm up (sometimes in the breach) social, sexual, and gender norms.131 When it came to the realm of morality, nature was sometimes taken to represent the intrinsically good (i.e., “natural law”), at other times characterized by amoral and even immoral carnality.132 It was against these still unstable meanings of “nature” that the very category of the “supernatural” was being oppositionally defined over the course of the high Middle Ages.133 This fluid state of affairs can help us to make sense of the Pietists’ tendency to explore both the marvelous and the mundane in their theological writings. Like their Christian contemporaries, Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were struggling to impose order upon a wide array of

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theologically resonant physical phenomena, both those they observed empirically and those they read about in authoritative texts. When the Pietists’ engagement with wondrous “remembrances” is compared with that of their Christian contemporaries, it becomes apparent that the Pietistic approach toward the natural world paralleled broader currents in Christian theological discourse. A brief survey of some influential Christian approaches to the theological meaning of the natural world— and to the mirabilia that seemed to disrupt it— will illustrate how the interrogation of “nature” among twelfth- and thirteenth- century northern European Christians had much in common with that of their Pietistic neighbors. Let us begin, as medieval Christian theologians often did, with Augustine of Hippo. One of the earliest and most influential treatments of the theological meaning of natural wonders can be found in book twenty-one of Augustine’s City of God, where he responds to skeptical critics who dispute “unreasonable” Christian teachings such as the resurrection of the dead or the miracles described in the Bible. Augustine’s strategy in responding to these critics is not to rationally justify these Christian doctrines, but rather to delegitimize reason itself as an infallible guide to what is and is not true. Augustine details some of the “marvelous” phenomena and objects that can be observed in the natural world— the magnet, for example— and claims that the majority of them are not subject to naturalistic explanations. These wondrous phenomena surely exist, even though, like the resurrection of the dead or the biblical miracles, they cannot be rationally accounted for. Augustine concludes that whether or not something is rationally comprehensible bears no relationship to whether it does or does not exist— God’s omnipotence alone is a sufficient justification for both marvelous phenomena and supernatural miracles. Far from subsuming “marvelous” natural phenomena within the natural order, Augustine uses marvels to undermine the very notion that there is a natural order in the first place. Committed Christians should not invest time and energy in investigating the natural causes of wondrous phenomena, but instead channel the emotional wonder that comes from observing something unexplained into their apprehension of and relationship with God.134 Augustine’s perspective exercised a great deal of influence in the Latin West during the early medieval period.135 Beginning in the twelfth century, however, a number of interrelated developments took place that served to undermine his approach. The first was an

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epistemological shift: for the increasingly naturalistically and scientifically minded theologians of the high Middle Ages, the Augustinian approach to wonders was no longer tenable.136 “To appeal to the omnipotence of God is nothing but vain rhetoric; naked truth requires a little more sweat.”137 The existence of marvelous and hence inexplicable objects and phenomena presented an implicit threat to the scholastics’ valorization of philosophical-theological synthesis. For these thinkers, the emotion of wonder that one feels when confronted with something unexplained could no longer be depicted in the Augustinian manner as a religiously positive value; rather, wonder was simply an expression of ignorance, a tacit admission that one had not managed to discern the rational workings of whatever one was observing. This reevaluation of the wondrous reflected, and furthered, a lowering of the boundaries between the everyday, mundane phenomena whose inner workings were understandable and the exotic, seemingly marvelous phenomena whose inner workings appeared to be hidden from view. Both were, at least in theory, subsumed within a unified natural order.138 But ironically, at the same time that theologians and natural philosophers were revising the Augustinian conception of wonders, knowledge of and interest in the wondrous was dramatically on the rise. To begin with, the twelfth century saw the increased circulation of works of paradoxography, as the “renaissance of the twelfth century” spurred interest in classical texts (such as the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder) that catalogued hundreds of “natural wonders.”139 Late antique animal lore also became increasingly available, as the Greek Physiologus was edited into numerous recensions of Bestiaries, which quickly achieved widespread popularity.140 And ancient knowledge concerning the magical and medical properties of gemstones and certain herbs was spread in flourishing genres of lapidaries and herbals.141 At the same time that classical descriptions of natural wonders were becoming widespread, moreover, interest in contemporary marvels was being fed as well. The high Middle Ages saw a flourishing of travel writings, including the popular works of authors like Marco Polo and Gerald of Wales (and, eventually, the hugely popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville). In their descriptions of their journeys, these authors called attention to the wondrous natural phenomena that they observed or heard about in the course of their travels. Elements of these paradoxographic texts and travel narratives made their way into epic romances as well142 — the so- called “Alexander Romance”

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was particularly influential, and different versions incorporated elements of the flourishing paradoxographic discourse.143 All of these developments ensured a wide audience for and interest in these exotic marvels.144 Thus, just as the European interest in natural wonders was reaching its zenith, a number of influential European intellectuals were engaged in a battle to “‘de-wonder’ anomalies”145 — as the PseudoAlbertine text De mirabilibus mundi put it, “The philosopher’s work is to make marvels cease.”146 One common strategy seized upon by thinkers committed to the notion of a stable natural order was to insist that “wonders” are not contrary to the workings of nature, but merely to what we know of nature. The English canon lawyer Gervase of Tilbury, for instance, insisted that wonders are “perspectival,”147 that is, only “wondrous” to those who are ignorant of their (wholly natural) workings. “We call things marvels that are beyond our understanding,” he explains, “even when they are natural.”148 The recognition that the experience of wonder derived solely from one’s knowledge, or lack thereof, rather than from the ontological status of the wondrous object itself, similarly led the twelfth- century natural philosopher Adelard of Bath (whose Quaestiones naturales first imported much Arabic scientific knowledge to northwestern Europe) to deride his imagined interlocutor for his frequent expressions of amazement: “I do not wonder at your wonder, for the blind person speaks thus of sight.” Or elsewhere, more programmatically: “Why is it that you so wonder at this thing? Why are you amazed, why are you confused? . . . I know that the darkness that holds you, shrouds and leads into error all who are unsure about the order of things. For the soul, imbued with wonder and unfamiliarity, when it considers from afar, with horror, the effects of things without considering their’ causes, has never shaken off its confusion. Look more closely, consider the circumstances, propose causes, and you will not wonder at the effects.”149 The desire to overcome wonder could thus serve as an impetus toward further investigation, and various scientific thinkers contributed to a growing corpus of texts treating wonders from a scientific perspective, culminating in the encyclopedic De causis mirabilium of the fourteenth- century scientist Nicholas Oresme.150 Certain scholastics sought to distinguish the universal natura simpliciter (“unqualified nature”) from natura secundum quod (“qualified nature”); the former referred to a universal order governed by teleological causes, the

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latter to the particular exceptions and deviations that could nonetheless be explained in a rational fashion. But despite “bending over backward to contain randomness itself within the ambit of a purposeful natural order,”151 the scholastics found that, despite their best efforts, there remained observable phenomena stubbornly impervious to rational inquiry.152 These thinkers arrived, by necessity, at a compromise position. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, posited the existence of a middle ground between the natural and the supernatural, which he called the “preternatural.”153 In theory, preternatural objects and phenomena had natural qualities and operated in accordance with reason; but in practice, the scholastics admitted that they remained ignorant of the inner workings of these marvels. The invention of the category of the preternatural was to some extent a face-saving measure—it allowed the scholastics to remain committed to the proposition that everything had a rational explanation, while nonetheless admitting that there were phenomena that still needed to be more completely understood. An object or phenomenon could fall into the category of the preternatural for a variety of reasons: for example, it might be subject to chance, to an unpredictable confluence of natural forces that cause it to behave as it does. The most common explanation, however, for why a preternatural phenomenon behaves as it does was the imputation to it of “occult qualities.” This designation, which continued to be invoked until well into the early modern period,154 essentially meant that the reason an object behaved in a certain manner was natural but inexplicable according to the known laws of natural causation. Or, to use the more technical language of the scholastics themselves, an occult quality was the “specific form” of an object or phenomenon, which conferred its particulars upon it; this stood in contrast to the “manifest properties” of natural objects, which could be accounted for by reference to their elemental composition. Scholastic thinkers sought to account in this manner for the routine, predictable, yet mysterious workings of seemingly supernatural phenomena.155 This sort of elite intellectual engagement with the wondrous and the occult had implications for the medieval conception of magic as well. Ever since the publication of Lynn Thorndike’s magisterial History of Magic and Experimental Science, scholars have increasingly come to recognize that magic was part and parcel of the medieval learned discourse over the workings of the natural order. Theologians, of course, were quick to condemn “necromancy,” magical

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praxis accomplished via the adjuration of demons, and magia could certainly be used as a term of opprobrium. But many theologians and natural philosophers alike tended to accept the validity and permissibility of so- called “natural magic,” which harnessed the occult properties of various objects in order to exploit natural “sympathies” and “antipathies” for concrete ends.156 Thus, the lines between what we would today call “science” and “magic” were for medieval thinkers very blurry indeed: lapidaries and medical treatises contained detailed descriptions of the amulets that could be made from various precious stones,157 and descriptions of materia medica in herbals were consulted by physicians and magicians alike.158 Pursuits such as physiognomy and, of course, astrology were also firmly within the “scientific” mainstream during this time period.159 Conceptually related to both occult “wonders” and natural magic was another discourse that flourished during this time period, but one which, at first glance, seems unrelated: technical, mechanical, and artisanal knowledge. In order to understand the linkage between these spheres, let us return briefly to occult properties. While the scholastics’ imputation of these hidden qualities to preternatural objects was intended to subsume those objects within the natural world, it also entailed a value judgment as to their status relative to other natural phenomena. For the scholastics, the theoretical, speculative via rationis (way of reason) was the favored intellectual approach; the via experimentalis (way of experiment), rooted in empiricism and induction, was far lower on the epistemological hierarchy. Preternatural objects and their occult workings could only be apprehended through empiricism— the attractive pull of the magnet could be seen, after all, but never derived from the known laws of nature. As such, writings about “marvelous” objects and phenomena were frequently grouped together with writings about other spheres of interest that were dependent upon observation of nature. The foremost example of this latter category was technical, artisanal crafts. After all, medieval artisans passed down their “trade secrets” from generation to generation, and developed new ones not via mathematical formulae or logical deduction, but through experimentation and careful observation. While discussions of casting spells, or of wondrous animals, might seem at first glance to have little to do with horticultural guidance or recipes for tanning solution, all of these contents were often grouped together in medieval writings on account of their shared epistemological foundations. Indeed, the curricular divisions of knowledge that

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can be found in works like William of Conches’s Philosophia mundi tend to subsume “magic” within the “mechanical arts” rather than in the Trivium or Quadrivium— attesting to the perceived linkages between empiricism, mechanical knowledge, and the occult.160 In fact, this period saw the growth of an entire genre of literature devoted to precisely these subjects, namely the “books of secrets.”161 Along with discussions of “marvelous” natural objects and their uses, these collections also contained a mix of recipes for medicines, spells, and instructions on how to master a wide array of crafts. Despite (or perhaps because of) their purportedly esoteric nature, these books were extremely popular in the medieval period— even among the scholastics, many of whom devoted considerable attention to these texts and their contents.162 Certain especially popular books of secrets even achieved quasi- canonical status among the university students and scholars. The extremely influential Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), for instance, has survived in so many manuscripts that Thorndike declared it “the most popular book in the Middle Ages.”163 This text, a “mirror for princes” supposedly composed by Aristotle for the use of his pupil Alexander the Great, combines basic political and moralistic guidance with medical, alchemical, and physiognomic contents and sundry magical spells. The very fact that it was attributed to Aristotle, and flourished among clerics and university scholars alike, attests to the fluid boundaries during this period between magic, science, and the occult.164 Scholars of medieval and early modern Jewish culture have increasingly explored the fluidity between medieval Jewish “science” and “magic.” Today it is a commonplace, for example, that the rationalist philosopher Moses Maimonides’ famous condemnation of astrology as a pseudoscience was well beyond the mainstream of medieval Jewish scientific discourse, and that influential thinkers from Abraham Ibn Ezra to Abraham Bar Hiyya to Gersonides all considered astrology to be a— even the—valid approach to understanding the natural world, useful for scientific, medical, and theological purposes alike.165 Occult properties— known as segulot—were seized upon by Jewish thinkers just as they were by their Christian contemporaries, and amulets and talismans were endorsed as medically effective and well within the contemporary definition of “rationality.”166 For philosophically minded Sephardic thinkers, then, as for high medieval scholastics, the ostensibly “magical” and occult could be readily subsumed within a stable and comprehensible natural order.

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Awareness of this cultural and intellectual backdrop casts the Pietists’ preoccupation with both routine and marvelous “remembrances” in new light. Like their Christian contemporaries, the Pietists assumed that the natural order was both amenable to analysis and theologically meaningful. And like their Christian contemporaries, they invoked a wide array of initially inexplicable phenomena— ranging from spells and amulets to artisanal “trade secrets”—which they utilized to think through the limits and meaning of the natural order. Closer attention to several of the categories of “remembrances” discussed above allow us to trace not only the conceptual parallels between Jewish and Christian conceptions of nature, and the role of wonders therein, but also the specific, shared textual genres they utilized in order to explore them.

Occult Properties and “Subtle Substances” We have noted that “wondrous” stones such as the magnet and even tekumah featured prominently among the remembrances invoked by the Pietists, who claim that they lend credence to God’s invisible powers. But the Pietists do not simply assert that these stones function through supernatural channels. Rather, they attempt to the best of their abilities to account for the specific means by which the magnet functions: “We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.” The underlying strategy is not to validate God’s supernatural powers by equating God’s attributes with those of other supernatural phenomena. On the contrary, by positing the existence of an intermediary substance that attracts the iron to the magnet, and that is too “subtle” to be seen by human eyes, the Pietists are seeking to explain that magnetism works via innate and consistent, albeit hidden, means.167 Just as the only way to account for the empirically observed phenomenon of magnetic attraction is to accept that invisible forces can function as part of nature, so, too, there is nothing unreasonable about accepting that God’s power is real, despite its invisibility. A comparison between the Pietists’ approach to magnetism and that of some of their contemporaries lends credence to the notion that the Pietists understood magnetism to be a wholly “natural” remembrance. For in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, magnetism was frequently invoked in debates over the stability of the natural

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order— often by opponents of the increasingly naturalistic theological discourse. The thirteenth- century Spanish halakhist Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba), for instance, argued, “I find it surprising that [advocates of science and philosophy] agree that their investigations do not even grasp the truth of natural phenomena, for every object has properties that they cannot account for [rationally], such as the fact that a stone can attract iron. . . . Is there anything that is more supernatural than for one inanimate object to cause another one to move? . . . If Aristotle himself had described this, and it were not already well known, [these scientists and philosophers] would doubtlessly have repudiated him.”168 The Pietists’ efforts, however limited, to explain the workings of magnetism are noteworthy when compared with this alternative approach. For Ibn Adret, the magnet proves that investigation of the natural world can never ultimately lead to truths about God, because He is fundamentally hidden from rational inquiry— notably, the same argument advanced by Augustine centuries earlier. Ibn Adret’s pupil R. Joshua Ibn Shueb echoes this approach: How can one rely exclusively upon his intellect? For we see that the intellect is exhausted even by natural, physical things . . . among stones. . . . For we see that certain stones, which are inanimate and motionless, can attract iron . . . and induce motion in motionless objects. . . . [Thus,] the intellect is insufficient for grasping even sensible objects, much less hidden matters. . . . Rather, [the philosophers] claim that these stones have an attraction that causes them to become attached to these objects, while other [stones] have an antipathy [that causes them to be repulsed]. . . . And there are many other matters also which the scientists are unable to explain, and which, in light of their inabilities to offer explanations, they attribute to “occult properties” (segulot).169

For Ibn Shueb, occult properties are not a means of situating natural but inexplicable phenomena within a stable, rational natural order. Rather, they are an intellectually dishonest attempt to mask the fact that the intellect is not a valid guide to understanding the natural world—much less “hidden matters” such as theology. For the Pietists, in contrast, it is precisely investigating the phenomenon of magnetism, and concluding that there must be some natural process through which it functions, that allows one to draw a link between the natural world and the theological truths it encodes. Indeed, conceptual parallels to the Pietistic approach to magnetism can be found not among “anti-rationalists” like Ibn Adret, but precisely among the philosophical authors, both Jewish and Christian,

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whose insistence upon natural causation rendered the occult properties of the magnet potentially troubling. For instance, the Pietists’ contemporary William of Auvergne, a French philosopher and theologian steeped in Aristotelian science, invoked the mysterious workings of the lodestone— a magnet that can “magnetize” other metal objects— as a means of justifying various other philosophical propositions. William describes how one can link a series of metal pins to one another in a chain, so long as the first pin is attached to adamantine (a lodestone), which magnetizes each subsequent pin in contact with it: For you will see that the first pin of those ordered in this way hangs from this stone which it touches; then that the second pin adheres to it by similar contact, and the third, the fourth, and so on with the others. Since, therefore, the power of the adamantine by which it makes the first pin to adhere to it is transferred to all the pins, why is it surprising if the vivifying or animal power of the first heaven is transferred to the second, and from the second to the third, and so on until it comes to the last of the mobile heavens, which is the heaven of the moon, even if there is not another bond or bonding between them than contiguity or contact, as is seen in the proposed example.170

The argumentation here is nearly identical to that found in the Pietistic sifrut ha- yihud. The ability of the spheres to transfer their “vivifying force” sequentially, from the outermost reaches of the cosmos inward, cannot be apprehended visually, but the example of the lodestone grants credence to this abstract scientific notion. Jewish rationalists, too, were content to explain magnetism in occult terms—without rejecting the broader construct of natural causality. Abraham Ibn Ezra,171 Maimonides,172 the fourteenth- century southern French philosopher Levi b. Gershon (Gersonides),173 and many others discussed the workings of the magnet in their writings, and concluded that its occult workings can be subsumed within the routine natural order.174 Magnetism should have been problematic for Maimonides and Gersonides in particular, since the Aristotelian natural philosophy to which they were committed held action at a distance to be impossible. Maimonides thus insisted that “even the magnet exerts an attraction upon iron at a distance through a force, spreading out from it in the air, which encounters the iron.”175 Gersonides, who discussed magnetism several times in his philosophical opus Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord) and in his supercommentaries on Averroes, likewise concluded that “the intervening medium is affected,” and that some sort of physical contact between

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the mover and the moved object is taking place.176 For Gersonides, who also uses the language of segulot, occult properties are not a strike against a rationally comprehensible natural order, as Ibn Adret or Ibn Shueb would have it. Rather, they are a means of privileging Aristotelian physics even in the face of potentially conflicting evidence. His account of the occult workings of magnetism, like Ibn Ezra’s and even Maimonides’, is thus functionally equivalent to the Pietists’ discussion of the “subtle substance that attracts [the iron to the magnet] which we cannot see.” It must be noted that many of these parallels are of heuristic value only—while they were familiar with the writings of Ibn Ezra, the Pietists never had access to the Guide, and predated William by several decades and Gersonides by a century. But the similarities are suggestive nonetheless. For the Pietists and these philosophical thinkers alike, magnetism is a “wondrous” phenomenon, whose occult workings do not undermine natural causality but rather can be subsumed within it— and can even be invoked to shed light on comparable philosophical and theological doctrines. When we turn to the Pietists’ treatment of the uses of magnetism, however, we find parallels in Christian scientific sources that are far closer in time, and which suggest the possibility of direct exchanges and encounters. As we have seen above, the Pietists extended their discussions of magnetism to the devices that worked via magnetic means, and hence they describe the nautical compass in a quite detailed manner. In their treatment of this device, the Pietists betray a familiarity with the state of the art of medieval technology— the compass was first introduced into medieval Europe during the late twelfth century and early thirteenth centuries, when it appeared in scientific and encyclopedic works like the De Naturis Rerum of Alexander Neckham, the Historia Orientalis seu Hierosolymitana of Jacques de Vitry, and the Liber Particularis of Michael Scot.177 These early authors had a difficult time determining how the compass functioned— like the magnet itself, the workings of the compass were considered to be hidden, and it is not until later in the thirteenth century that figures like Thomas of Cantimpre, Albertus Magnus, and especially Peter Peregrinus authored more detailed accounts of the workings of magnetism. Nonetheless, Neckham, Jacques de Vitry, and others described the compass in a mechanistic manner, rather than attributing its workings to magic or the supernatural, indicating that they

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understood this object to function naturalistically despite its occult status. Where did the Pietists come upon this knowledge? One possibility emerges from the passage in Arugat ha-Bosem cited above, in which Abraham b. Azriel invokes “the power of stones” (ko’ah avanim) as an archetypical “remembrance” of God’s wonders. As we have seen above, the notion that stones have intrinsic “powers” was a mainstay of contemporary lapidaries, which listed the properties and uses of various minerals and gems. Magnets features prominently in these collections— and, significantly for our purposes, the composition and translation of lapidaries were a site of intellectual exchange between medieval Jews and Christians.178 The best known medieval lapidary, Marbode of Rennes’ eleventh- century Liber de lapidibus, was translated several times into Hebrew (notably by the twelfth- century French polymath Berakhiyah ha-Nakdan) and circulated in Ashkenaz during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.179 Indeed, many of these lapidaries circulated under the generic title Sefer Ko’ah ha-Avanim— indicating that these scientific treatises on the occult properties of various gemstones were likely what Abraham had in mind when he invoked the ko’ah ha- avanim in his explication of Psalms 111:4 in Arugat ha-Bosem. Recently, Gad Freudenthal and Jean-Marc Mandosio have suggested that the Hebrew translations of Marbode’s lapidary achieved popularity in northern France and Germany due to the role they played in the rabbinic curriculum, helping biblical exegetes to understand passages in the Bible (such as the description of the High Priest’s breastplate in Exodus 28) based on the realia described in learned vernacular texts.180 Moreover, these texts were at times “Judaized” in addition to being translated: at least one Hebrew lapidary from medieval Germany was modified so as to include elements that correspond to the writings of Judah and Eleazar.181 Significantly, that same text contains a detailed description of the use of magnets as nautical compasses, reminiscent of Judah’s own description cited above.182 Judah’s repeated invocation of the therapeutic powers of the “preserving stone” similarly suggests that the Pietists treat wondrous gems not as supernatural phenomena, but rather as natural objects that function via occult means. After all, lapidaries consistently discuss the amulets that can be made from the various stones they treat, and numerous stones are described as being useful specifically for preventing miscarriages.183 Indeed, the manner in which Judah describes the

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even tekumah itself indicates that he saw it not as a deviation from natural causality, but rather as an object whose workings could— and should—be accounted for rationally. As we saw above, Judah believes that this amulet is effective because it works in a physical manner— namely through scent. He takes pains to clarify this point over and over again in his writings. At one point, for instance, he explicitly asks how it is possible for an amulet to have a physical effect: “And if one were to ask: ‘How can a fetus benefit from the even tekumah?’ It is possible to respond that the fetus enjoys the smell of it, and does not leave its appointed place, and remains at rest. And if one were to ask: ‘What scent does a stone have?’ It is possible to respond that the beeswax we light on the Day of Atonement has no smell that we can discern, but the bees smell it. So too, even though we cannot smell it, the fetus smells [the even tekumah] and closes the womb, and does not leave until the stone is removed.”184 Judah is clearly troubled here by the fact that the effectiveness of this object cannot be accounted for in any discernable way. He therefore attempts to explain it by reference to the beeswax candles lit by his community on the Day of Atonement— a “proof” of God’s existence that also recalls their invocation of dogs’ olfactory abilities discussed above. The Pietists invoke scent in their discussions of other magical phenomena as well. A transplanted nose will fall off when its original owner dies because “it smells the death of its [original] body, since some substance reached it, even though it is too subtle to see.”185 Indeed, just as in the case of magnetism, the existence of some “subtle” substance that can account for the physical workings of apparently magical practices is proposed over and over again. Thus in discussing the use of excrement to damage a person, Judah argues that “there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see.”186 He draws a similar conclusion regarding various spells and charms which protect a person from being harmed by swords or fire— these result in “some barrier that prevents him from being cut or burned, even though it is too subtle to see.”187 Once again, the strategy employed by the Pietists in making sense of these magical “remembrances” is functionally equivalent to the scholastics’ invention of “occult qualities.” In both instances, apparent deviations from natural causality are nevertheless subordinated to the natural world, through the positing of an innate, physical cause for phenomena whose workings are not understood. And just as there must be an invisible link that physically effectuates an array of magical processes, the Pietists argue, so

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too invisible spiritual entities can be said to exist. This argumentation is precisely the sort used by Christian practitioners of “natural magic,” who argued that their magical practices functioned not via maleficent means, but rather by exploiting the occult sympathies and antipathies intrinsic to the objects they utilized.

Pietists, “Philosophers,” and Polemicists There is reason to believe, moreover, that the Pietists came to this understanding of the workings of magic through contacts with practitioners in their surrounding culture. The Pietists refer throughout their writings to conversations with “the philosophers” (ha-filosofim). As Scholem long ago noted, the Pietists “[use] the term ‘philosophers’ in the same sense in which it is used in the medieval Latin writings on alchemy and occultism, i.e. as the designation of a scholar versed in these occult sciences.”188 But it seems that their references to these philosophers reflect not merely a terminological parallel, but rather direct exposure on the part of the Pietists to the very same occultists Scholem mentioned. For the philosophers are invoked by the Pietists in reference to practices that were commonplace in the surrounding magical culture, both in scholastic universities and among priests who inhabited what Richard Kieckhefer has termed “the clerical underworld.”189 For example, the Pietists frequently discuss a divinatory practice called sarei kos u- sarei bohen (“the divine beings of the cup and thumbnail”), which could reveal the whereabouts of a thief by asking a small child to interpret the images he sees reflected in a pool of oil poured into a vessel, or spread on his fingernails.190 This magical practice was invested with great import by the Pietists, who invoke it repeatedly in their attempts to understand the mechanics of prophetic revelation (in which the prophet analogously sees ontologically blurred images that are “reflections” of the divine). Moreover, they repeatedly describe conversations with the “philosophers” about the workings of this phenomenon, conversations in which the Pietists and their non- Jewish contemporaries debate the workings of this practice, and its implications for comprehension of divine revelation. It is thus especially significant that the very same divinatory practices were common within the Pietists’ immediate milieu. Divination through interpretation of images on reflective surfaces (“captoptromancy”) was discussed in the abstract by such Christian thinkers as Michael Scot

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and William of Auvergne;191 others, like John of Salisbury, recorded their own firsthand experience with this practice: During my boyhood I was placed under the direction of a priest, to teach me psalms. As he practiced the art of crystal gazing, it chanced that he after preliminary magical rites made use of me and a boy somewhat older, as we sat at his feet, for his sacrilegious art, in order that what he was seeking by means of finger nails moistened with some sort of sacred oil or crism, or of the smooth polished surface of a basin, might be made manifest to him by information imparted by us. And so after pronouncing names which by the horror they inspired seemed to me, child though I was, to belong to demons, and after administering oaths of which, at God’s instance, I know nothing, my companion asserted that he saw certain misty figures, but dimly, while I was so blind to all this that nothing appeared to me except the nails or basin and the other objects I had seen there before. As a consequence I was adjudged useless for such purposes, and, as though I impeded the sacrilegious practices, I was condemned to have nothing to do with such things, and as often as they decided to practice their art I was banished as if an obstacle to the whole procedure. So propitious was God to me even at that early age.192

The Pietists might likewise have observed captoptromantic divination firsthand, but they could equally have been exposed to discussions of “natural magic” in the Hebrew translations of Christian scientific encyclopedias that circulated during their time period. Y. Tzvi Langermann, for example, has called attention to a Hebrew translation of William of Conches’s Summa Philosophica, fragments of which are still extant in two medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts.193 Interestingly, the extant sections deal, among other topics, with “natural magic,” including various methods of divination and augury. While denigrating divination via demonic adjuration, what the Pietists would have called ov ve- yidoni, this text described matter-of-factly the mechanics of hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, and so on.194 If the Pietists read texts like this one, they would have been exposed not only to specific magical techniques, but also to the same ethos of magic as a natural, though occult, sphere of inquiry that they manifest in their discussions of magical “remembrances.” While the precise means by which the Pietists absorbed sarei kos u- bohen thus remains open to question, we are on firmer ground when it comes to their knowledge of another divinatory method. We have seen above that the Secretum secretorum, erroneously attributed to Aristotle (“the Philosopher”), was perhaps the most important

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medieval “book of secrets,” and that its magical contents were consumed by clerics and university teachers alongside more mainstream scientific and philosophical writings. Given the centrality of this text to the culture inhabited by the Pietists’ “philosophers,” it is thus noteworthy that the Pietists seem to have had direct access to the Secretum secretorum, and to have incorporated some of its contents into their own theological tracts. In a section of the Secretum secretorum dealing with the ways in which a ruler can be guaranteed success in battle, the author (“Aristotle”) counsels the addressee (“Alexander the Great”): Know, Alexander, that this is the secret which I would perform for you whenever you went out to confront your enemies . . . and it is one of the divine secrets with which God has graced me. I have tested its truthfulness, and discovered its benefit, and succeeded on account of it. . . . [The secret is] that you should never go out to confront your enemies without first ensuring you will defeat them, by using this [method of] calculation. If the sum [you arrive at] does not favor you, calculate using your servants’ names, and send out against the [opposing] army whoever results in a winning calculation. You should calculate the name of your opponent and your own name using this system, and carefully guard the sum you arrive at for each [combatant]. Afterwards, divide the sum you have arrived at for each person by nine. Whatever remainder of less than nine is left over for each name should be . . . investigated according to the sums I have written for you.195

The Secretum secretorum here provides a system for calculating the names of the combatants in a battle, and hence for predicting the outcome of that battle. The alphanumerical sums arrived at for each name should be divided by nine, and the remainders should be compared with one another. This passage is followed by an extensive chart that contains every possible permutation, revealing who will succeed if a person whose name generates a certain remainder confronts a person whose name generates a different remainder— thus “one and eight, the eight will defeat the one; one and seven, the one will defeat the seven,” and so on. The Pietists betray their familiarity with this system several times in their oeuvre. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, for example, a discussion of the properties of the number nine leads Eleazar to the following aside: Also, in the “sums of the philosophers” (heshbonot shel filosofim), they calculate by nines, and determine the future based on the remainder. When comparing two similar things, you follow the

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chapter 1 higher remainder, and when comparing two dissimilar things, you follow the lower one. . . . What is meant by two similar things? Like two Jews, who have the same faith and the same Torah, or two gentiles who have the same [religion]—when you calculate the name of one of them and divide by nine, and six remains, and [when you divide] the other [name] five remains, then if the two of them fight with one another, whichever fighter has a higher remainder will be victorious. But if a gentile fights with a Jew, the one with a remainder of five, that is, a lower one, will be victorious. . . . Thus claim the philosophers.196

In Sefer Gematriyot, Judah utilizes the same system for determining the outcome of a different sort of battle— that between a husband and wife. When the numerical equivalents of the names of a man and woman are added together, then divided by nine, each possible remainder is equated with a certain astrological outcome, such that the future success or failure of the match can be determined in advance.197 The “sums of the philosophers,” then, were adapted from the Secretum secretorum, a work attributed to “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), and one in vogue among contemporary “philosophers,” scholars learned in natural philosophy and occult sciences. Of course, the Pietists were enamored of gematriyah in general, and so a system that prognosticated on the basis of alphanumerical equivalences must have particularly piqued their interest. But the fact that in this instance, as in their use of sarei kos u- bohen, they sought out divinatory practices specifically from among “the philosophers” indicates that their predilection for gematriyah is not a sufficient explanation for the presence of this practice in their writings. Indeed, while the Secretum secretorum was translated into Hebrew during the medieval period (as Sod ha- Sodot), the earliest attestations of the latter are from the early to mid-fourteenth century,198 while the manuscript of Sefer Gematriyot is likely from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth.199 Thus, the citations from the Secretum secretorum in the Pietistic works may well be the earliest on record. Alternatively, the Pietists could have been exposed to the contents of Secretum secretorum even before it had been translated into Hebrew, or at least into the version that has survived. (Indeed, it is striking to note that Eleazar titled his own magnum opus Sodei Razya, the “Secret of Secrets.”) While oral transmission of these contents seems most plausible, it is not impossible that the Pietists had access to, and could have read, Latin or vernacular texts of the Secretum secretorum—which, as we

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have seen above, were extremely widespread. After all, Sefer Hasidim is replete with tales of Jews who come into possession of grimoires, collections of magical spells, 200 and there is some evidence that certain Ashkenazic Jews in the Pietists’ circles knew Latin and even read Christian texts. According to one exemplum in Sefer Hasidim: “A certain man told his friend, ‘I dressed like a priest and passed myself off as a gentile’ [during a period of persecution] so that they would think he was a priest and not hurt him. Another said, ‘I studied Christian books (sefer galhim),’ and when he was among the gentiles he would recite hymns in their language.”201 Casual references to Pietistic knowledge of Latin, and of details of Christian belief and observance, appear in other passages as well. Thus, Judah is well aware of the fact that Christians recite Psalms in their liturgy and is troubled by the fact that “the book of Tehilim, which David composed for the sake of heaven, and transmitted to the Levites to sing over the sacrifices [in the Temple], are used by [Christian] priests, who recite them before their idolatry.”202 Yet Judah himself unselfconsciously refers to mizmorim (chapters of Tehilim) as “Psalms”203 (‫)שלמש‬. Further evidence from Sefer Hasidim indicates that Christian maidservants would sing Christian hymns (shir shel avodah zarah) as lullabies to the Jewish children in their care. 204 Nor did exchanges of this sort take place only among marginal figures like servants and children: “One must not teach a Christian cleric (Hebrew?) letters, or play pleasant music in his presence, lest the cleric use that tune before his idolatry. And a tune used before idolatry must not be used by a Jew in praise of the Holy One, blessed be He.”205 Given a culture in which contacts between Jews and Christians took place so frequently, and in which Jews could be expected to know details of Christian practice, 206 and, in some cases, to have access to Latin books, it should come as no surprise that encounters with Christian “philosophers” would yield knowledge of the kinds of natural magic that the Pietists incorporate into their own writings and texts. Indeed, contacts of this sort may also account for the Pietists’ invocations of “wondrous” animals for theological ends. We have noted above that the twelfth century saw the rise of bestiaries, illustrated compendia that described the character and properties of numerous real and fantastic animals. These texts survive in many distinct recensions and consisted mainly of late antique animal lore, compiled from texts like the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, and the late antique Physiologus. 207 The twelfth- and

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thirteenth- century bestiaries contained much “scientific” data, and many of their contents were themselves incorporated into high medieval scientific encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, bestiaries were hardly intended to be abstract compilations of objective facts; rather, these texts were explicitly concerned with discerning the underlying spiritual meaning of the animals they described— the properties of various animals symbolized or shed light upon doctrines such as the Incarnation, Christ’s resurrection, and so on. Scientific (albeit wondrous) facts about animals are thus invoked not as ends in themselves, but rather for the light they shed on the theological and spiritual truths that they represent. This hermeneutical methodology is remarkably similar to that expressed by the Pietists. In both instances, the (sometimes fantastic) traits of animals are significant not in themselves, but primarily for the light they cast on ‘wondrous’ theological propositions—whether the powerful presence of an invisible God, or the ability of a divine being to become incarnate in a human womb. 208 But the linkages between medieval bestiaries and the Pietists’ discussions of animals run deeper than just this conceptual parallel. As noted above, some of the animal properties known to the Pietists could have been observed empirically; others, like the fire resistance of the salamander, are alluded to in rabbinic writings.209 But many of the facts about animals that the Pietists blithely invoke do not appear in any known works by prior Jewish authors that the Pietists would have encountered. Here again, the bestiaries provide us with a solution to the question of the Pietists’ sources. For example, the notion that weasels are able to resurrect one another through the administration of a certain medicinal herb, which the Pietists invoke as a confirmation of God’s power to resurrect the dead, appears nowhere in prior rabbinic literature, but is widespread in the bestiary texts, where weasels are said to revive their children when they die by administering a herb (usually rue) (Figure 1).210 This “fact” was popularized in narrative texts like Marie de Frace’s Eliduc, 211 and was also included in subsequent scientific encyclopaedias, such as the popular De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, composed in early thirteenth-century Magdeburg.212 The notion that lions hunt by trapping their prey in magic circles appears in Bartholomew’s work too, 213 as well as in numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries.214 The magic circle appears in these bestiaries’ illustrations as well (Figure 2). Ashkenazic Jews would have had occasion to learn about bestiaries and their contents via oral transmission. After all, in the twelfth

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Figure 1. A weasel resurrecting her cubs using “a certain herb” (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, fol. 96v)

and thirteenth centuries, the information about animals contained in bestiaries and encyclopaedias was hardly confined to written documents. Rather, information about the natural world and its theological implications was frequently fodder for Christian preaching. Works in the developing genre of Ars predicandi suggested that the properties of things in nature be invoked in sermons, leading preachers to marshal data culled from bestiaries, animal fables, and works of natural history for their moralistic and theological implications. 215 The thirteenth- century German text Proprietates rerum naturalium adaptate sermonibus de tempore per totius anni circulum, for instance, collected wondrous facts about animals and organized them so that they could be interspersed in sermons at the appropriate point in the liturgical year. 216 Indeed, medieval bestiaries were frequently combined together with sermons in medieval manuscripts— a fact that led one recent scholar to suggest that the medieval bestiary might have functioned less as a coherent, independent treatise than as a “summa of sermon material.”217

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Figure 2. A lion hunts using a magic circle (MS Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 3466, 8º, fol. 6v)

It is quite plausible that medieval Ashkenazic Jews could have encountered such preaching, since one of the most prominent ends for which animal data were marshaled was precisely anti-Jewish polemic. A wide array of “Jewish animals” was thought to anchor anti-Jewish beliefs and stereotypes firmly within the symbolic meaning of the natural order. 218 Thus the owl, for instance, was consistently equated with the Jews, since both of them “prefer darkness to light.”219 Other animals, like the hyena, which feasts on corpses with its ferocious fangs, and the bonnacon, which attacks men using its dung as a projectile, were linked to Jews in equally unsubtle ways. 220 These animals’ supposed properties, and their anti-Jewish implications, could easily have become known to Ashkenazic Jews in the course of polemical encounters. In his Topographia Hibernica, for example, Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223) homiletically invokes the wondrous natural properties of animals found in bestiary lore for anti-Jewish polemical ends:

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Repent, unhappy Jew, recollect, though late, that man was first generated from clay without being procreated by male and female; nor will your veneration for the law allow you to deny that. In the second place, woman was generated of the man, without the intervention of the other sex. The third mode of generation only by male and female, as it is the ordinary one, obstinate as you are, you admit and approve. But the fourth, from which alone came salvation, namely, birth from a woman, without union with a man, you utterly reject with perverse obstinacy, to your own perdition. Blush, O wretched man, blush! At least, recur to nature, which, in confirmation of the faith for our best teaching, continually produces and gives birth to new animals, without union of male and female. The first creature was begotten of clay; this last is engendered of wood.221

Gerald refers here to the wondrous properties of barnacle geese, animals that literally grow on trees. They are invoked in order to highlight the Jews’ blindness and stubbornness. After all, the Jews deny the possibility of Christ having been descended only from a woman, with no biological male input—but they should realize that nature itself attests that this is a tenable possibility, since barnacle geese exist despite having neither father nor mother. 222 Significantly, Pietistic sources themselves describe encounters in which Jews and Christians debated the theological meaning of animals’ properties. According to Sefer Hasidim, A gentile once brought a garment to a group of gentiles and said it was the garment of Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, “If you do not believe me, see what I can do with it.” He cast the garment into the fire, and it did not burn. The monks and priests said to the Jews, “See— there is holiness in this garment!” The sage replied, “Give it to me, and I will see what it contains.” He took some strong vinegar, and washed the garment before their eyes. He said, “Now cast it into the fire and test it.” They cast it into the fire, and it burned immediately. They asked [the sage], “Why did you think to wash it?” He replied, “Because it was coated in salamandra, and so I needed to wash the garment [to reveal its true nature].”223

Here, knowledge of the imperviousness of salamanders to fire becomes a weapon in the Jews’ polemical arsenal, as it allows them to combat an otherwise miraculous proof of the sanctity of a Christian relic. Two implications of this passage are worth emphasizing. First, it suggests that animals and their properties could be discussed in the course of actual encounters between Jews and Christians. 224 Second, it reinforces the fact that “wondrous” animal properties were understood to be part and parcel of the natural order. Far from being

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an inexplicable, supernatural phenomenon, the imperviousness of the salamander to fire is here invoked precisely as a naturalistic explanation for what would otherwise be considered a miraculous occurrence. Other contemporaneous Ashkenazic texts similarly marshal “facts” about wondrous animals for avowedly “scientific” ends. 225 The Pietists’ exposure to contemporary, polemically wielded bestiary lore can be confirmed by noting their adaptation of one final anti-Jewish motif. A number of bestiaries linked the “duplicitous” Jews to animals whose sexuality was ambiguous or threatening. Thus the hyena, mentioned above, was not only a corpse eater, but also a hermaphrodite; Jews were also linked to rabbits, whose gender supposedly alternated on a monthly basis, and to weasels, who were thought to copulate orally.226 This linkage between Jews and hermaphrodites—itself linked ideationally to the popular belief that Jewish men menstruated227— further served to equate Jews with “sodomites” in the minds of some Christian authors.228 It is quite possible that the Pietists’ knowledge of weasels and their powers of resurrection, discussed above, may have derived precisely from their exposure to such anti-Jewish barbs. In any case, the Pietists certainly did adopt, and invert, the bestiary’s position on dual-gendered rabbits. In a thirteenth-century exegetical text called Sefer Gematriyot, Judah betrays his knowledge of this motif and utilizes the supposedly dual-gendered nature of the rabbit to clear up a grammatical inconsistency in the Bible’s description of the arnevet (rabbit). According to Leviticus 11:6, because the rabbit “chews its cud, but its hooves are not split, it is impure”—not kosher. As Judah points out, “This [verse] is written both male and female”—that is to say, the verse in Leviticus refers to the rabbit using the female gender (ma’alat gerah hi . . . teme’ah hi lakhem), but the parallel verse in Deuteronomy 14:7 switches to the masculine in its description of the rabbit and hare (ma’aleh gerah hemah . . . teme’im hem lakhem). The conclusion Judah draws is that “one month [the rabbit] is male, and the next month it is female, and it menstruates like a woman.”229 This resolution of the textual difficulty clearly draws on the supposed physiology of rabbits, and reflects Jewish awareness, if not internalization, of this widespread Christian belief. Indeed, elsewhere in the Pietistic corpus, Christian priests are explicitly accused of habitually engaging in homosexual behaviour— suggesting that the same charges aimed at the Jews could be just as easily redirected.230 It is particularly noteworthy, too, that the animals whose theological and exegetical significance the Pietists chose

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to highlight here are precisely the same ones that were used against them as Christian polemical ammunition— and that, at least in the case of the rabbit, the Pietists level precisely the same charge against their Christian contemporaries, based on the same naturalistic argumentation, that they had themselves been faced with.231

The Wanderings of a Wondering Jew In addition to lapidaries, grimoires, bestiaries, and “books of secrets,” the Pietists consumed and produced an additional genre that anchors them firmly within contemporary debates over the relationship between natural order and occult mirabilia: travel narratives, which reported on, and sought to make sense of, the wonders to be found in far- off lands. As we have seen, Christian interest in natural wonder was nourished by, and nourished in turn, an efflorescence of travel narratives describing the “wonders of the east,” especially the ubiquitous Alexander Romance, which, in its varying recensions, described the monsters and wondrous natural phenomena thought to exist at the far reaches of the known world. In the case of the Pietists, too, an interest in wondrous phenomena within the natural world left its mark on the Hebrew travel narratives that circulated among the Jews of Ashkenaz. One such narrative, Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi- Ratisbon (“The Circuit of R. Petahiyah of Regensburg”), was produced within Kalonymide circles and manifests the interplay between real life observation and literary reworking that impacted Jewish ideas about nature just as it did Christian ones. Very little is known about Petahiyah: he was apparently the brother of the prominent Tosafist R. Isaac ha- Lavan of Prague, and he set out in the late twelfth century on a tour of the Crimea, Babylonia, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere— perhaps on pilgrimage, perhaps in search of economic opportunities, 232 perhaps in search of eschatologically meaningful portents. 233 The Sivuv describes Petahiyah’s travels, records his observations regarding the Jews and non-Jews he encounters along the way, and is especially concerned with listing and describing the pilgrimage sites that Petahiyah visited during the course of his journey. But it also describes in detail the wondrous animals, objects, and social mores Petahiyah encountered during his travels— Petahiyah describes with manifest

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amazement his observation of elephants, mandrakes, and hybrid birds; the political power of the Exilarchate; Babylonian women who are learned in written and oral Torah; and so on. Moreover, the shrines and holy sites he tours are depicted as sites of magical activity so manifest that they are revered by Jews, Muslims, and other religious groups alike. Though a critical edition of the Sivuv was published over a century ago, 234 the existing scholarship on Petahiyah and his travelogue is relatively minimal— scholars have tended to dismiss the Sivuv as a useful historical source, given its fantastic and unverifiable contents, and have generally compared it unfavorably with the contemporaneous, more straightforward travelogue of the Spaniard Benjamin of Tudela. 235 But more recent scholarship on medieval chronicle and travel writing should make us skeptical about dismissing a source merely on account of its fantastic or impossible contents. By focusing attention on the “social logic of the text” rather than on the discreet “facts” it purports to compile, scholars have demonstrated that a range of medieval Ashkenazic texts that “look like history” might be best approached from a literary or anthropological perspective rather than a positivistic one. 236 Martin Jacobs’s recent work has applied these critical tools to medieval Jewish travel narratives to illuminating effect. 237 Indeed, in the case of Petahiyah’s Sivuv, the specific circumstances of the text’s composition strongly suggest that it should be read as a literary artifact rather than as a collection of accurate and objective observations. First of all, Petahiyah did not himself compose the surviving accounts of his travels— rather, the Sivuv, which is extant in two main recensions, was compiled and composed by none other than Judah he- Hasid during the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, by which point he was already living in Regensburg. Now, Judah did not merely transcribe the account of Petahiyah’s travels— he edited it, at times with a heavy hand. 238 As such, the surviving accounts of Petahiyah’s travels must not be seen as merely one man’s idiosyncratic recollections; rather, it is worth considering whether the Sivuv can be situated within the Pietists’ broader approach toward the investigation of nature, its workings, and its theological meaning. And indeed, the account contains no shortage of observations of natural phenomena, which Petahiyah (as channeled by Judah) recounts breathlessly. Thus in Baghdad,

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Petahiyah benefits from the healing properties of the waters of the Tigris River, 239 observes an elephant for the first time, 240 rides a “flying camel” that traverses a mile in just moments, 241 and spies mandrakes growing in a local garden, 242 all of which lead him to declare the region “strange and glorious” (meshuneh u- mefu’ar). 243 Elsewhere, he observes new species of birds, 244 snakes that behave in a marvelous manner, 245 and weather conditions so unlike those of Europe that he declares, “Babylonia is truly a different world!”246 The observance of novel natural phenomena is a staple of travel accounts, and the notion that Petahiyah himself set out on his journey solely for the purpose of seeking out such natural wonders seems to me overstated. 247 But Judah’s authorship of this description of Petahiyah’s travels may well have been motivated by such concerns— the Sivuv begins by claiming the work was written in order to record “all the novelties and miracles and wonders of God that he saw and heard,” and “to tell his nation, the Children of Israel, the power and might of God, Who performed miracles and wonders each day for him.”248 In this reading, it is not only the Pietists’ approach to the natural world that mirrors that of their Christian contemporaries, but also the genre through which this approach was manifested: firsthand accounts of travels to the East. Seen from this perspective, it becomes highly significant that elements of Petahiyah’s Sivuv are directly modeled upon the Alexander Romance, Hebrew versions of which were spreading in Ashkenaz just as Latin and vernacular versions were becoming increasingly ubiquitous. We have noted above that the Pietists repeatedly reference the narratives about Alexander found in rabbinic writings, and that they incorporated elements of the Secretum secretorum, addressed to Alexander, into their esoteric writings. In the Sivuv, too, rabbinic passages about Alexander are invoked— but implicitly, masked as Petahiyah’s firsthand observations. For instance, Petahiyah is said to have encountered messengers headed toward the land of Gog, which is past the “mountains of darkness,” whose location Petahiyah then describes in detail. The reference to these mountains in the context of an eschatological discussion, however, originates in a talmudic narrative about Alexander and his adventures in the East— the same passage in which we encountered the salted fish reanimated by the waters of the Garden of Eden. As we have seen, these fish were

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invoked by Judah and Eleazar as one of the “remembrances” of God’s power to resurrect the dead, confirming that this passage may well have been on Judah’s mind when he recorded Petahiyah’s travels in the region of the “mountains of darkness.” In other instances, the wonders Petahiyah is described as having encountered during the course of his travels are adapted not from rabbinic legends about Alexander, but specifically from Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romances that were in circulation during this time period. For example, Judah at one point describes Petahiyah’s experiences at Mt. Ararat: “[Mount Ararat] is full of thorns and herbs, and when the dew falls upon them, manna falls there as well. . . . One takes the manna together with the thorns and herbs, and chops them up, since they are very hard. . . . The thorns and herbs are extremely bitter, [yet] when they are combined with the manna they become sweeter than honey or any other sweetness. And if one were to prepare [the manna] that falls on the mountain without the thorns, one’s limbs would come apart from the excessive sweetness.” 249 While these observations are attributed to Petahiyah’s direct experience, they are in fact adapted almost verbatim from an Alexander Romance that circulated in Ashkenaz during this approximate time period. 250 In the so- called Toldot Alexander ha- Gadol, we read: [Alexander] came to the land of Sidon and there found very high mountains. On the tops of the mountains there was something that looked like white snow. The king and his warriors climbed to the top of a mountain and there found something similar to manna. The king tasted it, and vomited it out because it was so sweet. While the king was on top of the mountain, a man . . . approached him, and said to the king: “Why did you respond in this way to the manna?” The king said, “I was sickened by the excessive sweetness of the manna.” The old man said to him, “There is a certain herb next to the manna which is extremely bitter. Had you mixed the herb with the manna you would not have become ill.” The king did this, and placed [the herb] in his mouth, and it was as bitter as honey is sweet. The king and his warriors gathered some manna and some herbs and brought them to the army and they ate it. 251

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Judah’s familiarity with this text 252 can account for another strange passage in the Sivuv as well. In Shushan, Petahiyah is said to have come across a local river, which is home to “fish with rings of gold in their ears”— an obscure description (not least of all because fish do not have ears). In the same Alexander narrative, however, the protagonist “came to a very wide river. In the river, they found fish with golden rings in their ears.”253 Here again, Judah apparently interpolated contents from the Alexander narrative he knew well into his account of Petahiyah’s travels in the east. A separate, more detailed study is needed in order to work through the textual relationship between Petahiyah’s Sivuv and contemporaneous Alexander literature. 254 For our purposes, however, it is surely significant that two of the literary genres that loomed large in the high medieval European fascination with wonders— travel writings and the Alexander Romance— manifested themselves in medieval Ashkenaz as well, and provided the Pietists with data concerning the workings of the natural world and particularly of its occult elements— data the Pietists could then marshal in the course of their theological and exhortatory writings. This chapter has argued that the Pietists’ frequent ruminations on the “remembrances” of God’s wonders, manifested in their recurrent citations and explications of Psalms 111:4, reflect a determined effort to extract spiritual meaning from a theologically resonant natural world. Rather than privileging the “supernatural” at the expense of “nature,” Judah and Eleazar were keen observers of their natural surroundings, and described and perhaps even engaged in experiments intended to shed light on nature’s workings. The attempt to derive theological meaning from the natural world was of a piece with some of the dominant intellectual currents of their surrounding culture— and like their Christian neighbors, the Pietists did not limit themselves to routine, prosaic natural phenomena, but also sought to understand and instrumentalize the wonders of nature that were of growing interest and anxiety to Christian theologians and natural philosophers, as well as to producers and consumers of magical, mechanical, and literary texts. The Pietists expressed their theological take on nature and its meaning by citing and interpreting texts from within the Jewish tradition— but they also engaged with the same texts and genres

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being utilized in Christian discourses on nature and its meanings, such as lapidaries, “books of secrets,” travel narratives, and literary accounts of the wonders of the east. Such materials could have been transmitted via both written and oral means, and attest to the constructive role of polemic and preaching as a means to conveying ideas within and between competing cultures.

Chapter 2

The World Made Flesh Why all the fuss about the body? — Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?”

To medieval Jewish theologians, the body was well worth fussing over— specifically, God’s body, and, more specifically, the question of whether He had one. Rationalist thinkers, heirs to a philosophical tradition that privileged form over matter, took pains to distance God from any hint of corporeality, explaining away the Bible’s anthropomorphic language in favor of a wholly abstract and radically transcendent deity.1 Kabbalists, whose literary heritage included the unself- consciously anthropomorphic Shi’ur Komah— a work that painstakingly measures the length of God’s appendages and facial features— constructed a spiritualized divine body out of the ten sefirot, one whose “limbs” and “organs” represented divine hypostases rather than physical realities. 2 Scribes and artists, meanwhile, tiptoed around the physical representation of God, arriving at varied solutions to the question of whether the Bible’s prohibition on pictorial depictions of God extended to the drawing of human figures altogether.3 Caroline Bynum, in her now- classic article on medieval understandings of embodiment, could take for granted that the body had intrinsic meaning for Christian theologians, committed as they were to the notion that, at a key moment in salvation history, “the Word was made flesh and lived among us.”4 For medieval Jews, ostensibly removed from the incarnational worldview presupposed by so much of Christian theology, the spiritual status of the body was far from obvious, and subject to almost constant questioning. When we turn to the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, we find reflections, and refractions, of each of these theological trends. From the 73

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philosophical works of the tenth- century theologian Saadia Gaon, Ashkenazic theologians imbibed a strict belief in God’s incorporeality— even as they used floridly anthropomorphic language and imagery in their theological and liturgical writings. 5 They showed little awareness of the kabbalists’ sefirotic divine body but enthusiastically cited from Shi’ur Komah,6 and may even have conceived of God as comprising multiple gendered, and hence irreducibly embodied, strata.7 Ashkenazic artists at times relied upon zoomorphic illustration, perhaps to avoid the drawing of embodied human figures, and at other times had no compunctions about depicting God Himself in a straightforwardly physical guise.8 But for all the ambiguity surrounding their views of God’s body, scholars have tended to agree on Ashkenazic Jews’ attitudes toward mundane, physical, human bodies: namely, that they were committed to a dualistic anthropology that privileged the immortal soul at the expense of its disposable physical container. Such denigration of embodiment, it is assumed, explains the Ashkenazic propensity for martyrdom and extreme asceticism; as Joseph Dan has put it, “The sages of Ashkenaz agreed unanimously that . . . withdrawal from the world, sacrifice of the body on behalf of the soul, giving up one’s life for one’s faith . . . were the goal of religious life. This sensibility . . . impressed itself upon the teachings of the German Pietists . . . ensuring that their theological writings were imbued with a deeply pessimistic air.”9 Put differently, the Pietists, like their Ashkenazic contemporaries more broadly, “[posited] utter self-nullification and assimilation into the divine world.”10 These thinkers ruminated obsessively about the body of God (or lack thereof), but saw little of value in the human body itself. But the notion that the physical body was dross to be discarded at the earliest opportunity does not accord with the diverse and overwhelmingly positive discussions of human embodiment found in a wide array of Pietistic texts. Nor, for that matter, does it do justice to the varied and complex notions of just what a “body” was for medieval thinkers. Just as “nature” had a range of definitions and uses in medieval thought, so too “the body” functioned simultaneously, and not always consistently, in overlapping physical, political, and theological registers.11 In recent years, practitioners of linguistic, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and disability theories have shown that conceptions and definitions of human bodies are culturally constructed rather than essentially or transhistorically predetermined. Medievalists have profitably harnessed and contributed to these

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overlapping fields, producing a sophisticated “history of the body” that has demolished the longstanding truism that premodern thinkers privileged the soul at the expense of the body or, indeed, that the two could be sharply distinguished from one another altogether.12 Scholars of rabbinic and medieval Judaism have brought many of these insights to bear on their respective fields of study— but the valences and vicissitudes of the medieval Ashkenazic body has remained by and large unexamined.13 This chapter will survey a range of Pietistic writings that, far from bemoaning human embodiment, positively celebrate the body and its capabilities. A wide reading of Pietistic halakhic, moralistic, liturgical, and theological compositions reveals the human body to be an object of almost obsessive concern. This interest is reflected in passages devoted to the detailed workings of the physical human body— texts that revel in anatomical details, and methodically investigate the workings of the body’s physiological processes. But the Pietists also invoke the human body in more abstract, overtly theological contexts. In particular, they return again and again to the man’s status as an olam katan (world in miniature), a microcosm of the created world as a whole. Given that the Pietists saw the natural order as imbued with spiritual profundity, it should come as no surprise that the body which reflected and encapsulated that order was seen as reflection of God’s goodness, as theologically meaningful— indeed, as the very linchpin of creation. In their nuanced approach to human embodiment, and particularly in their use of the olam katan motif as an organizing principle, the Pietists echoed discourses that were increasingly in vogue in high medieval learned culture. While their Sephardic coreligionists— “mystics” and “philosophers” alike—were increasingly imbibing a negative conception of human embodiment from currents of regnant, world-rejecting neoplatonic thought, the Pietists’ Christian neighbors— ironically, also under the influence of neoplatonic writings—were simultaneously lauding the human body as an encapsulation of and conduit toward spiritual profundity. The Christian natural philosophers, mystics, and exegetes among whom the Pietists lived extensively mined the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm in a wide array of written and visual texts, depicting man’s body as a minor mundus, and hence as theologically meaningful. Christian attention to the spiritual value of physical embodiment was bound up in an incarnational theology that found theological

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meaning in both the human body as microcosm and physical universe as macrocosm. This rumination on “the Word made flesh” echoed the Ashkenazic interest in the human body as encapsulating the divine order, as a veritable “world made flesh.” After outlining some of the general discussions of embodiment that appear in Pietistic theological and liturgical texts, this chapter considers in some detail the specific theme of man as olam katan. This notion has two interrelated components: a link between the human body and the physical universe, and one between the human soul and God. The Pietists’ Sephardic contemporaries increasingly emphasized the latter at the expense of the former, but by examining each of these correspondences in turn, it emerges that the Pietists saw the two as intimately, inseparably linked. The present chapter focuses on the correspondence between the physical body and the universe, while Chapter 3 explores the ramifications of the link between soul and God. The implications of this linkage, as we shall see, included an overriding concern with bodily stability and mutability—which are discussed extensively in Chapters 4 and 5.

“All My Bones Shall Say Lord, Who Is Like You?” Once one reads Pietistic texts with an eye to the role of the human body, their concern with biological and anatomical details fairly leaps off the page. To begin with, Pietistic texts are full of lists—of the limbs of the human body, of its internal organs, of the bodily humors and the ways in which all of them function in the physiological workings of the body and its internal processes. Almost invariably, the contexts in which these lists appear make clear that the body is being invoked not as a source of abhorrence, but as a concrete manifestation of God’s goodness and beneficence. Perhaps the most comprehensive example of the Pietists’ rumination on the body and its potentialities emerges out of an ostensibly minor passage in the Sod ha-Yirah, a section of Sefer Hasidim generally attributed to Samuel, Judah he-Hasid’s father. There, in the context of a discussion of what man’s attitude should be upon awakening in the morning, we are told that one ought to “bless the Holy One, blessed be He, for that over which one had no control [while he was asleep], when he had no control over his body. Bless Him for each and every limb. . . . Thus, the Sages established a blessing over each one, as is fitting. And a certain pious man used to bless [God] for each and

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every limb, and a verse supports him: ‘My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God’ (Ps. 64:3), and it is [further] written, ‘all my bones shall say Lord, who is like You?’ (Ps. 35:10).14 Thus would he pray for all the limbs that were created in him. ”15 On its surface, this passage seems merely to be a variation on a common theme, namely that the morning blessings (birkhot ha- shahar) were instituted so as to correspond to one’s physical actions upon awakening in the morning.16 What is unique, however, is the blessing that “a certain pious man” added of his own accord. As Malachi Beit-Arie has pointed out, this prayer, or one like it, survives in a collection of Pietistic prayers preserved in a Bodleian manuscript.17 The text of this prayer, which the copyist of the manuscript entitled Birkhot ha- Evarim (The Blessings of the Limbs), begins by praising God, who “opens [the ears of] the deaf and [the eyes of] the blind”18 —paralleling Sod ha-Yirah’s description of one who, while sleeping, “has no control over his body.” The prayer then proceeds limb by limb and organ by organ through the entire (male) human body, describing the anatomical role played by each of the body’s component parts.19 Overall, the liturgical composition includes thirty-eight blessings (e.g., “Blessed are You, Lord, on account of the eyes and their sight”). Some of these formulae, however, refer to more than one body part, such that in sum the prayer specifies no fewer than sixty-nine distinct types of body parts. 20 In his description of this liturgical composition, Beit-Arie has suggested that “the author of these blessings had no interest in the anatomy of the human body [per se]. . . . Rather, the text was composed for literary and liturgical reasons . . . and thus should not be treated as a source demonstrating anatomical knowledge among medieval Jews.”21 While the anatomical contents of the text are certainly not comprehensive— though it does contain material drawn from medical texts like the early medieval Sefer Refu’ot of Asaf ha-Rofe, 22 the majority of its contents are paraphrased from rabbinic literature— the choice of the human body as the organizing principle for this prayer was not a random one. Pietistic sources recurrently invoke the limbs of the body in their praise of God, and suggest, as this prayer does, that man in his embodied state is best equipped to appreciate God’s goodness. Thus, Eleazar too instructs his readers to “praise God with all of his limbs” prior to listing the body parts that are “witnesses” to God’s grandeur, 23 and he returns repeatedly to this theme throughout his writings.24 The positive valences ascribed to human corporeality emerge clearly in Eleazar’s liturgical writings as well. In his explication of

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the prayer of Nishmat Kol Hai (“The Souls of all Creatures”) in his commentary to the prayerbook, Eleazar caps off a lengthy discussion of the body and its anatomy— to which we devote more detailed attention below—by noting that “I, the insignificant one, have written this so that you should know that wretched man is extremely dear to his Creator . . . he must [in turn] truly love his Creator with all his heart.”25 Here, man’s embodiedness is not the source of embarrassment or disgrace, but rather occasions an outpouring of love for one’s Creator. Moreover, Eleazar’s claim that contemplation of the anatomical details of the human body— evidence of God’s love for man—leads man inevitably to love of God seems to have found an enthusiastic reception among his disciples. A noteworthy example can be found in the Sefer Mitsvot Gadol (Semag) of Rabbi Moses b. Jacob of Coucy, whose links to the Hasidei Ashkenaz have recently been reinforced by Ephraim Kanarfogel and others. 26 Moses of Coucy’s Semag is an enumeration of and commentary on each of the 613 commandments, informed primarily by Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. But in his discussion of Deuteronomy 6:5—“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might”— Moses deviates radically from the Maimonidean approach. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides had linked the injunction to love God with the injunction to fear Him: What is the way for one to love and fear Him? When one examines His great and awesome deeds and creations, and discerns in them His eternal, inestimable wisdom, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify [God], and greatly desire to know his great Name; as David said, “My soul thirsts for the Lord, for the living God” (Ps. 63:2). When he contemplates these matters, he will immediately recoil in fear, and realize that he is a tiny, lowly, murky creature, whose knowledge is infinitesimal compared to He whose wisdom is perfect— as David said, “When I see the heavens, the work of your fingers—what is man that You should remember him?” (Ps. 8:3). 27

For Maimonides, love of God is inextricably linked to the recognition of human frailty and insignificance; the love of God cannot but occasion in man an awareness of his profound insignificance in comparison to both God Himself, and “His great and awesome deeds and creations.” For Moses of Coucy, precisely the opposite is the case. Love of God, he says, derives from man’s recognition of God’s goodness— particularly the goodness of human embodiment. Having created

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man initially from a “stinking drop [of semen],” God has “crafted him with wisdom,” endowing man with a finely tuned, precisely balanced physical body, which is perfectly suited to life on earth. 28 It seems clear that in veering from the approach of Maimonides, and instead linking love of God to human embodiment, Moses is adopting the approach of Eleazar, namely that the intricate details of human anatomy allow one to “know how dear man is to his Creator,” and thus to “love his Creator truthfully, with his whole heart.” Moreover, unlike the Birkhot ha- Evarim, where precise anatomical details are minimized in favor of literary flourishes, Moses’s discussion of the wonders of embodiment is highly technical and surprisingly thorough. Beginning with the relatively mundane— God has given man eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear, and so on— Moses proceeds into more detailed anatomical discussion. For example, God has given man “a liver on the right side [of his body], with blood and red bile within it, to heat the upper bowels . . . and to process the food and drink [within]. . . . He has given him a spleen on the left side [of the body], with black bile to cool the bowels and intestines and stomach, so that the heat of the blood, liver, and red bile will not dry out and spoil the food and drink. . . . He has stretched out skin over the flesh, bones, tendons, and sinews in order to cover the body, keeping it warm and protecting the moistness of the body and its internal organs.”29 The discussion continues in this manner until nearly every physiological process and bodily organ has been described. Although the Pietists could anchor their writings on the liturgical role of the body in traditional sources, like the verses from Psalms cited above, the novelty of their approach should not be underestimated. Some of the rabbinic writings to which they were heirs clearly warned against using the limbs of the body for the praise of God. According to the early medieval Otiyot de-Rabi Akiva, for instance, “It is inappropriate for the 248 limbs of the body to praise God in song— only the mouth and tongue [are suited for this].”30 The Pietists knew the Otiyot de-Rabi Akiva well and cite from it throughout their writings—but this particular stricture seems not to have resonated with them. Their interest in the workings of the human body, moreover, seems to have led the Pietists to pursue anatomical knowledge in a wide array of sources. Of course, prior rabbinic literature frequently makes reference to the details of human anatomy, and the Pietists incorporated those details into their writings. Thus, one homiletic passage in

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Judah’s Sefer Gematriyot describes the human heart with anatomical precision: “The heart has 32 openings, and five entrances, and the 365 tendons and 248 limbs of the body are guided by the heart.”31 All these details have been culled from prior rabbinic writings. 32 As we have seen, the Pietists were avid readers of Sefer Yetsirah, and the latter’s anatomical contents are frequently invoked in Pietistic writings on the body as well.33 Sefer Refu’ot served as a further source of anatomical knowledge, 34 as did the (Galenic) physiological asides that appear in Shabbatai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni— Moses of Coucy’s lengthy description of the limbs and organs of the body, for example, are quoted from Hakhmoni almost verbatim.35 But the same empirical tendencies that the Pietists manifested in their exploration of their natural surroundings seem to have been enlisted in the service of understanding the body as well. Thus Eleazar, for example, complements the Galenic descriptions of various organs with his own empirical observations: “The two kidneys . . . are the sources of ‘service’ (tashmish), that is, sexual intercourse (mishgal), for it is within [the kidneys] that the semen is whitened— for semen is initially red, like blood. The great heat of the kidneys whitens it, and [the semen] proceeds from these organs to the genitals and penis. [Thus,] the kidneys are [also] the source of sterility, for if one is burned on the outside of his body in proximity to the kidneys, he will become sterile.”36 And similarly, “I shall now write for you the secret of the spleen: it is like a sponge that absorbs the liquids that come from the esophagus, and sends them to the bladder through a certain vessel. Therefore, if one drinks the waters that are used by a smith to temper iron, he will blacken his spleen—for the water is burned in the process of tempering the iron, and the spleen, which is like a sponge, absorbs [the water] until it is blackened.”37 In both these instances, Eleazar finds confirmation of theoretical anatomical teachings in their observed, empirically verifiable effects. He does likewise in the context of a discussion of the physiology of female lactation, where he amplifies upon the Talmud’s (Galenic) belief that breast milk originates as menstrual blood—“the blood becomes turbid and turns into milk.”38 “So long as a women’s menstrual blood is flowing, the milk in her breasts will dry up and cease. When the blood flow from her womb ceases . . . the blood ripens and whitens, and its redness is processed by the heat of the pregnant womb and the breasts. . . . Know, that if an infant nurses excessively, blood will come out of the breasts. Menstrual blood originates in

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the heart, and from the heart channels conduct it and spill it into the breasts, and thence into the loins, and from the loins to the womb, and from the womb the blood exits [the body].”39 Eleazar here (mis) understands an observable phenomenon to be a confirmation of an otherwise unverifiable teaching. A woman’s nipples will become sore and bleed from excessive nursing; to Eleazar, however, this indicates that once a woman’s milk supply is exhausted, unprocessed blood will be channeled directly from the heart to the breasts. Human corporeality, then, is not merely something to be transcended. God’s goodness was thought to have been made manifest in the physical body, and empirical examination of the latter could grant the observer increased insight into the workings of its component parts. And yet, for all that the body is incessantly discussed in Pietistic writings, it is rarely marshaled in isolation. Rather, the human body is consistently viewed specifically as an olam katan, a microcosm of the universe as a whole. After charting the traditions concerning the relationship between micro- and macrocosm with which the Pietists would have been familiar, and those flourishing among their contemporaries, we will be in a position to more fully appreciate the linkages they drew between the body and the cosmos, and between the soul and God.

A Microcosm . . . of What? In conceiving of man as a microcosm of the universe, the Pietists were hardly unique. The term olam katan apparently originated in the Tanhuma, in the context of a description of the building of the Temple.40 In its structure, the latter paralleled both the human body and the broader cosmos: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created His world, he created it as He would a human being. Just as a human being originates at his navel, and then expands outward in all four directions, so too the Holy One, blessed be He, began to create the world from the even shetiyah (foundation stone) . . . and created the Temple above it.”41 The relatively brief treatment of this motif in the Tanhuma is fleshed out considerably in subsequent midrashic works.42 Thus, with regard to the equation between cosmos and Temple, Midrash Tadshe— also known as the Beraita de-Rabi Pinhas ben Ya’ir— expands the linkage considerably, detailing the one-to-one correspondences between the Temple architecture and vessels and a variety of cosmological and terrestrial objects.43 By the late eleventh

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or early twelfth century, a certain Shemaiah of Soissons is credited as the author of a lengthy midrash on the correspondences between the Temple and the cosmos (and, to a much lesser extent, the human body as well).44 In many midrashic works, however, the Temple drops out of the equation, focusing the discussion exclusively on the correspondences between the man and the cosmos. In some instances, such linkages are clearly motivated by homiletical or exegetical considerations. Thus in Ecclesiastes Rabbah: “R. Berakhyah said in the name of R. Simeon b. Lakish: Everything the Holy One, blessed be He, created in man, he created on earth as an example. Man has a head (rosh), and the earth has a head, as it says, ‘the beginning (rosh) of the dust of the world’ (Prov. 8:26). Man has eyes (eynayim), and the earth has eyes, as it says, ‘[the locust] covered all the earth (eyn ha- arets)’ (Exod. 10:15).”45 This passage is devoted to homiletical wordplay, not to charting any ontological linkages between microcosm and macrocosm; hence, while the text is long on exegetical creativity, it is short on anatomical or physiological detail. A similar approach is manifested in Pesikta Rabati, in the context of an imagined discussion between God and his celestial retinue: [Angels:] And what will You create next? [God:] Libra (ma’aznayim, scales), for [after man’s death] his deeds will be weighed on a scale. [Angels:] And what will you create next? [God:] Scorpio (akrav, scorpion), for once they are weighed, if he has [an excess of] sins he will descend to Hell. [Angels:] And what will you create next? [God:] Sagittarius (keshet, bow), for once mercy is requested on his behalf, he is shot out of Hell like an arrow from a bow. [Angels:] And what will you create next? [God:] Capricorn (gedi, a kid), for lest you say that once he ascends from Hell, his face is perpetually darkened, he in fact dances and jumps like a kid.46

Here, the constellations of the Zodiac are linked via wordplay to the progression of the divine judgment of men after their deaths. Rather than treating man himself as an encapsulation of the universe, this source sees elements of the universe (i.e., the Zodiac) as prefiguring discrete stages in the (not necessarily embodied) eschatological drama of the individual.

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But other rabbinic sources argue, with greater or lesser degrees of sophistication, for actual ontological linkages between the created world and the human body. Thus, the rabbinic compilation Avot deRabi Natan contains a lengthy list of quite specific correspondences between the human body and the natural world: “Rabbi Yosi the Galilean said: Everything that the Holy One, blessed be He, created on earth he created in man as well. . . . He created thickets on earth, and created thickets in man, namely man’s hair. He created evil beasts on earth, and created evil beasts in man, namely lice. . . . He created wind (ru’ah) on earth, and created breath (ru’ah) in man, namely his nose. . . . He created millstones on earth, and created millstones in man, namely the stomach [which digests one’s food].”47 While this passage also propounds linkages that are hard to interpret as ontologically compelling— such as “[He created] mountains and valleys on earth, [and created] mountains and valleys in man, for when he stands, he is like a mountain, and when he lies down, he is like a valley”48 — the text as a whole attempts to portray the workings of the human body in a comprehensible manner, via the analogies with the corresponding elements of the physical world. A variety of other midrashic passages interpret man’s microcosmic nature in a similar manner.49 The most comprehensive of these is a text known as Agadat Olam Katan, published by Adolph Jellinek from a Munich manuscript.50 This text, which is of indeterminate provenance, is almost a summa of prior rabbinic explications of the microcosm-macrocosm motif. It incorporates many of the texts described above and proceeds for several pages to outline the correspondences between man and the universe— especially the linkages between man’s anatomical makeup and the physical structure of the natural world. 51 While many of these texts were known to the Pietists, and, as we shall see, informed their understanding of man’s role as an olam katan, the most systematic explication of the ontological links between man and the universe appears in Sefer Yetsirah, and in several of the early medieval commentaries that fleshed out its meaning.52 Much of Sefer Yetsirah is organized around a series of correspondences between the human body, the physical universe, and the procession of the seasons— or, put differently, between man and his natural surroundings. While parts of Sefer Yetsirah are quite opaque, the equivalencies it draws between man and the universe are relatively straightforward, in keeping with its originally “scientific,” and especially astrological, intended meaning.53 Thus Sefer Yetsirah links the seven orifices, or

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“gates,” in man’s face to the seven planets and seven days of the week; man’s twelve limbs and internal organs, or “guides,” correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac and twelve months of the year. The three segments of the human body (the head, torso, and lower body) are linked to the three seasons (hot, cold, and temperate) and three elements (water, fire, air). Sefer Yetsirah sparked a wide array of commentaries in the ninth through eleventh centuries. Sefer Hakhmoni, composed by the Byzantine physician and astrologer Shabbatai Donnolo, concerned itself extensively with the text’s correspondences between man’s body and the structure of the universe, and seems to have been composed with the express purpose of reconciling Sefer Yetsirah with the ByzantinePtolemaic cosmology to which he was heir. 54 Because that cosmology was predicated on a set scheme of correspondences between astral bodies and human anatomy— a system known as melothesia— Donnolo was particularly interested in the correspondences that Sefer Yetsirah outlines (and finding them to be by and large incorrect by contemporary Ptolemaic standards, Donnolo matter-of-factly corrects them). In his quite technical anatomical discussions, it becomes clear that the correspondences between man and the cosmos are ontological ones, not mere homiletics. Indeed, in the introductory section to his commentary, an extended excursus on Genesis 1:26 (“Let us create man in our image and likeness”), Donnolo argues originally that the plural (“us,” “our”) in this verse refers to the two images in which man was created— that is, while man’s soul was created “in the image of God,” man’s body was created in the image of the earth. The Pietists were profoundly influenced by Donnolo’s Hakhmoni, and his writings on the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm feature prominently in our discussion below. Also significant from this perspective is the compendious commentary to Sefer Yetsirah of Judah ben Barzilai al-Bargeloni, which also recapitulates many of the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm— some cited from the works mentioned above, and others whose provenances remain unknown.55 Judah ben Barzilai compiled his commentary in the early twelfth century, but by the standards of contemporary Sephardic thought, the emphasis he placed (in some passages) on the physical body as a microcosm of the universe was becoming increasingly anachronistic. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the interpretive landscape had undergone significant shifts. Unlike Donnolo, who was a physician by

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training, and whose eisegetical loyalties were to Galen, Hippocrates, and Ptolemy, the Sephardic philosophers and mystics who grappled with man’s role as an olam katan had a far dimmer view of the human body, viewing it as at best subordinate to the soul— the true microcosm, namely, of God— and at worst as the soul’s prison.56 The tendency, particularly pronounced in influential neoplatonic writings like the Theology of Aristotle, toward denigration of the material world led Jewish thinkers to aspire to escape from the body, and hence toward rejection of the independent theological value of the latter. Thus, while the motif of man as an olam katan continued to dominate Jewish theological writings, it was increasingly recast as referring exclusively to the correspondences between the human soul and God (or World Soul, or Active Intellect). By investigating one’s (spiritual) self, one could proceed upward anagogically, out of the material world, toward the divine realm that was the source of the soul in the first place. 57 This approach manifests itself in the writings of a wide array of eleventh- and twelfth- century Sephardic thinkers, including Bahya Ibn Paquda of Zaragoza, Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), Abraham Bar Hiyya of Barcelona, the Provencal poet and philosopher Moses Ibn Tibbon, the peripatetics Abraham Ibn Ezra and Judah ha-Levi, and others.58 Only Joseph Ibn Tsadik of Cordoba, in his Olam Katan, continued to grant pride of place to the linkages between man’s physical body and the physical universe— and by the standards of his contemporaries, his approach was considered “primitive” and “gross.”59 The approach of Maimonides can be seen as the culmination of this trend away from the body and toward the soul. In his treatment of the motif of man as a microcosm in the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides fully severs the body from the discussion. He begins with a lengthy discussion of the apparent similarities between the human body and the structure of the cosmos. On account of these correspondences, he argues, “it behooves you to represent to yourself in this fashion the whole of this sphere as one living individual in motion and possessing a soul.”60 But it soon becomes clear that this comparison between physical microcosm and physical macrocosm is of heuristic value at best: “Know that it was not because of all that we have mentioned in comparing the world as a whole to a human individual that it has been said about man that he is a small world. For this whole comparison can be consistently applied to every individual animal that has perfect limbs; but you never hear that one of the ancients has

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said that an ass or a horse is a small world. This has been said only about man. This is because of that which is a proprium of man only, namely, the rational faculty— I mean the intellect, which is the hylic intellect, something that is not to be found in any of the species of living beings other than man.”61 Even this limited interpretation of the microcosm motif, though, is ultimately unsatisfactory— after all, the intellect is inextricably embedded in man’s body, whereas God is unbounded and transcendent. Thus, “we should have compared . . . the rational faculty to the intellects of the heavens, which are in bodies.”62 As one modern reader of Maimonides has put it, “No sooner is [the microcosm] analogy offered than it is crushed under the weight of myriad qualification. . . . Of all the rich implications of the microcosm metaphor, only one remains standing after this Maimonidean critique: a drastically attenuated and obscure similarity between the perfected human intellect and the mysterious cognitive entities which cause the celestial bodies to move.”63 A related, though not identical approach is in evidence in the writings of the theosophic kabbalists who flourished in thirteenth- century Iberia. Unlike their philosophically inclined counterparts, mystical authors like Moses De Leon did indeed focus on the human body in their reading of man’s role as an olam katan. But rather than linking the body to the physical universe, they linked it to the sefirotic “body” of God. Sharing many of the same neoplatonic commitments that guided the philosophers,64 the kabbalists saw the physical body as dross to be escaped from, and saw significance in man’s microcosmic anatomical form only to the extent that the latter could be used as an organizing principle for the macrocosm, namely the sefirot. The role of the body in kabbalistic thinking has been analyzed extensively in recent years, and while scholars like Elliot Wolfson have demonstrated the centrality of bodily discourses to high medieval mystical writings, they have cautioned that the body prized by the kabbalists was ultimately not a material one: “The positive valence accorded the body in Kabbalistic symbolism . . . is related to the textual nature of bodiliness, which, in turn, rests on an assumption regarding the bodily nature of textuality. . . . The real body, the body in its most abstract tangibility, is the letter.”65 Man’s goal vis-à-vis his corporeality, then, is “the metamorphosis of the mortal body into an angelic body, a body whose limbs are constituted by the letters of the name, the anthropomorphic configuration of Torah.”66 Elsewhere, he puts the matter more sharply:

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On balance, kabbalists adopt a rather negative view toward the material universe as that which must be overcome. . . . True spiritual piety . . . demands an abrogation of the sensual pleasures of the body. . . . When this is translated into the standard categories of gender, then we are justified in speaking of the transmutation of the feminine (body) into the masculine (spirit). . . . In this respect, the kabbalists reflect the typical medieval attitude toward the body as that which must be surmounted. Naturally, I do not deny that it is a salient characteristic of kabbalistic symbolism that the anthropomorphic representation of God is augmented and intensified. . . . However, the use of anthropomorphism to depict God does not betoken a more positive approach toward corporeality. The contrary is the case: The imaginal construction of the divine configuration is predicated on a nullification of the physical body. . . . In medieval kabbalistic symbolism, there is no celebration of the body, nature, or the feminine.

Rather, we find an “annulment of nature, or at the very least, the ontological transmutation of corporeal nature into the image that she reflects as the mirror of that which is invisible.”67 Thus, by the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the major Pietistic works were composed, there existed an established, entrenched tradition among “philosophers” and “mystics” alike of divorcing man’s microcosmic nature from his physical body. The Pietists’ approach, as we shall immediately see, could not have been more different. For them, man’s role as olam katan had everything to do with his body and its physical makeup— to the extent that even the soul itself was conceived of in irreducibly embodied terms.

The Geography of the Body The Pietists at times cite the midrashic passages that relate the structure of the human body to the Temple,68 and sometimes also link the structure of the body to that of the throne world, as described in Ezekiel 1 and 10, and in the elaborations on those texts found in the Merkavah literature.69 But more often, the Pietists focus on the physical parallels between the human body and the natural world, at times adopting the specific terminology of olam katan,70 at other times simply stating that the body is to the universe as the soul is to God.71 The most extensive explications of the link between the human body and the universe appear in Eleazar’s lengthy commentary on Nishmat— indeed, E. E. Urbach once noted that this section of Eleazar’s wider commentary on the prayerbook represents a self- contained work unto

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itself (Urbach suggested calling it Hibbur Olam Katan).72 Because many of the discussions of microcosmism that appear throughout Pietistic literature are repeated in this text, it is worth describing and analyzing at some length. The Nishmat prayer, which appears in the Sabbath morning liturgy, at one point states that “the limbs that you have set within us, and the ru’ah and neshamah that you have breathed into our nostrils . . . shall thank and bless, praise and glorify, exalt and revere [You] . . . as it is written, ‘All my bones shall say, Lord, who is like You?’” As we have seen above, Psalms 35:10 is frequently cited in the context of Pietistic discussions of the body and its theological meaning. And indeed, Eleazar seizes upon this passage as an opportunity to explicate his approach to the human body: Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, blow of Himself into man, rather than into animals? Because man is an olam katan. How so? Everything the Holy One, blessed be He, created in the world He created in man: the firmament corresponds to man’s head, for the membrane surrounding the brain is constructed like an archway (kipah)73 — it slopes, and has the power of fire.74 The sun and moon correspond to man’s eyes, which provide him with light. The stars correspond to the hair of man’s head.75 Seven planets guide the world— the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars— and there are seven [“gates”] in the human body— two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and the mouth.76

In this brief passage,77 Eleazar incorporates contents from the Heikhalot corpus, Sefer Yetsirah, and midrashic literature. Thus, while the actual contents are derivative, the organization and selective citations highlight Eleazar’s underlying interest, namely locating microcosmmacrocosm analogies in whatever sources he can find them. Eleazar’s omnivorous search for sources on man as olam katan is further in evidence as the passage continues: he segues into an extensive citation from Agadat Olam Katan discussing the linkages between the signs of the Zodiac and the human life cycle, and then proceeds into a more esoteric discussion of the correspondences between man and the celestial throne world.78 But Eleazar soon returns to his main topic, the correspondences between the structure of the human body and that of the created universe. In a passage paraphrased in part from Agadat Olam Katan, he links the trees and forests on earth to the hairs of man’s head and beard; rivers and streams to veins and arteries; the different types of water in the world (saltwater and freshwater,

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hot and cold waters, etc.) to man’s various bodily fluids (tears, saliva, urine, etc.); and so on.79 As his discussion continues, Eleazar moves on to an additional series of correspondences: “The earth has hot and cold winds; when man purses his lips [the air he blows out is] cold, and when he opens his mouth [fully the air he blows out is] hot.”80 “The air of the world is constantly moving due to the wind (ru’ah), and man’s heart is constantly in motion, and beating, because of his spirit (ru’ah).”81 “On earth, birds have wings with which to fly; in man, the ‘wings’ of the lungs encompass the heart in their wings,”82 and so on. Moreover, some of these correspondences are predicated on the same kinds of empirical observations that the Pietists favored in other contexts. Thus: “On earth, the land constantly desires rainfall, which is why plants are green like rain, for the rain is the ‘master’ of the earth;83 in man, the liver desires all things, good or bad, and thus man has intercourse with his wife until she bears his child.”84 We have seen in Chapter 1 that, in general, the Pietists linked water to the color green on empirical (and theological) grounds.85 This particular linkage, however, operates on an additional level. The rain which is desired by the ground is being implicitly compared to the semen, which is produced by the liver. Just as the rain— the “master” (ba’al) of the earth—is needed to generate plants, the semen produced by a woman’s husband (ba’al) leads to the production of offspring. The notion that the earth desires rain appears elsewhere in Pietistic writings,86 while the link between sexual desire and the liver is an element of the Platonic- Galenic model of the tri-partite soul that Eleazar absorbed from the works of Abraham Ibn Ezra.87 In linking the workings of rainfall with human physiology, Eleazar thus marshals and recombines a variety of existing motifs in the service of his overriding interest in human microcosmism. As the commentary on Nishmat progresses, moreover, the correspondences Eleazar lists between microcosm and macrocosm become increasingly technical. Thus man’s animating spirits are linked to the meteorological workings of the universe: The world has four [types of] wind (ruhot): one guides the clouds to rain water down on the ground, at [God’s] urging; a second pushes clouds from one land to another; a third clears all the clouds out of the sky; and a fourth causes the plants to grow and the trees to blossom by the order of God. All of them are ruled over by the breath of [God’s] mouth. Man has four spirits (ruhot): the first arouses the

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chapter 2 desire to eat and drink, and dwells in the chest, surrounding the heart; the second dwells in the stomach and entices the food and drink through the body; the third dwells in the liver, and burns in order to ignite the heat of the stomach, and to strengthen the heart and cause [man’s breath] to ascend; the fourth is the wind which exits man’s body.88

Eleazar next segues from meteorology to physiology, and marshals the contrasting colors of the rainbow to account for the delicate balance of humors that coexist in the body: “In the world, the rainbow [contains] red, like the anger of the Holy One, blessed be He [which the rainbow was intended to appease]. . . . In man, anger derives from the liver, which is full of blood, because of the bile which is attached to the liver. In the world, the rainbow contains red and white next to one another, which teaches us that water extinguishes fire; in man, the spleen is cold, to cool the heat of the liver.”89 Eleazar finds empirical confirmation of this biological opposition between white and red in the botanical and anatomical realms as well: “In the world, red flowers, like almond blossoms, produce white fruits, while white flowers, like those of peanuts . . . and cherries . . . have red fruit. In man, [breast] milk becomes blood if [a woman] does not conceive with her husband, but the blood becomes milk when she becomes pregnant.”90 The correspondences detailed thus far have dealt with the physical resemblances between elements of the human body and their cosmic counterparts. Having exhausted such similarities, Eleazar next moves into the realm of astrological melothesia. Drawing on information he found in Shabbatai Donnolo’s Hakhmoni, in the Beraita di- Shmu’el, and in the Sefer Refu’ot of Asaf ha-Rofe, he outlines in detail the technical relationships that exist between the humors, the elements, various planetary bodies, and the varying heat and moisture of each. Thus: The world is divided into four [elements]: fire, water, air, and earth. Aries, Leo, [and] Sagittarius [correspond to] fire; Taurus, Virgo, [and] Capricorn [correspond to] earth; Gemini, Libra, [and] Aquarius [correspond to] air; Cancer, Scorpio, [and] Pisces [correspond to] water. Nisan, Iyar, and Sivan are hot and wet; Tamuz, Av and Elul are hot and dry; Tishrei, Marheshvan, and Kislev are cold and dry; [and] Tevet, Shevat, and Adar are cold and wet. In man, the red bile corresponds to fire; black [bile] corresponds to earth; phlegm corresponds to water; [and] blood corresponds to air. . . . Blood is hot and wet; red bile is hot and dry; black bile is cold and dry; [and] phlegm is cold and wet.91

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That Eleazar lays out these correspondences between man as microcosm and the broader universe shows that he was conversant in the basic astrological thought of his time— the links between the four humors, four elements, four qualities (hot/cold/wet/dry), and four groups of three Zodiac signs was relatively standardized by this period.92 The same is indicated by the continuation of this passage, in which he reproduces melothesia correspondences he found in the Hakhmoni— and which contradict those laid out in Sefer Yetsirah itself. Eleazar clearly saw the linkages propounded by Donnolo, which were in keeping with contemporary scientific thought, to be more reliable than those contained in the original text of Sefer Yetsirah. I have cited from Eleazar’s commentary on Nishmat at some length in order to convey the extremely comprehensive— if unsystematic— approach he takes to the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm. This passage is the lengthiest in which he outlines these views, but, as we have seen, far from the only one.93 Nor was Eleazar alone in his preoccupation with this theme. Works linked to Judah heHasid, like the Sefer Gematriyot, contain lengthy explications of this motif as well.94 In combining selective citations of midrashic, medical, exegetical, and “scientific” writings with their own empirical observations, the Pietists make clear that the workings of the body, and its relationship to the created order as a whole, is a major animating theme in their thought.

Creation as Birth The macrocosm-microcosm discussions analyzed thus far compare the anatomical and physiological structure of the human body with the corresponding elements in the natural world. But the Pietists manifest an abiding interest in the generation of the world, and of man, as well. In varying contexts, they link human conception and birth to the creation of the world, on the basis of authoritative Jewish sources, contemporary science, and empirical observation. This linkage between creation and birth goes back to the Tanhuma, which invoked embryology in analogizing the even shetiyah to man’s navel. But the Pietists expand upon the connection in a number of original ways. Eleazar, for instance, explains that Psalm 104, which describes God’s creation of the world, contains 271 words, since that is the numerical value of the Hebrew word herayon (pregnancy).

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This notion that the world was “gestated” indicates that “man was created similarly to the earth, and is called an olam katan, for everything that exists in the world exists in man.”95 In his commentary on the Torah, Judah anchors this same linkage in his reading of the structure of the six days of creation. Judah points out that each main element of the cosmos— the heavens, the earth, and the seas—were only completed three days after their initial creation. Thus the heavens were created on the first day, but not finished until the fourth day, when the celestial bodies were created; the seas were separated from the celestial waters on the second day, but the fish were only created on the fifth day; and on the third day, the earth was separated from the water, but the terrestrial fauna waited until the sixth day to be created. Thus, “there are always three days between primary creative act (av) and secondary one (toladah). This is how the sages discerned that [it takes] three days for the collecting [of the semen in a woman’s womb].”96 Probably the most ambitious effort at linking man’s birth to the world’s creation is Eleazar’s attempt to synthesize the creation scheme of Sefer Yetsirah with the four humors/four elements melothesia of contemporary anatomical theory. Doing so presented a formidable challenge, for at least two reasons. First, although Sefer Yetsirah expends considerable energy correlating human anatomy to the cosmos, it never discusses the origins of man himself, as it does the origins of the created universe more broadly.97 Second, the elemental scheme of Sefer Yetsirah is not in keeping with the regnant Aristotelian system of four elements (earth, water, fire, air). Sefer Yetsirah has only three fundamental elements (avot, or sefirot): ru’ah (wind/spirit/space), water, and fire. Both earth and air are toladot, or byproducts, created out of the interrelationship between these three primal elements, but not elements in their own right.98 Eleazar seeks to overcome these challenges not by focusing on the melothesia of Sefer Yetsirah itself, but rather by invoking the relationship between the four humors and the four elements, with which, as we saw above, he was intimately familiar.99 He begins by outlining Sefer Yetsirah’s scheme of the origins of the universe:100 Let me further instruct you in the meaning of the creation of the four elements of the world. First ru’ah was created101—from [God’s] spirit102 all of this was created. From the ru’ah that was created both water103 and air were created, and from water, both fire and snow

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were created. From the fire that was created from water the heavens were created, and from the snow that was created from water the earth was created. And once the heavens and earth, and air and water were created, the heavens—which correspond to fire— gave birth to heat and dryness, the wind [produced heat and wetness],104 earth gave birth to cold and dryness, and water gave birth to cold and wetness.105

Although Eleazar’s terminology is not entirely consistent, his overall aim in this passage is clear. He outlines the stages of Sefer Yetsirah’s cosmogony, but then selectively identifies some of these stages with the four Aristotelian elements. Thus, he chooses two avot/sefirot— fire and water— and two toladot— air and earth— and locates the balance of heat/cold/wet/dry within them, neglecting the sefirah of ru’ah, and the other toladot mentioned in the passage (e.g., snow). The reason that he does so becomes clear in the next section of his discussion: “Similarly, four elements were created in the body. The ‘living spirit’ of the father and mother generate semen and blood [respectively]—the semen corresponds to water and the blood to air. From the semen produced by the father . . . is created the red bile and the phlegm, which is like snow. And from the blood produced by . . . the mother is created the blood of the [baby’s] body. And from the phlegm, which is like snow, is created the red bile.”106 Eleazar here reconstructs the development of the human fetus so that it parallels the cosmogony of Sefer Yetsirah. That is, the process of the successive emanation of primordial elements (ru’ah, water, fire) and their byproducts (air, snow, heaven, earth) is imposed upon the development of the human body in utero. The intermediary step that allows for such connections to be drawn is the linkage between elements and bodily humors that, while foreign to Sefer Yetsirah, was well known to Eleazar. Thus, the link between blood and air (itself linked to ru’ah) allows for the blood of the baby to be conceived as paralleling the emergences of the second sefirah from the first (ru’ah from ru’ah Elohim hayyim). Similarly, snow, which is cold and wet, can be linked to phlegm, which has the same qualities. Overall, the aim is to anchor the creation of the human fetus in the creation of the cosmos, using the known correspondences between elements and humors as a means of establishing and strengthening otherwise tenuous linkages. Indeed, in recapitulating this approach in others of his works, Eleazar goes further and proceeds to anchor each major organ of the human body in the Sefer Yetsirah cosmogonic scheme, again, by marshaling the elemental-humoral linkages in such a way as

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to squeeze the square peg of human embryology into the round hole of Creation according to Sefer Yetsirah.107

Reading the Body While the connections charted thus far have been primarily theoretical, or descriptive, there is a strong current in Pietistic writings arguing that microcosm-macrocosm links can be exploited for practical ends as well. As we have seen in a previous chapter, the Pietists were committed to the notion that the natural world was stable and predictable, and that it could be harnessed for both theological and practical ends via empiricism, astrology, and meteorology. The human body can fill these same roles— indeed, Eleazar explicitly links the two. At the conclusion of yet another lengthy explication of the parallels between the human body and the universe, he segues from anatomical parallels to epistemological ones: “There are wisdoms and planets (hokhmot u- mazalot)108 in the world, and there is the wisdom of signs (hokhmah otot) in man. For just as the astrologers gaze at the stars and identify [auspicious and inauspicious] hours, one who is expert can know the future based on man[‘s body].”109 Having linked the study of nature to the empirical observation of the workings of man’s body, he proceeds to outline a number of predictive schemes— one predicts man’s future based on the tremors he experiences in a given limb of his body; another uses the lines of one’s palms for the purposes of divination. The effectiveness of physiognomy is alluded to in a number of other Pietistic texts as well, and again the linkage between body and cosmos is foregrounded: “It is possible to use the planets to know what the appearance, image, and deeds of a person will be.” In Judah’s Sefer Gematriyot, too, some of the same physiognomic schemes are outlined, again in juxtaposition to a lengthy discourse on astrological melothesia.110 One of the most detailed accountings of the practical implications of the microcosm-macrocosm relationship appears in the context of a discussion of astrology; Judah segues to the topic of divination based on the human body: “If one were to ask, since God is all-pervasive, why is it said that ‘our God is in the heavens’ (Ps. 115:3)? It is because those who can predict future events are experts in the procession of the planets, and inform man concerning what will occur. . . . [God] rules over all of nature . . . and everything God created above has a corresponding element in man— man is an olam katan. . . . [Thus] the

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wisdom of the stars in the world [corresponds to] the wisdom of signs in man. Astrologers discern matters based on [the planetary] hours, and similarly some are able to predict the future based on man.”111 After outlining the same schema of divination described above, Judah concludes rhetorically: “Why go on at length? Everything that exists in the world exists in man . . . and the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals the future in man’s body.”112 Finally, in Sefer Hasidim, a text intended for an exoteric audience, the same divinatory methods are outlined, and the emphasis is once again on the body and its potentialities: “The Holy One, blessed be He, has inscribed upon man’s limbs all of his future deeds, and through the tremors of those limbs his Creator reveals all that will happen to him in the future.” Here, however, Judah goes one step further, and definitively distinguishes this predictive scheme from magical divination (nihush) or superstition (darkhei emori): “Do not allow your heart to mislead you . . . to say that these are not pious practices, but are rather superstitions— do not think this, or allow your thoughts to sway you. For this book is The Book of the Pious, and its [contents] are like its name. . . . [Nevertheless], do not reveal this [wisdom] to others, lest it lead them to magical practices.”113 While acknowledging that the divinatory practices being discussed here might resemble (forbidden) magical ones, Judah distinguishes the two clearly. Physiognomy and chiromancy are, like astrology, “wisdoms” permitted by God, and, indeed, implanted by Him into the human body and cosmos, respectively.114 Of course, physiognomy and divination were by no means original to the Pietists— the Heikhalot corpus includes many allusions to the effectiveness of physiognomy, chiromancy, and so on, and whole texts survive from the late antique and medieval periods which are wholly dedicated to the explication of this art.115 Indeed, a certain Sefer haRefafot (Book of Tremors) is preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth century Mahzor Vitri, suggesting that this system of divination was, if not widespread, then certainly not unknown in medieval Ashkenaz.116 What is noteworthy is the way the Pietists frame this material, and the placement it receives in their writings. By anchoring it firmly in the context of discussion of man as microcosm, the Pietists present what could have been understood as magical or “supernatural” as merely another empirical means of understanding the relationship between man and the physical universe.

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The Microcosmic Golem In light of the Pietists’ evident preoccupation with microcosmism, it is worth revisiting one of the most famous and also most obscure passages in their textual corpus. In his Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, Eleazar briefly describes the ways in which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet can be utilized in the creation of a Golem: “One who studies Sefer Yetsirah must purify himself [and] wear white clothing. And one must not study by himself, but rather with two or three [others] . . . and he should take virgin soil from a mountainous place where no man has ever plowed. He should knead the soil together with living water (mayim hayyim) and form it into a body (golem), and begin to permute the alphabet of the 221 gates limb by limb, each limb together with the letter corresponding to it in Sefer Yetsirah.”117 The passage is followed by a lengthy list of letter combinations (the “221 gates,” though sometimes 231 appears in place of 221). These instructions have been the focus of a great deal of sustained scholarly attention. Gershom Scholem argued that this passage reflects “the oldest instructions for making a Golem,”118 and showed that it was in keeping with the explosion of interest in Golem-making among the Pietists and their Ashkenazic contemporaries.119 Peter Schäfer, too, has claimed that the Pietists were the first Jewish “mystics” to attempt to create Golems.120 Yehudah Liebes and Moshe Idel, in contrast, have argued in a series of publications that the notion of creating a Golem predated the writers of medieval Ashkenaz, and may have been the implicit goal of Sefer Yetsirah itself from its earliest stages.121 For Liebes and Idel, the question of why medieval Ashkenazic theologians took such an interest in Golem making is a mistaken one, since in their view the Pietists were merely transmitting more ancient materials rather than generating new ones. But the notion that Golem materials predated the twelfth century has more recently come under fire, as a number of scholars have shown that Idel’s and Liebes’s textual evidence is far from unambiguous.122 Then why, we may ask, did the “idea of the Golem” come to the fore specifically in medieval Ashkenaz? Schäfer argues that the answer lies in the Pietists’ confidently pious self-image— the Talmud already claimed that one who was totally free from sin could theoretically mimic God’s creative capacities,123 and Schäfer suggests that the Pietists might have been the first Jewish thinkers confident enough to take on this challenge.124 But this solution does not account for the

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fact that recipes for creating Golems and tales about those who did so spread rapidly in medieval Ashkenaz, far beyond the confines of Judah, Eleazar, and their circle.125 Instead, I would suggest that the newfound fascination with Golems is a manifestation of the broader Pietistic preoccupation with microcosmism. The sanctity ascribed to the creation of a human body “limb by limb” as a means of mimicking God’s creation of the world is striking in light of the conceptions of the human body traced thus far in this chapter. Indeed, if one “zooms out” from the paragraph cited above—which scholars focused on “the idea of the Golem” have tended to sever from its wider context in Eleazar’s Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah—it becomes clear that microcosm-macrocosm analogies are key to the meaning that the Golem discussion has in its immediate context. For the passage that precedes the Golem instructions is yet another lengthy explication of the linkages between man as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm—this time cited mostly, but not entirely, from Judah ben Barzilai al-Bargeloni’s commentary on Sefer Yetsirah.126 The passage in question is devoted to explicating the terms alizim, lo’azim, and no’atsim, which Sefer Yetsirah mentions cryptically in reference to the twelve “simple” letters and their human anatomical corollaries.127 Thus: Two joyous ones (alizim): these are the liver and the gall bladder. The liver is the house of the blood, and the blood serves and rules over the body. Its planet is Mars, and Mars’ constellations are Aries and Scorpio. Aries is fire, and Scorpio is water— this is why the blood is wet and hot, since its heat is from Aries and its wetness is from Scorpio. . . . Thus the liver is like the storehouse of the body. It is also the location of the bile, and it helps digest food, and conveys the power from food to the stomach, and it changes the bile into blood. . . . Thus the liver is entirely blood, and when the bile is turned into blood it eliminates jaundice. This is why they are called “two joyous ones”—for when the liver and the gall bladder are in their natural state, the entire body will be healthy.128

Eleazar cites this passage almost verbatim—but adds one brief line that indicates that he was not merely copying blindly. He explains that the numerical value of Aries (tleh) is equivalent to that of blood (dam; both equal 44)— an equivalence that does not appear in alBargeloni’s work, and which is typical of the Pietists’ general infatuation with gematriyah as a hermeneutical tool.129 Eleazar continues to cite from this passage at length, explaining lo’azim and no’atsim by expounding further upon the interrelationship between the various

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planets, constellations, humors, and bodily organs. Eleazar seems untroubled by the fact that al-Bargeloni’s interpretations of the correspondences between body parts and astral bodies contradicts Sefer Yetsirah’s own account, in which, for example, Mars is equated with the left eye, not the liver.130 Nor does this scheme fit with that of Donnolo, who links the alizim not to the liver and gall bladder, but instead to the stomach and spleen.131 Consistency, it would seem, was not Eleazar’s priority. Rather, he was once again moved to cite a scheme relevant to his overriding concern with man’s role as a microcosm— indeed, al-Bargeloni sums up the contents of this passage by noting that “everything you find in the macrocosm (olam ha-gadol), which is the entire universe, and in the microcosm (olam katan), which is the bodies of human beings,” will be encompassed by the series of correspondences described in Sefer Yetsirah.132 After listing these lengthy correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, Eleazar segues to a line from Sefer Yetsirah that follows on the references to the alizim, lo’azim, and no’atsim: “They are 22 objects, but a single body (guf ehad).”133 In context, the line seems rather self- explanatory— although Sefer Yetsirah divides the alphabet into three groups (3 amot, 7 kefulot, 12 peshutot), they are all parts of a greater whole. But for Eleazar, the reference here to “the body” occasions yet another excursus on embodiment: Regarding “they are 22 objects, but a single body”: the 22 letters form a single word when they are joined together . . . and the world is a body as well, and its 22 components are [divided into] three, seven, and twelve— fire,134 air, and water, and the seven planets, and the twelve constellations. The year is also a single body— its three are cold, hot, and temperate, and the seven days of the week, and the twelve months of the year. And man is also a single body— his three are the head, middle, and lower bodies, and the seven “gates” (orifices in the face) and the twelve “guides” (limbs and organs). . . . Each of these join with each of the others, and each of them substitutes for the others, and corresponds to the others, and without one none of the others can exist. . . . The world is built upon all of these, whether to build or to destroy, and it was based on these that the secret of this book was revealed to Abraham our father, to know God’s deeds and to fulfill all the deeds of His service.135

As this intermediary passage indicates, the juxtaposition between a discussion of man as microcosm of the universe and instructions for creating a Golem is not accidental. For Eleazar, embodiment is the governing metaphor for understanding the physical universe as

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a whole. Time, space, and of course man are all bodies— discrete bodies, but bodies whose boundaries simultaneously blur into one another. It is this overarching, cosmic embodiment that comprises “the secret of this book.” While Sefer Yetsirah itself does not describe the creation of man, this passage perfectly sets up the discussion of how one can utilize its contents to do precisely that. The Golem that results is a world in miniature, a body created via the body of the alphabet, just like the bodies of time and space themselves. The twenty-two letters, which unite into a single body, are thus utilized by the adept not merely in the pursuit of a “mystical experience” per se,136 but rather as a means of creating a body, and hence a complete spatio-temporal world. By reading Eleazar’s discussion of the Golem specifically in light of his preoccupation with microcosmism, it may be possible to shed light on one additional element of the ritual described in Pietistic sources. In addition to the technical instructions that are provided in works like Eleazar’s Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, other sources portray the creation of the Golem in narrative form and retroject it onto an earlier time period. Thus, in Judah’s Sefer Gematriyot: “Everything that God had created” (kol asher bara [‫]כל אשר ברא‬ Elohim la’asot):137 [like the] 231 [‫ ]רל”א‬letter permutations of Sefer Yetsirah. Ben Sira wanted to study Sefer Yetsirah. A heavenly voice descended and said, “You cannot do this alone” (Exod. 18:18). He went before Jeremiah his father— Ben Sira equals Ben Yirmiyahu in gematriyah— and they studied it together. After three years, they created a man, on whose forehead was written “Truth” (emet)— like on the forehead of the first man. The man they created said to them: “God alone created the first man, and when He wanted to kill the first man, he erased a letter from ‘Truth’ (emet) so that ‘Dead’ (met) remained. How much more do I wish to do this— do not create any more men, lest you deceive the world.”138

Jeremiah and Ben Sira accede to the created man’s wishes, and he immediately “returned to dust.” Versions of this story appear in a number of Pietistic writings, and also in related works like the PseudoSaadia Commentary associated with the so- called “Unique Cherub Circle.”139 Scholars have sought to account for some of the strange details of this story—why it features Jeremiah and Ben Sira as protagonists, for example.140 But one peculiar detail that can be addressed via an awareness of the Pietistic concern with microcosm-macrocosm analogies is the word emet said to be written on the Golem’s forehead.141 While the tale focuses on the contrast between the words

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emet and met, emet itself functions as an acronym of the final letters of bara Elohim la’asot, the final three words in Genesis 2:3— the same verse invoked in the tale to hint at the 231 letter combinations used to animate a Golem. In their writings, the Piestists made much of the fact that “the creation of the world begins and ends with truth (emet),” noting that the word for “truth” is encoded in both the first (Gen. 1:1) and last (Gen. 2:3) verses of the creation narrative: ‘In the beginning, God Created the’ (bereishit barA elohiM eT) and ‘which God created’ (aher barA elohiM la’asoT).”142 The appearance of emet on the Golem is meant to emphasize that the Golem is a stand-in for the universe as a whole, an embodied microcosm whose individual limbs the Pietists treated with reverence, and the creation of which represents the apogee of Pietistic esotericism.

The Body in an Incarnational Age Thus far, this chapter has demonstrated the centrality of human embodiment in an array of Pietistic writings. Unlike their Sephardic contemporaries, for whom the human body was being increasingly downgraded in favor of the soul, the Pietists granted pride of place to the body as theologically meaningful. By linking the human body to the cosmos—which, as we have seen, are themselves imbued with theological meaning— the Pietists were able to shed new light on the origins and structure of the human body, knowledge of which reveals God’s goodness and majesty. In a brief aside, Haym Soloveitchik once acknowledged that “one might, indeed, have thought that the ascetic tendencies of the movement would have been fertile soil for the development of an acrid doctrine of dualism. Yet there is nowhere noticeable in the Hokhmath ha-Nefesh any antagonism towards the body.”143 Soloveitchik attributes the Pietists’ positive approach to embodiment to “the influence of Donnolo.”144 But while the Pietists, as we have seen, certainly did find Donnolo’s works (and those of others too!) to be crucial sources, they were nevertheless selective in their citations from his Sefer Hakhmoni. Indeed, given the omnivorousness with which the Pietists consumed and combined diverse texts on the body, it could be argued that the fact that they valued the body was what led them to read and selectively cite from Donnolo’s work in the first place. The French scholar of medieval philosophy Remi Brague has recently formulated this methodological point somewhat sharply: “What seems to me to

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be essential, in any event, is to have done with a stupidly hydraulic representation of ‘influences’ in which knowledge supposedly flows naturally from the summits to the plains. In reality, demand precedes offer . . . and it is that need that we have to explain.”145 The other scholar who has dealt with the Pietistic writings on the body, and particularly on the body as microcosm, is Joseph Dan, who, in a neglected article, links the Pietists’ interest in the human microcosm with the Renaissance preoccupation with the hermetic motif of harmonia mundi.146 Dan extrapolates from the fact that Christian kabbalists like Pico Della Mirandola had access to Pietistic writings in Latin translations the possibility that Renaissance neoplatonic thinking about man’s cosmic significance may have derived from medieval Jewish sources. But the notion that the “hermetic” neoplatonic ideals of the Italian Renaissance can be traced back directly to Pietistic writings seems to me less productive than a linkage between Pietistic writings and the Christian ideals of the twelfth- century Renaissance. Just as the twelfth century witnessed an explosion of interest in the workings and theological meaning of the natural world, it saw a corresponding engagement with the human body and its linkages to the universe as a whole. Indeed, Christians preachers and theologians were expounding upon the theological value of the human microcosm in precisely the same times and places in which the Pietists were writing, seizing upon a motif that earlier Christian sources had mostly neglected and bringing it to the center of their theological and scientific worldview in a manner “virtually unforeseen in the previous literature.”147 In discussing the surge of twelfth-century treatments of microcosmism, it is important to acknowledge the wide array of theories— some complementary, other mutually contradictory— that fall under the rubric of microcosmism. Just as we have noted that the midrashic, medieval Sephardic, and Pietistic understandings of the microcosmmacrocosm relationship differed in key ways, medieval Christian authors drew on a wide array of microcosmic theories. In his important taxonomy of ancient and medieval microcosmic theories, Rudolf Allers, for instance, distinguishes no fewer than eight discrete approaches in evidence among the ancient Greeks, church fathers, and medieval Christian authors— and this without even taking into consideration Islamic and Jewish sources.148 Nonetheless, no matter how narrowly microcosmism is defined, there can be no doubt that the twelfth century was witness to a

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flourishing of this motif unprecedented in prior literature. While the Patristic authors had certainly been aware of the classical notion that man is in some sense a microcosm of the universe, they were suspicious of its potential implications. Hence Augustine, for example, refused to posit any precise equivalencies between man/soul and the universe/God, lest they be understood as equating God with the neoplatonic “world soul.”149 Instead, Augustine and many of his intellectual descendants were content to invoke microcosmism in exegetical contexts, as grounding an allegorical approach to biblical hermeneutics. Thus Ambrose, for instance, invokes the analogy between man and the created order in his tropological interpretation of the biblical account of the six days of creation— in his reading, every object or phenomenon created in the universe “need[s] to represent some aspect of human nature, some virtue to be emulated, some vice to be avoided.”150 The same limited approach can be found in the writings of Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and others.151 Indeed, this approach was still in evidence during the high Middle Ages, for example in the Microcosmus of Godfrey of St. Victor, who links the four elements of the universe to the four senses in which scripture can be interpreted.152 Even those authors who did invoke the microcosm motif for descriptive ends— that is, those who argued for an ontological linkage between microcosm and macrocosm— tended to focus exclusively on the soul and its links to God.153 Thus John Scotus Eriugena, based on his reading of Greek sources, and particularly the Pseudo-Dionysius, went so far as to qualitatively link the soul with God, and to argue that both the body and the physical universe themselves were only created in response to the Fall— the original plan for man was that he be disembodied, and that emanation outward from God cease long before reaching the level of materiality.154 In the twelfth century, however, medieval Christian authors began to emphasize precisely the physical, ontological linkages between man and cosmos. This was due in large part to an increased engagement with the writings of Plato, especially the Timaeus. As mediated by late antique interpreters like Macrobius and Chalcidius, this work put forward an involved mythopoetic creation narrative that emphasized the physical parallels between man and universe. The rediscovery of the Timaeus, and consequent application of microcosmism specifically to the natural world and to man’s physical body, was also impacted by the spread of Arabic scientific texts. The twelfth century saw the rapid dissemination of astrological knowledge in particular, which included the

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kinds of intricate descriptions of melothesia we have already encountered in the writings of Donnolo above.155 The Platonic and astrological trends coincided in the extensive microcosmic discussions of a wide array of twelfth-century authors. Those associated with the Cathedral school at Chartres were particularly enamored of this notion— hence the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvester comprised two parallel sections, one describing the creation of the megacosmus, the other detailing precisely the parallels contained within the microcosmus.156 Contemporaries and disciples of Bernard like William of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers, and Alan of Lille were similarly enamored of the notion that man, precisely in his materiality, is a microcosm of the physical universe. Emphasizing as they did Christ’s Incarnation, and the concomitant sanctification of the material world, the Chartrians and their contemporaries found microcosmism to be an apt scheme for exploring and spiritualizing the physical world.157 While dedicated Augustinians like Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard resisted the emphasis on microcosmism—Augustine did not embrace the microcosm motif, as we have seen, and was opposed to astrology as well—they were the exceptions rather than the rule. Indeed, even the fiercest opponents of the excesses of the Chartrians (such as William of St. Thierry, who was instrumental in the condemnation of Gilbert of Poitiers in 1148) embraced the notion that the physical universe could best be understood via analogies with the microcosmic human body.158 As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, Aristotelian naturalism conquered the universities, and the Platonic overtones of the microcosmic analogy were increasingly jettisoned. But while an earlier generation of modern scholars argued that microcosmism was definitively rejected in this period, recent studies have emphasized that Aristotelian natural philosophy modified microcosmism rather than uprooting it— so deeply had the linkages between man and the cosmos become ingrained in contemporary scientific and theological writings.159 Indeed, the fundamental linkages between man and the universe provided a grounding for the proposition that man himself was capable of investigating and discerning the inner workings of the natural world. For mystics and scholastics alike, “connections were established between the human body and the world, and the resemblances upon which they were based posited sympathetic rather than semantic links. From being an interpretive principle, microcosmmacrocosm came to be an ordering conception by which the world could be known and, in theory, manipulated.”160

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In closely connecting the workings of the human body to those of the universe, and particularly in emphasizing the practical implications of such connections, the microcosmisms of twelfth- century northern Europe closely resemble those of the Pietists. While the latter primarily adopted their microcosmic linkages from prior midrashic and scientific sources, the fact that they felt moved to do so attests to the pull that microcosmism as a theological motif exerted on them. Indeed, it is likely that Ashkenazic Jews would have been exposed to such motifs in their immediate surroundings, since some of the most vocal and influential mid- to late twelfth- century proponents of man’s physical connection to the universe lived in close proximity to the German Pietists (in Regensburg and the Rhineland). Honorius Augustodunensis, who died in Regensburg ca. 1151, and whose possible links to contemporary Jews have lately been highlighted by Jeremy Cohen and Rachel Fulton,161 was key to the popularization of microcosmism via his Elucidarium, which circulated extensively in Latin and was quickly translated into a number of vernaculars.162 Even more notable is the extensive use of microcosmic motifs in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), who flourished in the Rhineland, and whose extensive preaching tours took her to towns containing important Jewish communities like Mainz, Cologne, Metz, Bonn, and Würzburg.163 A number of recent studies have pointed out the parallels between elements of some of Hildegard’s writings and those of contemporary Ashkenazic Jews,164 and indeed, the similarities between the microcosmic discussions in works like the Liber divinorum operum and those recorded in Pietistic texts are striking. In Hildegard’s initial vision recorded in her Liber divinorum operum, she records seeing “a beautiful, marvelous image, in the mystery of God, as if the form of a human being. . . . I heard a voice from heaven telling me, ‘God, who created all things, made the human being in his image and likeness, and in him designated both the higher and lower creatures.’”165 For Hildegard, man’s divine likeness is focused not in his immaterial soul, but rather in his encapsulation of the created world. What follows is an extensive account of man as the organizing principle of creation, in which the topography of the earth, its meteorological workings, the progression of the seasons, and so on, are intricately bound to man’s anatomical and physiological functioning. Moreover, as in the Pietistic texts discussed above, we find in Hildegard more than just the standard classical equivalences between the four humors, four elements, four qualities, and four seasons.

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Hildegard was a keen observer of her natural surroundings and incorporated her own empirical findings into her works, using them as a spur toward further, novel linkages between the human body and the broader cosmos.166 Moreover, man’s microcosmic significance is bound up in an incarnational theology, in which God’s own erstwhile humanity imbues the created order with sanctity— a notion that finds visible expression in the illumination that Hildegard designed to accompany this vision (Figure 3). The prospect that Ashkenazic theologians were exposed to Hildegardian cosmology is reinforced by another suggestive parallel. Scholars have explored the use of nut (egoz) imagery as an organizing principle in Pietistic conceptions of the cosmos and the throne world,167 but have not noted a related analogy that appears intermittently in the writings of the Pietists and their contemporaries— that between the created universe and an egg. This parallelism appears in Eleazar’s Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit,168 as well as in the Sefer ha-Maskil of Solomon Simhah of Troyes,169 a text that betrays the influence of Pietistic sources and beliefs.170 The image of the “cosmic egg” was the subject of one of Hildegard’s best-known visions, described and interpreted at length— and depicted pictorially—in her Scivias (Figure 4).171 The symbol of the egg, which is to my knowledge unattested in prior Jewish cosmogonic writings,172 might well be the result of Hildegard’s analogy having spread to the Jews in whose towns she was a frequent presence.173 Like the other links between cosmogony and gestation surveyed above, the “cosmic egg” motif links microcosmic physiology to macrocosmic notions of the workings and meaning of the created world.174 Written and visual articulations of this incarnational theology appeared with increasing frequency in medieval Germany in particular. Thus, the Hortus deliciarum, commissioned in the mid-twelfth century in the Alsacian Hohenburg Abbey, contains a visual representation of man’s microcosmic nature (Figure 5), as do several additional illuminated manuscripts composed in twelfth-century Regensburg (Figures 6 and 7).175 And in fact, at least one Pietistic rumination on the olam katan reflects familiarity with tropes that were circulating specifically in medieval German sources. In a passage from a Pietistic miscellany preserved in the Bodleian Library, Judah discusses the microcosmic significance of the rainbow—a topic we encountered above as well, which the Pietists returned to frequently in the writings about the natural world.176 “Why is the rainbow green, like grass, and partly red and yellow? Because the rainbow is meant to extinguish anger, and anger is located in

Figure 3. “Universal Man,” Liber divinorum operum MS Lucca 1942 (early thirteenth century)

Figure 4. The Cosmic Egg, Scivias codex, Abbey of St Hildegard, RüdesheimEibingen, fol. 14r (ca. 1165)

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Figure 5. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, fol. 16v (Médiathèques Strasbourg / Heritage Fund Ms 955)

two organs— red [corresponds to] the liver, and the lungs [to] green. Anger causes one to puff air from his nose, and that wind comes from the lungs; and the gallbladder lets a drop of green bile into the liver [which is full of blood], and his anger is forgotten.177 This is why red and green are adjacent in the rainbow, to show that [God’s] anger is forgotten.”178 According to the book of Genesis the rainbow was created by God to serve, in Yair Lorberbaum’s phrase, as an “anger management device,”179 and Judah here links the colors of the rainbow to those bodily humors that, according to contemporary medicine and rabbinic literature, were responsible for kindling and assuaging anger (specifically blood and bile). This linkage can be further proved, according to Judah, based on additional physiological details; thus, he argues that the forty-seven nerves connected to the heart correspond to the forty-seven times that the High Priest would sprinkle

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Figure 6. Munich: Library, Staatsbibliothek, Clm.13002, fol. 7v (mid-twelfth century)

blood in the Temple during the Yom Kippur ritual of atonement (in order to assuage God’s anger).180 Judah goes on to provide additional physiological proofs for the connection between the colors of the rainbow and the humors of the body, and then suggests an empirical verification: “One can see when the sun shines upon the water that spills over the millwheel—not the mills in

Figure 7. Vienna Nat. Bibl., Cod. 12600, fol. 29r (Prufening, twelfth century)

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Figure 8. Noah Window, Chartres Cathedral

the river but those in town, and not when the water is underneath but when it spills over the top—when it is in the sunlight in the morning, [one can see] an image of a rainbow.”181 The specificity with which Judah refers to the mill—referring his readers to go specifically to a certain mill in town— suggests that he and his readers really attempted to empirically examine rainbows in order to discern their workings and meaning. Indeed, similar instructions can be found in contemporary treatises on optics written by Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon—again anchoring the Pietists specifically within their surrounding intellectual culture.182 Moreover, Judah’s description of the colors of the rainbow (highlighting red, green, and yellow) is not in keeping with classical scientific theories,183 but does correspond strikingly to contemporary visual depictions of rainbows, such as the tri-color rainbow in the “Noah Window” of the Chartres Cathedral (Figure 8). Finally, the original and not at all self-evident notion that the colors of the rainbow correspond to theologically meaningful bodily fluids parallels a tradition found in high medieval German vernacular culture. In the so-called Milstäter Genesis, a High Middle German lyrical rendering of the biblical story, the red and green colors of the postdeluge rainbow are held to symbolize the blood and water that flowed out of Christ’s side at the crucifixion.184 The link between the color red

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and blood, and, less intuitively, between water and green were both typical in Pietistic thought, as we have seen above.185 There is good reason, then, to believe that the Pietists’ obsessive attention to microcosmism derived from or was augmented by exposure to Christian sources. The varied microcosmic linkages that the Pietists compile— some adopted from prior sources, others based on empirical observation— speak to a consuming interest in the scientific and theological significance of the human body. That interest was reshaping Christian theology in precisely the same time and place in which the Pietists flourished—increased attention to the Incarnation sacralized the human body and precluded the kind of sharp body- soul dualism that has been stereotypically associated with medieval thought. Indeed, this theological backdrop might allow us to make sense of the consuming interest of medieval Ashkenazic figures in exploring the body of God, with which this chapter began. For despite the clear anti-anthropomorphic consensus of rationalist thinkers like Saadia, neither the Pietists nor their Ashkenazic contemporaries ever stopped ruminating upon the question of God’s body. The most overt exponent of the view that God did (or at least could) indeed have a physical body was Moses b. Hisdai Taku, an Ashkenazic halakhic authority and fierce intra- communal polemicist.186 In his Sefer Ketav Tamim (Book of Innocent Writing), Taku compiles dozens of biblical and rabbinic passages describing God’s corporeality, and excoriates those Jewish authors who “come to dispute the truth and to assert something new which is not there”— namely, those who read these anthropomorphic passages figuratively or metaphorically.187 The latter include not only rationalist philosophers like Saadia and Maimonides, but also Judah the Pious and other Ashkenazic theologians, like the anonymous author of Sefer ha- Hayyim.188 Taku’s argument for the plausibility of divine embodiment rests in part on literalist hermeneutical grounds, that is, on an aversion to allegorical interpretation of scripture. But at the same time, a positive evaluation of human embodiment is never far beneath the surface. For Taku bases his argument particularly upon biblical and rabbinic passages lauding the human form as a reflection of the divine— denying God a body, he seems to be implying, would in turn derogate human corporeality, whereas humanizing the divine body in turn divinizes humanity.189 His sharp critique of Judah the Pious and his ilk should thus not obscure the fact that each was in his own way lauding the human

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body as spiritually meaningful, as a physical and spiritual reflection of the cosmos, and hence of God. But Taku’s critique was rooted in polemical concerns in addition to theological and hermeneutical ones. Taku identified allegorical readings of the Bible with Christian methods of scriptural interpretation: “Do we not have sufficient rage and anger at the words of the heretics, the disciples of Jesus, who render the commandments of the Torah allegories?”190 The irony, of course, is that Taku’s opposition to Christian hermeneutics led him to corporealize God at precisely the moment when contemporary Christians were arguing for the plausibility of the “Word made flesh”— arguing, not least of all, with Jews. Contemporary Christian polemical texts are rife with scriptural and logical proofs of the plausibility, indeed necessity, of Christ’s assumption of human form.191 To further compound the irony, the high Middle Ages saw a countervailing tendency on the part of some of the same Christian interlocutors, who were increasingly reading and ridiculing Jewish texts that anthropomorphized God. Former Jews such as Petrus Alphonsi and Nicholas Donin, who had access to and facility with rabbinic literature, heaped scorn upon passages that implied that “God has a head, arms, and the entire form of the body.”192 On an individual level, these “apostate” Jews may have been working through their own apprehensiveness about the incarnational theology of their newfound religion. More broadly, criticism of Jewish anthropomorphic texts was of a piece with the overarching notion that members of “carnal Israel” were blind to the core spiritual meaning of Scripture, and preoccupied solely by its physical shell; indeed, due to their status as so- called “living letters of the law,” for Christians “the word of God was incarnate in the Jew!”193 Taku’s “corporealism,” though formulated exceptionally bluntly, was not entirely unrepresentative. And while most Ashkenazic thinkers (including the Pietists) did repeatedly and vociferously deny that God had a physical body, their consistent preoccupation with an ostensibly long-settled question points to the possible impact of the broader incarnational worldview upon their own theological reflection. And significantly, their denial of divine corporeality did not preclude them from conceiving of the soul— itself a microcosm of God—in decidedly physical, embodied terms. This tendency to join the “cosmic body” to a “corporeal soul,” and its manifold theological and ritual implications, is the subject of the following chapter.

Chapter 3

Between Body and Soul Just as God fills the entire world, so too the soul fills the entire body. — Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 10a

While they valorized the human body as a microcosm of the theologically resonant natural order, the German Pietists did not neglect the corollary— that the human soul is a microcosm of God. Indeed, the correspondences between the soul and its maker had been catalogued in earlier, authoritative texts, most famously in the talmudic exegesis of Psalms 103:1: “Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all my innards [bless] His holy name.” For the rabbis of the Talmud, this verse suggested that “just as God fills the entire world, so too the soul fills the entire body”— that the soul was in some sense identical with “all my innards.”1 For the German Pietists, who conceived of God as panentheistically immanent in the created world, 2 the notion that the soul pervaded the body was a logical conclusion. And characteristically, they understood this linkage in bluntly physical terms; developing an image found in Midrash Tehillim, Eleazar states that “the soul is like . . . a vessel full of blood, attached by a chain to the spinal cord; it has tiny tendons that spread through the entire body.”3 The human soul does not just animate the body, it is literally, physically embedded within it, inextricably pervading the flesh through a net of interlocking sanguineous strands. Given the positive valuation of human embodiment discussed in the previous chapter, this emphasis on the physical presence of the soul within the body should come as no surprise. And indeed, the Pietistic corpus is rife with discussions of the physical dimensions of “ensoulment”— the soul is understood to be inextricably linked to the body, and at times even to be a physical body itself. A comprehensive 114

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survey of Ashkenazic conceptions of the soul is beyond the scope of this book and remains a desideratum.4 Instead, this chapter highlights a number of ways in which the ostensible dualism between body and soul is mitigated in Pietistic writings, and seeks to anchor the resulting fluidity within the surrounding culture in which it was articulated. In particular, it examines the physical manifestations of the soul within the body and traces the corporeal life cycle of the soul itself—for the Pietists, conception, gestation, aging, and death all manifest themselves on a spiritual as well as a physical level. Attention to this dynamic will allow us, at the conclusion of the chapter, to shed new light upon one of the best known and most puzzling elements of Pietistic devotion— the extreme physical asceticism that is central to Ashkenazic penitential theology and praxis.

Bar the Doors? The Soul in and as the Body The Hebrew Bible generally evinces a monistic conception of human identity, without any kind of sharp distinction between body and soul.5 In rabbinic literature, matters were considerably more complicated, both conceptually and terminologically. Rabbinic sources at times endorse a dichotomous body-soul dualism, and at other times imply a more holistic or gradated relationship between man’s spiritual and physical natures.6 The biblical nefesh is at times used generically to mean “living creature,” but is also one of the five terms used in rabbinic sources for the incorporeal human soul (the others are ru’ah, neshamah, hayyah, and yehidah). These five terms are variously used synonymously with one another or used to refer to distinct levels or gradations within the soul.7 The confused state of affairs is reflected especially in discussions of human eschatology, where descriptions of an incorporeal afterlife for souls butt up against promises of bodily resurrection—fundamentally incompatible schemes that subsequent interpreters went to great lengths to integrate and synthesize. Medieval rationalist and especially Maimonidean thinkers increasingly widened the theological gap between body and soul, and privileged the latter at the expense of the former.8 Like these Sephardic contemporaries, Ashkenazic theologians could hardly ignore the rabbinic passages that treated the soul as ontologically distinct from the body.9 At times, they even expressed the characteristically Platonic notion that the body (Greek: soma) is a tomb (Greek: sema) for the soul— albeit in a different idiom. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, the

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etymology of the word guf (body) is derived from a verse in Nehemiah (7:2) in which Nehemiah orders the gatekeepers of Jerusalem to “bar (yagifu) the doors”—indicating that the body is seen as a constraint on the soul, one that is lifted only at the death of the body.10 Nonetheless, these gestures toward a dualistic conception of the human body and soul are far outweighed by passages in which the fundamental connection between body and soul is explicitly or implicitly emphasized. In keeping with their depiction of the sanguineous soul perched upon the spinal cord, the Pietists recurrently treat the bodysoul connection by linking the various components of the soul to specific bodily organs. The Pietists were aware of the midrashic notion that the soul comprised five sub-souls,11 but were far less concerned with this typology than they were with the Aristotelian-Platonic scheme that they found in the writings of Abraham Ibn Ezra. In his commentary on Ecclesiastes, which Eleazar incorporated verbatim into his psychological treatise Hokhmat ha-Nefesh,12 Ibn Ezra laid out a tripartite scheme distinguishing between three of the terms used for “the soul” in the Bible. He identified the nefesh alternately with the Aristotelian “vegetative soul” and the Platonic “appetitive soul”; the ru’ah with Aristotelian “sentient” and Platonic “spirited” souls; and the neshamah with the intellectual/rational soul.13 In the seventh chapter of his treatise Yesod Mora, moreover, Ibn Ezra located these parts of the soul in specific anatomical sites—the nefesh in the liver,14 the ru’ah in the heart, and the neshamah in the brain.15 The Pietists were familiar with this source as well and cited it repeatedly in their writings.16 Moreover, they invoke it in their readings of the passage in Berakhot with which this chapter began. According to the rabbis, one of the correspondences between God and the soul is that both of them “see but are not seen.” The Pietists invoke Ibn Ezra’s physiology in order to understand how the soul’s invisibility does not preclude it from— anatomically speaking— “[filling] the entire body.” For example, “the neshamah sits below the membrane of the brain, and rules the body, filling all its limbs, and sees but is not seen.”17 The second half of this passage gestures toward BT Berakhot 10a, but, significantly, recasts “fills the entire body” (memaleh kol ha-guf) as “fills all its limbs” (memaleh kol ha-evarim).18 Using Ibn Ezra’s psychological-anatomical correspondences, Eleazar is able to explain the soul’s immanence in the body as being a function of its placement in specific anatomical sites. This linkage between the body’s physical organs and its spiritual faculties stands out all the more in comparison to the treatment of these

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organs in roughly contemporaneous works. The Zohar, for instance, also occasionally acknowledges the spiritual primacy of the brain, heart, and liver—but only as representatives of their supernal counterparts in the sefirotic body (Hokhmah, Tiferet, and Malkhut, respectively).19 In the approach of the Zohar, “the spiritual use of the body confers benefit to the supernal realm. This approach betokens an antagonistic relationship between body and spirit, registering the idea that the two are irreconcilable and that the way to advance the agenda of the supernal realm is through repression of the human body.”20 For the Pietists, however, the emphasis is not on an externally oriented spiritual use of the body so much as the incarnation of one’s spiritual capacities specifically within his material body. Having linked the soul to the limbs and organs of the body, moreover, the Pietists feel authorized to treat it with the same empirical methodology that, I have argued above, they harnessed in their analyses of the body itself. Careful observation of the body, that is, can shed light on the workings of the various elements of the soul. One rather obscure manifestation of this linkage is the Pietists’ repeated references to a timekeeping mechanism embedded in the human body: The nefesh is the blood in the liver . . . and the ru’ah beats through the body through the power of the heart, and the neshamah is in the brain, and breathes forth from the nostrils. At night, the neshamah first blows from the right nostril for the entire first hour [of the night]. If your left nostril is blocked, and your breath comes primarily from the right nostril, you can know that it is the first hour [of the night]. And if your right nostril is blocked, and when you breathe, your breath blows primarily from the left nostril, know that it is the second hour. And if the left nostril is blocked, and most of your breath comes from the right nostril, know that it is the third hour. You can do thus at any time of [night] to know what time it is. 21

This strange notion is invoked over and over again in a wide array of Pietistic writings, usually in proximity to the notion that the soul departs the body at night and returns only in the morning— in Pietistic thinking, this is the source of dreams. 22 Because the neshamah is in the brain, it exits the body through the nostril— and this is understood to be a fundamentally physical process! One can feel the soul departing the body, to the extent that one can tell what time it is by remaining attuned to the nostril from which the breath is exiting. (I am unsure, however, of why the Pietists believed that the soul alternated nostrils over the course of the night.)

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The fact that the soul exits the body at night can be verified empirically through other means as well. Thus in discussing the nefesh, which is localized in the heart, Eleazar writes: “The nefesh . . . services the entire body. . . . Thus, when man is weary and tired he immediately falls into a deep sleep, and dreams, and is not aware of whether he is awake or asleep. If he is awakened suddenly, his body will be startled, and his heart will pound as though it is a small bird— this is the nefesh returning to it [all at once]. If, however, [the soul] returns of its own accord, he will awake gently, around sunrise, with the nefesh in its proper place.”23 The rapid beating of one’s heart when they are suddenly awakened is, in this reading, the feeling of the nefesh literally rushing to return to its anatomical home. The sense that the parts of the soul are physically linked to their respective anatomical centers is echoed in Eleazar’s discussion of the different deaths one can experience depending on which part of the soul is affected— thus death by exsanguination is fundamentally different from death by asphyxiation, since the former affects the nefesh, while the latter affects the ru’ah. 24 Inversely, a fascinating Pietistic text describes the way in which one can revive a stillborn child by physically reimplanting his or her soul within: “‘He blew the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into his nostrils’ (Gen. 2:7): This hints to people—if a child is stillborn, one must blow air/soul (ru’ah) into him via the orifices, through the mouth and nose and navel and nether- opening, and to grasp his navel so that the air/soul will not escape, [and to do this] for a long period of time, a half day or a full day.”25 The linkage between the neshamah and the brain has concrete, empirically verifiable implications as well. Thus man’s intellect— used interchangeably with this component of the soul 26 —“is in the head, in the brain. Know [that this is the case], for when any of the limbs of the body hurt, one’s mind is unaffected, but when one’s head hurts, or when one’s brain swells, he rants like a crazy person.”27 Eleazar goes into further detail elsewhere, and explains that the mechanics of such episodes are a function of the dynamic relationship between the elements of the soul and their anatomical corollaries. Discussing the common medieval medical belief that the waxing and waning moon can cause the brain to expand and contract, 28 Eleazar states: The soul dwells on the brain, in the head, and when the brain is weighty one’s mind is sound, but when the brain is lightened one loses his mind. And when one’s body is warmed, strengthening it, the brain too is in its rightful place, allowing it to guide the body with

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tranquility, health, and wisdom. For [in these instances] . . . the heart benefits, and [in turn] benefits the entire body—for the heart is the source of the soul, from whence the soul ascends to the brain, in the head, and from whence [the soul] also descends to the spaces in the lower part of the body (i.e., the liver). . . . Now, halfway through the month, when the moon is full, the brain expands and fills the entire skull. This damages the soul, because its dwelling place is closed off, and it is squeezed out by the brain, damaging it. This is why [the person] will arise, and lose his senses, and rant nonsensically, and lose his mind. The distress of the soul is very great on account of this swelling of the brain— to the extent that all who see [this person] say, “he is a lunatic,” [or] “he is possessed by demons.” But this is not so! Rather, it is the distress to the soul, and the corresponding grip of the black bile, which increases when the brain swells, till all the soul’s entrances [to the brain] are blocked. This will continue till the moon begins to wane, when the brain will also lessen. But if the black bile continues to rise into the level of the soul, the distress of the soul will increase till one’s mind departs, and foam exits his mouth, and he bites his tongue and grinds his teeth together, and falls to the ground like a lunatic, and he beats at the ground with his arms and legs. And there are those who will throw stones about unknowingly. All this is because the soul was prevented from entering its place in the brain, and because of the black bile that rose to block the entrances to the brain. . . . This is how we know that that the intellect is housed in the brain, and that one’s wisdom is housed in the heart. 29

In this lengthy discussion of epilepsy, which also appears in some late manuscripts of the Sefer Refu’ot of Asaf ha-Rofe, 30 Eleazar incorporates the soul into a dynamic system that also includes the humors, astrological influence, and the bodily organs. Taking Ibn Ezra’s scheme of the soul’s anatomy as a starting point, he describes the interplay between nefesh and neshamah as being fundamentally linked to the physiological processes of the body. As in the previous examples, it is clear that the soul is understood to be inextricably linked to the body it inhabits— or rather, the body that it is, in a certain sense, identical to, or at least contiguous with.

Elderly Angels and Embryonic Souls Related to this tendency to localize the soul within the anatomy of the body is another, related, motif in Pietistic writings, namely the tendency to describe the soul as itself possessed of anatomical

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features. This motif features in two interrelated components of Pietistic thought: their discussions of embryology and “ensoulment” (the implantation of the soul in the body), and their definition of man’s creation in God’s image (be-tselem elohim). Early on in Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, Eleazar describes the process of human conception: Man’s spirit should not be exalted, or prideful, but should rather think about his Creator, who is the first of all beginnings and lasts of all endings. . . . And when man sees himself, and his body— how his roots and shoots are created from filth, from a drop of semen, and made afterward into a piece of meat; and how [God] blows a supernal spirit, and a soul, into him, and creates bones within him, and stretches tendons through him, and saturates the tendons and bones with blood, and dresses them in skin; and how [God] creates man’s facial countenance and physical stature; and how man’s nostrils are perforated, and lead to the throat to allow for breathing and scent, and the ears [man has] for hearing, and the eye sockets and many colors of corneas, and the pupils and eyelids, and the palate and the tongue that extends, and the lips that open and close, and the jaw and cheeks, and the two doors to the mouth, the place where the teeth are planted, with the two lips covering them like a curtain; and the arms and legs, body cavities, fingers and knuckles and nails, each distinct from the others. . . . [And when you see] in the days of your youth, who darkened the hair of your head and beard, such that no matter what soap of lye you use, you cannot whiten even a single strand of hair, [while] in your old age all of your hair will turn white31— then you shall “seat the Creator upon His foundation,”32 for He has done all this, and this is what it means that “you should know today, and set it upon your heart, that the Lord is God” (Deut. 4:39). 33

At its outset, this passage looks to be a condemnation of man’s corporeality— a sharp dichotomization between the exalted Creator and the lowly, filthy human body. As the passage progresses, however, it becomes clear that the real goal here is to wonder at the precisely calibrated body that God has granted to man, and to celebrate God for His creative capacities. That is, the reason man should never feel prideful is not because his corporeality is intrinsically base or denigrated, but precisely because it was God who created the finely tuned, awe inspiring body of which man is possessed. Compared to God, who is able to take a “stinking drop of semen” and, by infusing it with a soul, transform it into complex, wondrous human body, man is indeed insignificant. It is noteworthy that the human body is not here identified with filth, but rather is contrasted with it. Though ostensibly intended to

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reinforce man’s lowliness vis-à-vis God, the passage once again belies the notion that human corporeality is intrinsically filthy or debased. 34 Particularly relevant for our purposes is the fact that this passage explicitly links the soul to the development of man’s physical body. It is God’s infusion of the soul into the body that transforms the “piece of meat” into an object whose creation attests to God’s glory and greatness. Eleazar seems to treat the soul as a blueprint of the entire human body—which is why it is only when God “blows a supernal spirit, and a soul, into him” that man’s inchoate materiality can be shaped into an ordered, coherent entity. This impression is confirmed in another set of texts, in which Eleazar puts his own stamp onto the midrashic motif of yetsirat ha- vlad (the creation of the fetus). The mechanics of “ensoulment” are a contested issue in rabbinic literature, with Babylonian and Palestinian texts differing as to the time at which the soul is implanted in the fetus and a number of additional issues.35 Rabbinic texts discuss embryology extensively, and several passages couch the discussion of the implantation of the soul into the fetus in narrative form. The earliest such source is in the Tanhuma, which describes God’s dispatching an angel to retrieve the drop of semen that will lead to conception and to bring it heavenward. Once the “stinking drop” is in God’s possession, “the Holy One, blessed be He decrees what the fate of the drop will be: whether male or female, weak or strong, poor or rich, short or tall, ugly or attractive, fat or thin.”36 At that point, God summons another angel and instructs it to fetch a soul from the Garden of Eden, which will be implanted within the fetus now that its bodily appearance and proportions have been determined. This midrashic tale circulated widely, and it was preserved under the title Seder Yetsirat ha-Vlad in at least two differing recensions.37 In his writings, Eleazar returns again and again to the creation of the fetus, basing his own account on the midrashic one just summarized. But Eleazar introduces several significant differences into his version. To start with, he anchors the tale of the creation of the fetus in another rabbinic teaching, namely that “the [messiah] son of David will not come until all the souls in the body (guf) have been depleted.”38 He further links this “body”— understood by his contemporaries to be a heavenly storehouse where preexistent souls are stored prior to their implantation in bodies39 — to the pargod, or curtain, which Heikhalot literature describes as surrounding the celestial throne. According to a number of texts in the Heikhalot corpus, this

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pargod was embroidered with images of all future events that would transpire on earth.40 Eleazar combines all these elements into a single, novel narrative of the creation of the fetus: All of the souls [created] in the six days of creation are embroidered into the pargod called “the body” (guf), which is like a spreadout curtain on which the souls of Israel are embroidered, the men separate from the women, Canaanite slaves separate from foreign maidservants, gentile men separate from gentile women. I have also found in the name of an anonymous sage,41 that the souls are embroidered into that curtain called guf in the same form and image in which the body will be created in the future from the seed of a man and woman, and that the appearances of the souls are embroidered there. . . . When a woman conceives, [God] calls to the angel appointed over pregnancy and says to him, go and see and search out the image of so-and-so on the curtain.42

Perhaps on account of the single cosmic “body” that they inhabit prior to being implanted in actual bodies, Eleazar understands the souls of human beings to be fundamentally embodied by their very nature. The soul is not an incorporeal, spiritual essence implanted into the body, but rather contains the physical contours of the body it will eventually inhabit long before that body comes into existence. Hence, the qualities that, in the other versions of Yetsirat ha-Vlad, are ascribed to the semen which will grow into the physical fetus— appearance, height and weight, and so on— are here deemed intrinsic to the soul. Notably, Eleazar takes particular pains to emphasize that souls are fundamentally gendered even prior to their implantation in bodies. Thus, Jewish men’s souls are sequestered from those of Jewish women, and the same is the case for Gentiles and even “Canaanite slaves” and “foreign maidservants.” Such a conception of the soul goes a long way toward explaining why, in the passage discussed above, it is only after the implantation of the soul that the “piece of meat” in utero begins to develop its physical appearance and anatomical structure. Eleazar utilizes this same scheme in his explication of the talmudic tradition that “forty days prior to the creation of the fetus (yetsirat ha- vlad) a heavenly voice announces, ‘The daughter of soand-so [will marry] so and-so!’”43 He explains: “How are the souls arranged in the ‘body’ above? Each nation and clan are separate. Why are they arranged in that manner? Because forty days before the creation of the fetus an angel announces that ‘the daughter of so-and-so

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[will marry] so-and-so.’ How does the angel know this? He gazes at the body above, and looks for the [location of] the men in the body, and next to them are [the] females [they will marry], and [the angel] knows that each is designated for the other. . . . Why is it called a body? Because the body of [each] person [on earth] is drawn so as to correspond to his body above, which is the soul (neshamah).”44 In Eleazar’s telling, married couples on earth are quite literally “soulmates,” since matches are made among disembodied (but gendered!) souls in the heavenly “body” (guf) even prior to their implantation in physical bodies on earth. The final line of this passage, moreover, can be seen as a counterpoint to the dualistic etymology of guf described above. Rather than understanding the body to be a site of constraint, in which the soul is trapped, this passage sees the soul as itself a body, one that corresponds to, and anatomically prefigures, the very physical body it will come to inhabit. The notion that the soul is, in a certain sense, a celestial blueprint of the physical body is closely related to the ways in which the Pietists understand Genesis 1:26 (“let us create man in our image”). The “image” in question is understood to refer to man’s astral counterpart— alternately referred to as his tselem, demut, mazal, or malakh— the existence of which is already attested to in Merkavah texts with which the Pietists were familiar. Thus: “Each person has his form above, who is his advocate . . . an angel who guides that person’s ‘star.’ And when he is sent below, he has the image of that person who is beneath him. . . . And this is [what is written], ‘and God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him’ (Gen. 1:27). Why twice—‘in his image,’ and ‘in the image of’? One is the image of man, and one is the image of the angelic being, which is in the form of that man.”45 Man’s demut, then, is a physical copy of him, much like the soul. Whether this cosmic doppelganger is itself equivalent to the soul, or precisely what relationship pertains between them, is never fleshed out in Pietistic writings. The fact that this tselem continues to exist in the celestial realm while man is living on earth, and that it disappears when man is decreed to die,46 would seem to militate against its being identical to the soul—which certainly continues to exist long after the physical body is dead. But while the motif of the astral demut was a fixture of prior Jewish esotericism, the Pietists particularly emphasized the physical resemblance between body and its corresponding demut. For the relationship between demut and body, especially vis-à-vis embryology and ensoulment, is described

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very similarly to that between soul and body: “The soul’s image (demut) is above. . . . There is a book on high in which are inscribed all the angels who are in the images of people who will be created. . . . When the angel appointed over pregnancy needs to draw the appearance of the fetus, he looks in the book of images [to see] what star (mazal) and what angels are recorded for that fetus.”47 Whatever its precise status vis-à-vis the soul, the demut closely resembles the soul in its tendency to be depicted corporeally. While previous sources described man’s celestial “star,” the notion that this celestial counterpart physically resembles man is apparently original to Eleazar.48 By corporealizing the demut, Eleazar channels the Pietists’ broader belief in the inescapability of the physical body, indeed, its elevated theological status.49 So intimately linked are man’s physical appearance and that of his demut that the Pietists at times suggest that man has an infinite number of these demuyot, with one discrete demut corresponding to every change in his physical appearance. Thus: “Man’s celestial image does not change in the manner that man’s physical appearance changes— for if so, [one’s celestial image] would start out as young, and then grow old! Rather, [God] created man with many images— one that resembles him while he is a youth, and one that resembles him when he is elderly. There is an image for each and every change (shinui) that man undergoes.”50 The fact that the Pietists deem it impossible for man’s celestial body to age is in keeping with a general anxiety manifested in their writings about aging; the Pietists seem to have been uncomfortable with the notion that the body, which, as we have seen, they valued as theologically meaningful, was inevitably growing more frail, and hence destabilized. 51 For our purposes, however, the fact that a separate demut is required for each physical change undergone by man’s corporeal body highlights the fact that one’s bodily qualities are inextricably linked to their cosmic counterpart. Just as the souls in the heavenly “body” already encapsulate all of the physical traits of the bodies into which they will eventually be implanted, the demut remains a fundamentally corporeal mirror of man.52 Not surprisingly, the Pietists’ Christian contemporaries were also in the midst of developing a conception of the soul as irreducibly embodied. The numerous treatises De anima (“On the Soul”) that appeared beginning in the twelfth century “incorporated the physical principles and materialist outlook” that characterized the contemporaneous discussions of microcosm-macrocosm linkages. By utilizing

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“physiological categories to classify the faculties of the soul,” thinkers as diverse as the Chartrian William of Conches and the Cistercian William of St. Thierry “gave physical basis and substance to the mere moralizing analysis in which spiritual writers typically took refuge.”53 Caroline Bynum has called the theories of the soul that developed during this period “somatomorphic,” in that they increasingly conceived of the soul as possessed of a body of its own, and hence as inextricably connected to human embodiment on an ontological level. 54 Indeed, in high medieval visionary accounts and theological texts, these conceptual linkages between body and soul were complemented by visual ones. The souls of the dead, for example, were recognizable to their relatives on account of their “shadow corporeality,” a “human body of air” that mirrored the body they had occupied while alive.55 Indeed, one of the early, and influential, articulations of this view appeared in the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis— like Judah the Pious, an inhabitant of Regensburg during the twelfth century.56 Moreover, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this linkage between body and soul was understood by many Christians to imply that human souls are fundamentally gendered. The Church fathers had emphasized the sexlessness of souls, denying that sexual differentiation was in any way relevant to spiritual entities; Aquinas would reiterate this position in the late thirteenth century. 57 But in the writings of theologians like Honorius, and especially in the vitae of thirteenth- century Beguines, it became increasingly common to depict gender as an inextricable, constitutive part of the human soul.58 Eleazar’s insistence that souls in the heavenly pargod were divided according to gender would thus have resonated for many of his non-Jewish contemporaries. Granted, medieval Christian thinkers would have been wary of the midrashic notion that souls preexist the body, a doctrine that may well have smacked of Catharism for orthodox theologians. 59 But the tacit or explicit “engendering” of the soul confirms that for medieval Jews and Christians alike, the physical and spiritual components of the olam katan were not distinct from one another, but intermingled, a “hylomorphic unity”60 that combined a spiritualization of the body with an embodiment of the spirit.

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“Until His Blood Spills Out” This joint emphasis on somatomorphism may shed light upon perhaps the most jarring element of medieval Ashkenazic piety—the harsh asceticism that is central to Ashkenazic penitential theology and praxis. While their Sephardic contemporaries increasingly conceived of penitence as a process intended to elicit an internal emotional state of regret,61 Ashkenazic Jews, and particularly the German Pietists, were far more preoccupied by the manner in which penitence was externalized. In recent years, scholars have retreated from the once common truism that “asceticism never occupied an important place in the Jewish religion,”62 tracing the diverse expressions and valences of physical asceticism in rabbinic and medieval Jewish sources.63 But physical mortification endorsed in Pietistic halakhic tracts and penitential handbooks exceed those found in rabbinic texts by several orders of magnitude. Thus: If a person who slept with a married woman comes to inquire how to repent . . . he must perform penances equivalent to lashes (malkot) or to excision (karet). If it is winter when he comes to inquire, and icy, he may break through the ice covering the river and sit in the water up to his mouth or nose for an amount of time equivalent to the time from when the sin began until it ended. He must do this regularly as long as there is ice. In the summer, he should sit in dug-up dirt among the ants while covering only his mouth . . . If it is [neither winter nor summer], he should fast, eating only bread and water in the evenings . . . and afflicting himself until he is able to sit in water when it is icy, or until there are ants and bees [in the summer]. If, however . . . [his sexual transgression] renders the woman prohibited to her husband, or if the relationship produces a bastard child (mamzer)— this occurred once, and [the sinner] was instructed to [sit among] the ants day and night, and to lie on the ground in the summer so that fleas would crawl on him . . . he [also] walked naked in proximity to a beehive, till his body became swollen, and once he healed, he returned there again and again.64

Elsewhere in Sefer Hasidim, even more graphic ascetic practices are described: a man who violated the Sabbath by fixing his wagon wheel after sundown on Friday night is instructed to weigh the wagon down, and then run his hand over with the same wheel he illicitly fixed; 65 another is told to flagellate himself “until [his] blood spills out.”66 Readers of Sefer Hasidim are warned not to go so far as to expiate their sins by castrating or even killing themselves67—but other texts attributed to the Pietists in fact license or even encourage penitentially motivated suicide.68

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The exceptionally gory details of these penances have understandably attracted the attention of modern scholars, who have explored their origins and traced their surprisingly widespread reception.69 On its surface, the Ashkenazic enthusiasm for the “mortification of the flesh” seems in tension with the positive valuation of the human body surveyed in Chapter 2. Indeed, Sefer Hasidim and other, related texts justify ascetic penitence under the rubric of teshuvat ha- mishkal— the notion that sin can be expiated only when one has undergone suffering equivalent to the amount of pleasure one derived from committing it. The apparent underlying assumption, that sin is physically pleasurable, has been extended by some scholars to include the corollary that the Pietists saw physical pleasure itself as sinful.70 But this reconstruction of the role of the body in penitential theology does not fit with the surprisingly embrace of human sexuality in some Pietistic writings71— nor does it account for the harsh penances levied upon sinners whose offenses do not involve obvious physical pleasure, such as murderers or idolaters. A number of Pietistic sources, however, justify ascetic penances on different grounds— not as a means of compensating for sinful pleasure, but as a way of preventing future punishment in the next world.72 In this view, the relevant “equivalency” (mishkal) is between suffering in this world and future suffering in the next: “one should accept judgment upon himself in this world so that his sins will not obstruct him in the world to come.”73 And a range of Pietistic sources makes clear that the punishments in the next world will be physical ones. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, Eleazar at times argues that although a deceased person’s body rots and eventually disappears, their soul is joined postmortem by a surviving “scent of the body” (reyah haguf),74 a quasi-physical counterpart to both body and soul that is subject to physical punishments in the afterlife (and that is functionally identical to the “body of air” of Honorious’s Elucidarium).75 Penitential bodily mortification is thus designed to prevent physical postmortem suffering. This dynamic is expressed clearly in a recently discovered poetic composition, in which Eleazar of Worms correlates the penances one must undertake for various sins with the corresponding suffering in the next world that those penances are meant to replace. Thus, the sin of an unrepentant murderer . . . is punishable by death / and he will go to ruin In the pit of destruction, in devastation / in the nethermost fiery pit

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He will be hung hand and foot / for having strayed from the straight path Snakes and scorpions / will bite him on account of the sins He committed in life / they will bite his soul Angels will dismember / his limbs and burn him They will strike him with a fiery staff / and reduce him to ashes They will revive his soul / at every moment and season 40,000 a- / -ngels, angry and destructive Will murderously strike him / at every moment, so that he finds woe and sorrow.76

Eleazar’s description consistently elides between body and soul— thus the sinner’s body is hung hand and foot, and his soul is bitten by snakes and scorpions; after the sinner is burned and his limbs dismembered, angels will “revive his soul” so that the physical punishment can recommence. One who eats pork suffers a similar fate: They will stand him in fire In rivers of boiling pitch / they will slice him to pieces Flames will fill his mouth / How can his soul stand it?77

Again, the soul that suffers in Hell is subjected to physical punishment, and is envisioned as possessing limbs, orifices, and so on. In each instance, the mortifications demanded of the sinner in this world are meant to prefigure, and hence obviate, this future physical suffering. Eleazar promises that if one fasts, refrains from bathing, “is lashed in every location,”78 and so on, he will proceed at death directly to the Garden of Eden, since he has already undergone the equivalent of suffering in Hell. This link between penance and post-mortem suffering might also account for the fact that sinners are warned not to subject themselves to penances on the Sabbath79 —perhaps because the Sabbath was imagined to be a day of respite for sinners suffering in Hell.80 The penitent who lashes himself “until his blood spills out” was consciously or unconsciously afflicting both body and soul, since the latter was “a vessel full of blood, attached by a chain to the spinal cord, [with] tiny tendons that spread through the entire body.”81 Far from pointing to the devalued status of the body or to the sinfulness of physical pleasure, the penitential mortification of the flesh thus attests to the inextricable link between soul and body, indeed, to the physical identity between the two. The same underlying logic animated many contemporary Christian discussions of penitence, a fact that has not been lost upon scholars of medieval Christian spirituality.

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As Caroline Bynum, Peter Brown, and others have cogently argued, Christian asceticism often reflected “not ‘flight from’ so much as ‘submersion in’ [the body].”82 That is, even harsh penitential practices can be understood not as attempts to overcome or suppress human embodiment, but rather as attempts to utilize one’s embodied status specifically as a means toward spiritual growth. Ascetic penance reflects the utilization of the body and its potentialities, rather than an attempt to escape from them.83 As such, the examples of harsh asceticism recommended by the Pietists in Sefer Hasidim and in their penitential tracts need not conflict with the positive attitudes toward the body reconstructed in the preceding chapters.84 This perspective also allows us to detour around the contested question of whether Pietistic asceticism was “borrowed from” or “influenced by” contemporary Christian praxis.85 Whatever the precise relationship between Ashkenazic penances and those of their Christian neighbors, the underlying conception of human embodiment that gave meaning to those practices was apparently identical.86 ne fe sh , ne sh a m a h ,

and

sh i n ui

This chapter, in tandem with the previous one, has argued that the human body was a key theological construct for the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, embedded as they were within a culture increasingly preoccupied by incarnational theology, and invested in the spiritual profundity of the human body and material world. But as an array of scholars has demonstrated, the human body was not merely a site of interest for medieval theologians—it was a source of anxiety as well. Caroline Bynum, for instance, has argued that high medieval debates over the body were often a manifestation of a wider concern with the process of change: “Much of the religious and intellectual concern of the period was devoted to containing and countering a mutability seen as a dark threat to survival and identity.”87 Bynum has convincingly demonstrated that this fundamental philosophicalpsychological anxiety lay at the root of a varied array of high- and late-medieval developments, ranging from the flourishing of twelfthcentury interest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to the prolific writings produced on werewolves and other hybrid animals during the same period, to the upsurge in interest in alchemy and academic magic, even among the scholastics.88 And as Jeffrey J. Cohen has noted, the microcosmic approach to human embodiment in particular presupposes an

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inevitable mutability, an “asymmetrical geometry of radiation and connection [that] pulls the human outside of himself, breaking its self- contained organization to disaggregate the body into pieces more intimate with stars and planets than with each other . . . dissolving corporeality into an infinite rotation of concentric but self-interested forces.”89 The German Pietists were certainly committed to the notion of natural and corporeal stability— as we have seen in Chapter 1, they were loath to acknowledge miraculous interventions in the physical world, and saw meaning specifically in the ordered workings of natural phenomena. But they also realized that the human body is constantly undergoing processes of change that render it intrinsically unstable— hence their concerns about the effect of aging upon the human demut, for example. Eleazar creatively anchors this propensity for instability firmly within the biblical account of man’s creation. The words nishmat and nefesh that appear in Genesis 2:7, which describes man’s “ensoulment,” each contain the Hebrew letter shin, and each of those letters is topped by a tag, a scribal calligraphic flourish. This is the case, Eleazar explains, to signify that each shin points to an inevitable change (shinui) that the soul will undergo90 — namely, at death, when the soul leaves and the body begins to rot.91 Man’s somatomorphic unity is thus susceptible to disintegration from the very outset— a propensity for instability that threatens the elevated conception of the body and its spiritual potential. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, this tension between corporeal stability and the inevitability of shinui was a major preoccupation for the Pietists, who invested considerable energy into buttressing man’s body against potentially destabilizing biological processes from within and against demonic forces from without.

Chapter 4

The Pious Werewolf ANNIE: Ah well, you shouldn’t be eating bacon anyway, should you? You’re Jewish. GEORGE: Yeah, I gave up on the whole orthodoxy thing when I started turning into a wolf. ANNIE: Do they have rules about being a werewolf as well? GEORGE: I think you’d be hard pressed to find a religion that doesn’t frown on it. — Being Human, BBC Three, “Pilot”

In medieval Christian thought, Jews were understood to be both less and more than human. Beginning in the high Middle Ages, European Jews were subjected to increasingly repressive treatment, and denounced in ever-more strident terms— dehumanized, both institutionally and ideologically. They were accused of ritual murder and cannibalism, equated with demons and animals, attacked and eventually expelled en masse.1 And yet at the same time, Christian representations of Jews—what some scholars have termed “hermeneutical Jews”—were invested with ever increasing symbolic significance. “The Jew,” whether real or imagined, pointed beyond himself to a broader complex of interwoven theological interests and anxieties: the relationship between faith and works, between soul and body, between the spirit and the letter of the biblical text. 2 Jews were simultaneously marginalized and made central, shunted aside and obsessively scrutinized, rejected by and given pride of place in an array of sermons, exegetical tracts, and theological writings. In their ambiguous positioning within broader culture, Jews bore a close resemblance to another category of medieval Christian thought: monsters, creatures whose aberrant bodies or despicable actions marked them off from the rest of humanity. For both classical and medieval authors, monstrous creatures were meaningful by definition— in St. Augustine’s influential formulation, the very term 131

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“monsters” (monstra) “come[s] from the [verb] monstrare, ‘show,’ because they show (demonstrent) something by a sign.”3 Monstrous races and creatures were understood by some thinkers as portents, signs warning of impending catastrophe, and by others as divine messages, physical beings attesting to God’s omnipotence and creative capacity.4 Monsters were believed to live on the margins of society, in the far reaches of the known world, and their humanity was recurrently debated—but their symbolic and spiritual significance was never in doubt. And indeed, the conceptual linkage between Jews and monsters has not been lost on modern scholars, who have paid particular attention to the place of anti-Jewish polemic in medieval discourses of monstrosity, noting that Christian thinkers’ ideas about and depictions of Jews and monsters were oftentimes mutually reinforcing.5 In the words of Debra Strickland, over the course of the high Middle Ages Jews were rendered “a kind of ur-monster, an imaginary and ideological complex of all that medieval Christians found abhorrent, evil, and threatening.”6 Given this ideational linkage between Jews and monstrosity, it is surprising that scholars have by and large ignored the monstrous creatures that appear throughout medieval Jewish written and visual texts themselves. Analysis of these materials has the potential not only to deepen our understanding of medieval notions of monstrosity, but also to shed light on the dynamics of interreligious intellectual exchange in medieval Europe— how did those who were considered by many to be monsters themselves conceive of monstrosity? The need for a careful study of medieval Jewish conceptions of monstrosity, moreover, is particularly pressing in the case of northern European Jews. For in medieval Ashkenazic writings, monsters attack the reader at every turn: werewolves and witches, demons and vampires appear in an array of contemporary texts, particularly those composed by or associated with the Hasidei Ashkenaz. Like the wondrous and magical contents described in Chapter 1, however, the monstrous creatures in these texts have been largely unexamined by scholars of medieval Jewish culture. The reigning scholarly assumption has been that “the literature of German Pietism is rich in references to and descriptions of demons, werewolves, dragons, witches, and bloodsucking vampires, who are called by their vernacular names, and who penetrate [Pietistic writings] without any process of Judaization or reworking. . . . The details of their descriptions reflect their familiarity with the surrounding folklore.”7 In this view, the

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monstrous creatures found in Pietistic writings have no bearing on these figures’ “real” theological or moralistic doctrines, having been credulously absorbed from the surrounding medieval Germanic folk culture. This dichotomy between elite and folk religion was already embraced by Joshua Trachtenberg, whose classic 1939 study Jewish Magic and Superstition was tellingly subtitled A Study in Folk Religion.8 More recently, a similar approach has been manifested by Joseph Dan, who averred that such folkloric elements “belong to the realm of popular, supernatural beliefs (or superstitions) that seldom find their way into the theological works of educated scholars.”9 This approach is problematic from a number of perspectives. On a methodological level, the strict binary distinction between “elite” theology and “popular” or “folk” superstition has been rendered increasingly untenable by growing evidence that high intellectual discourse shaped, and was shaped by, medieval low cultural production.10 But more specifically, the German Pietists do not themselves distinguish between their theological or moralistic teachings and their teratological interests; on the contrary, they consistently invoke werewolves, vampires, and other monsters in explicitly theological, exegetical, and even halakhic contexts. Nor are the specific monsters that interest them chosen at random. From the panoply of medieval monstrous creatures of which they were aware, the Pietists focused sustained attention primarily on creatures that undergo bodily metamorphoses—in particular, humans who transform into animals. Indeed, given the argument of the previous chapters— that Ashkenazic theologians saw theological profundity in the stable human body per se— their specific preoccupation with physical transformations, with creatures whose bodies manifest an apparent mutability and instability, should come as no surprise. Since the immutable human body reflected, indeed encapsulated, a theologically profound cosmic order, the very existence of monsters, whose intrinsically unstable bodies could change from one form into something wholly other, posed specifically theological concern. Rather than blindly incorporating theologically neutral “folk beliefs” from their wider surroundings, then, it seems likely that the Jews of Ashkenaz consciously sought to understand those monstrous beings whose bodily instability disrupted their broader spiritual worldview. This chapter explores the role of monstrous bodies in medieval Ashkenazic thought through a case study of the Pietists’ treatment of a specific medieval monster: the werewolf. While modern popular

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culture tends to depict werewolves as ferocious creatures who are half-man, half-wolf, the werewolf in classical and medieval lore was understood to be a man who turns completely into a wolf. The werewolf is thus an ideal example of the kind of bodily instability that the Jews of Ashkenaz were bound to find troubling, and the German Pietists in particular found werewolves “good to think with” in their ruminations on the spiritual significance of human corporeality. This is not to say that all Pietistic invocations of men who transform into wolves—much less of monsters in general— can be systematically reconciled with one another. Rather, their discussions of werewolves reflect two overarching, competing strategies for deriving theological meaning from the monstrous. One strategy argued for an irrevocable continuity between the physical human body and its monstrous manifestation, essentially insisting upon continued bodily stability and human identity in the face of apparent disorder; the other denied corporeality— and hence humanity— to monsters altogether. Though mutually exclusive, these two approaches to monstrosity shared an underlying attitude toward human embodiment and helped the Jews of Ashkenaz grapple with what it might mean for human bodies to undergo processes of change altogether. The strategies developed by Pietistic thinkers for dealing with werewolves, moreover, mirrored precisely those of their Christian contemporaries, who were simultaneously invoking these same monstrous creatures in unprecedented ways in their attempts to understand similar issues of cosmic order and corporeal immutability. Their simultaneous development of “lycanthropic theologies” reflects the extent to which Christians and Jews were participants in a shared intellectual tradition— one in which discourses of monstrosity were treated not solely as founts of polemical rhetoric, but also as theological problems in pressing need of solutions. After briefly surveying recent historiographic developments in the field of “monster theory,” this chapter reviews some of the monstrous creatures found in writings with which the Pietists would have been familiar. Recognition of the panoply of bizarre creatures known to the Pietists casts their singular focus on monstrous bodies that undergo metamorphoses into sharp relief, and serves to highlight the specific questions about corporeality and transformation that animated their teratological excurses— and those of their Christian neighbors.

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“How Many Are Your Works, Oh Lord!” Rabbinic Discourses of Monstrosity With very few exceptions, scholars of the Jewish Middle Ages have disregarded the monstrous and fantastic creatures that appear regularly in medieval Jewish written and visual texts. They have not been alone in doing so— until relatively recently, the study of monsters was neglected by medievalists generally. Notwithstanding the pioneering studies of scholars like J. R. R. Tolkien and Rudolph Wittkower,11 early and mid-twentieth- century historians tended to confine monsters and other ostensibly superstitious phenomena to the margins of medieval intellectual history, in keeping with the broader tendency to portray the Middle Ages in a generally “progressive” light.12 Beginning with the early twentieth- century “Revolt of the Medievalists,” historians, most notably Charles Homer Haskins and his students, sought to cast the Middle Ages rather than the Renaissance as the period responsible for the “birth of the modern world,” the “starting point for modern authority and modern liberty.”13 Committed as they were to “the modernity of the medieval past,” these scholars depicted the high medieval period in particular as one in which rationality and progressivism flourished, and consciously or unconsciously downplayed the fantastic and grotesque elements of medieval culture that had so interested their nineteenth- century Romantic predecessors.14 In recent decades, however, as the paradigm of a progressive Middle Ages has steadily given way to one emphasizing medieval alterity,15 intellectual and cultural historians have devoted increasing attention to what has been called “monster theory.”16 In this view, monsters are “specular objects”17— the monstrous creatures that surface in particular historical contexts serve as lenses onto the key beliefs, values, and anxieties of the cultures in which they were generated. For Jeffrey J. Cohen, one of the earliest and most influential “monster theorists,” “monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literaryhistorical) that generate them. . . . The monstrous body is pure culture . . . it exists only to be read.”18 Recent scholarship has focused in particular on the linkages between discourses of monstrosity and the cultural constructions of the human body, and on the philosophical and theological ends for which monstrous creatures were frequently marshaled.19 Scholars have not limited themselves, moreover, to those creatures medieval authors themselves termed

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monstra— generally either “monstrous births” or the “monstrous races” that were thought to inhabit the far reaches of the inhabited world. 20 Rather, monster theorists have productively extended their analyses to “monstrous” creatures more broadly, demonstrating the profundity invested by medieval artists and authors in the fantastic and aberrant creatures that populated their works. 21 For the most part, this recent scholarship on the meaning of monsters has not yet infiltrated medieval Jewish historiography—but not due to a lack of relevant monsters. 22 The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz inherited a veritable menagerie of fantastic creatures from prior Hebrew sources. Late antique and early medieval rabbinic texts describe an array of hybrid and grotesque creatures, including centaurs, 23 sirens, 24 giants, 25 and adnei ha- sadeh, creatures who are halfman, half plant. 26 Far-off “monstrous races” are represented in these sources as well. One talmudic passage refers obliquely to Blemmyae, a headless race of creatures whose facial features are located in their chests. 27 Eldad ha-Dani, the supposed emissary of the Ten Lost Tribes whose legal and narrative compositions were known to medieval Ashkenazic Jews, 28 describes a tribe of African anthropophagi (cannibals) from whom he narrowly escaped in the course of his travels westward from his home among the Ten Lost Tribes. 29 Menahem b. Perets haHevroni, who traveled from Ashkenaz to the Land of Israel in the early thirteenth century, describes a similar encounter with a tribe of Pygmies during his stay in the East.30 And the varying Hebrew recensions of the account of the travels of Alexander the Great through the East contain lengthy discussions of monstrous races: one- eyed Cyclopes, 31 fierce Amazons, 32 and Cynocephali, men with the heads of dogs.33 A midrashic text preserved in the cosmographical work Midrash Konen provides one of the fullest summaries of monstrous hybrids in its description of the denizens of a subterranean realm called “Tevel”: “There are 365 types of creatures— there are people whose heads and bodies look like those of oxes, but who speak like people; and there are those who have two heads, four ears, four eyes, two noses, two mouths, four hands, four legs, and a single body. When they sit they appear to be two people, but when they walk they look like a single person. When they eat and drink, they fight with one another, saying, ‘You ate more than I did, and drank more than I did!’ But lest you say they are wicked— God forbid! Rather, they are righteous.”34 This text had a fascinating reception history,

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which points to medieval Jews’ widespread awareness of the monstrous creatures within rabbinic tradition. 35 Thus, a popular narrative that circulated in an array of medieval Jewish cultures describes how the demonic Ashmedai conveyed an inhabitant of Tevel to King Solomon: [Ashmedai] reached his hand into the land of Tevel, and pulled from it a man with two heads and four eyes. Solomon was immediately shocked and amazed, and said, “Bring him into my room.” . . . [Solomon] said, “Whose son are you?” [The man] said, “I am a son of Adam, a descendent of Cain.” [Solomon] said, “Where do you live?” [The man] said, “In the land of Tevel.” [Solomon] said, “Do you have a sun and moon there?” [The man] said, “Yes, and we plow and reap, and raise sheep and other beasts.” [Solomon] said, “From where does the sun shine?” [The man] said, “From the west, and it sets in the east.” [Solomon] said, “Do you pray?” [The man] said, “Yes.” [Solomon asked,] “And what is your prayer?” He said, “How many are Your works, oh Lord! You have fashioned them all in wisdom” (Ps. 104:24). 36

Medieval Jewish authors would nonchalantly invoke this tale even in halakhic contexts: the Tosafists, for instance, refer to it in a gloss on a talmudic passage in which the sages discuss how many pairs of phylacteries a two-headed man must wear, and explicitly assert that such two-headed men in fact exist. The Tosafists suggest that there is no halakhah le- ma’aseh (practical ramification) to be derived from this discussion, since “in this world, there are no [such creatures]; but in the midrash, Ashmedai drew such a two-headed man out of the earth before King Solomon.”37 By denying categorically that two-headed men exist outside of the realm of midrash, the Tosafists manifest their awareness of this motif, but also implicitly deny that there is theological value to be derived from discussions of monstrosity. The German Pietists were aware of, and occasionally cited, the rabbinic references to many of these creatures.38 But the sheer variety of monsters known to the Pietists in fact casts into sharp relief their singular focus on creatures that undergo metamorphoses. For in these prior Jewish texts, creatures that undergo processes of bodily transformation are conspicuously absent— earlier Jewish authors seemed more comfortable with monstrous hybrids or with creatures possessing sundry wondrous properties. The rare rabbinic writings that do refer to creatures who undergo physical transformations make explicitly clear that those transformations are either the result of conjuration (ahizat enayim, meaning the transformation is only apparent, but

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not real),39 or are to be understood metaphorically.40 Medieval biblical exegetes followed the lead of their forebears, and also took pains to explain away biblical passages that describe apparent metamorphoses. For instance, in his commentary to Daniel 4:30, an obscure verse that describes how Nebuchadnezzar was “driven away from his people, and ate grass like cattle,” the twelfth- century biblical exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra goes out of his way to deny that any fundamental transformation took place: Do not let it occur to you that Nebuchadnezzar actually turned into an animal . . . for the verse says only that he lived among the animals, and ate grass like them. . . . Indeed, I have been told by one of my trustworthy friends that on a certain island called Sardinia, a certain Gentile lost his sanity, escaped from his family, and lived among the rams for many years, walking on all fours as they did. The king of the island once went out to hunt and captured many rams, and seized the demented Gentile who thought he was a ram. His family recognized him, and tried to speak with him, but he did not respond. They put bread and wine before him, but he would not take it— instead, he ate grass with the rams. In the middle of the night, he escaped back to the rams in the field.41

plus ç a c h a nge :

Stabilizing the Monstrous Body

It is against this backdrop of silence concerning monstrous metamorphosis that the Pietists’ ruminations over creatures that undergo bodily transformations loom particularly large. The creature who seems to have most piqued their interest was the werewolf, and by working inductively from some of the passages in which these creatures are invoked it is possible to reconstruct the “lychanthropic theology” that underlies the Pietists’ recurrent references to this particular monster. In a brief passage in Sefer Hasidim, Judah the Pious considers the story of the primordial serpent in the Garden of Eden. According to the standard rabbinic interpretation of Genesis 3:14, the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve was a creature who walked upright; the curse he receives, “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life,” implies that until that point in time serpents “had legs, which were [then] chopped off.”42 In his discussion of this transformation, Judah explains: “The serpent [in the Garden of Eden] walked upright, and somewhat resembled a man. Know that those who know how to change the form of a man into a wolf, or cat, or donkey— the eyeball does not change. Similarly, the snake that

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changed [when it lost its legs] did not have its eyes change. Thus, one who miscarries in the form of a snake is impure as though she has given birth, for the eyes [of the snake] resemble those of a human.”43 Here, Judah invokes werewolves as a means of grappling with the question of how it was possible for the bipedal snake to be physically transformed into a creature that crawls on the ground. According to Judah, the relationship between the snake’s body prior to and following its transformation is akin to the relationship between the werewolf’s human and wolf states. In both instances, there is a semblance of physical continuity even in the midst of apparently complete physical transformation—“the eyeball does not change.” This was indeed conventional wisdom according to medieval werewolf lore 44 — but rather than reflect a naïve, wholesale adoption of contemporary “popular superstition,” this passage pointedly invokes werewolves because they help to shed light on a fundamental scriptural problem. Moreover, the mechanics of werewolf transformation have overt legal (halakhic) ramifications. The ruling with which the passage concludes is drawn from the Talmud, where Rabbi Joshua argues that a woman whose miscarried fetus looked like a snake is to be regarded as ritually impure, just as she would be if the fetus had had a more typical human appearance (as mandated by Leviticus 12). This, claims Rabbi Joshua, is because the snake’s “eyeballs are round like those of a human being.”45 In linking this halakhic precedent with the snake in the Garden of Eden on the one hand, and with contemporary beliefs about werewolves on the other, Judah the Pious marshals werewolf lore to lend credence to a specifically halakhic rationale. The contrast with the Tosafists’ discussion of the two-headed man is particularly striking in this regard. The latter invoked a tradition about two-headed men existing in Tevel as a means of denying halakhic import to a talmudic discussion about the obligation of two-headed men to wear phylacteries— since the two-headed man invoked by the Talmud exists only in some alternate universe, the Tosafists argue, there is no need to wrestle with the practical, this-worldly implications of the talmudic discussion. But rather than eliminating monstrous creatures from the halakhic discourse, Judah the Pious is here introducing them into it, and positing a direct connection between the nature of a given monstrous creature and the practical halakhic guidance that the Talmud had provided.

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Werewolves are invoked to similar effect in a passage attributed to Judah the Pious in the fourteenth- century Bible commentary of Menahem Ziyoni, whose Sefer Ziyoni preserved many otherwise unattested Pietistic teachings.46 Like Judah in Sefer Hasidim, Ziyoni utilizes werewolves to understand a mysterious process of change described in the Bible— the transformation from human to angel. In the Bible, two figures apparently undergo such a transformation. In Genesis 5, Enoch is said to have ascended heavenward to “walk with God,” apparently without having died— a sequence of events that exercised the imaginations of generations of biblical exegetes, and led some to suggest that Enoch had been transformed into the angel Metatron at the moment of his ascent.47 According to II Kings 2, Elijah, too, ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot without having died. How is it possible for human beings to enter the celestial realm while still alive and embodied? According to Ziyoni, “Rabbi Judah the Pious wrote that Enoch and Elijah already had an angelic side in their composition. . . . A true proof that this is possible is the fact that there are . . . certain men who become wolves.”48 The overall structure of Ziyoni’s question and answer is identical to the discussion of the primordial serpent in Sefer Hasidim. Here, werewolves are invoked as a means of thinking about seemingly impossible changes— in this case, from a man into an angel. Judah the Pious posits that such changes are hardly absolute; there is a measure of permanence and even stability in the midst of change. While the verses might imply that Enoch and Elijah ascended to heaven as humans, and were only then transformed into angels, Judah argues that both in fact had an angelic dimension while living as humans on earth. Like the werewolf, whose eyes remain the same even as the rest of its body undergoes transformation, Enoch and Elijah were able to ascend to heaven without experiencing death because aspects of their existing selves were already angelic, rendering their transformations less absolute than they initially appear.49 A lengthier discussion of werewolves appears in an exegetical collection associated with the German Pietists that was appended to a manuscript of the thirteenth- century biblical commentary of the French exegete R. Ephraim b. Samson.50 One passage from the collection focuses on the two cryptic blessings that the tribe of Benjamin received in the Pentateuch. In Genesis, Jacob blesses his son Benjamin in the following manner: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours his prey, and in the evening he divides the spoils” (Gen. 49:27). In Deuteronomy, Moses addresses the tribe of Benjamin as a

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whole: “To Benjamin he said: May the beloved of God dwell securely upon him; he encompasses him throughout the day, and he dwells between his shoulders” (Deut. 33:12). To an author with a marked interest in lycanthropy, the reference in Genesis to a “ravenous wolf” must have proved irresistible, and it leads the exegete to conclude that Benjamin was himself a werewolf: “Benjamin was a ravenous wolf, who would occasionally maul people. And when the time came for him to turn into a wolf, as it says, ‘Benjamin is a ravenous wolf,’ if he was with his father he would lean on the doctor, 51 and in that merit would not turn into a wolf. Thus it says, ‘and if he leaves his father he will die’ (Gen. 44:22)— that is to say, if he separates from his father he will turn into a wolf [and attack] people on the way, and anyone who encounters him will kill him.”52 In this telling, Jacob’s hesitance in Genesis 44 to allow his son to leave his care is due to Benjamin’s propensity to turn into a wolf when away from his father. This comment serves as a springboard for the author of this passage to launch into a broader survey of the place of lycanthropy in the Bible: “There is a certain wolf that is called a loup-garou that is a man who changes into a wolf. At the instant when he changes into a wolf, his legs emerge from between his shoulders— thus Benjamin ‘dwells between his shoulders.’”53 According to this reading, the ambiguous blessing bestowed upon Benjamin in Deuteronomy refers to the anatomical workings of human-lupine metamorphosis—that is, that the legs of the wolf emerge from within the body, “between the shoulders,” of the human werewolf. Interestingly, this reading leads the exegete to parse the text of the passage in Deuteronomy in a grammatically unprecedented way. According to the most widespread interpretation of that verse, Moses was prophesying that God would eventually “dwell” in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, since the Temple would be built “between Benjamin’s shoulders” in his territorial allotment in Jerusalem.54 (Actually, the Temple was thought to straddle the lots of both Benjamin and Judah, but the altar, on which God’s presence descended, was located in land belonging to Benjamin.)55 But while rabbinic and medieval exegetes overwhelmingly agreed that the two pronouns in the verse refer to two distinct antecedents, namely God and Benjamin, the Pietistic author suggests that Benjamin literally dwells within his own shoulders, since it is from between his own shoulders that a werewolf’s inner “ravenous wolf” emerges.

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The conventional interpretation of the verse in Deuteronomy, however, was not lost on the Pietist author, as the continuation of the text makes clear: “This is how to rid oneself of such a wolf: at the instant that it enters one’s house, one who is fearful of it should take ashes collected from the fire and cast them about, and he will not be harmed. They would do likewise in the Temple— every day they would cast the ashes next to the altar, as it says, ‘And place them next to the altar’ (Lev. 6:3).”56 This reading links werewolves to an arcane element of the Temple service, the terumat ha- deshen, or “offering of ashes.” Just as, according to Leviticus 6, the priests would ceremonially collect and dispose of the ashes of the altar (itself located in the territory of Benjamin!), one who is confronted by a werewolf should utilize ashes as a means of defending himself. The Pietistic commentary reinforces this linkage between werewolves and the tribe of Benjamin by immediately pointing out that “Benjamin ate his mother, who died. As it says, ‘As she breathed her last—for she was dying— she called his name Son of My Trouble (Ben Oni)’ (Gen. 35:18).”57 Like the “ravenous” wolf of Genesis 49:27, and like contemporary werewolves, Benjamin metaphorically “devoured” his mother, who died while giving birth to him. That Benjamin’s mother’s name was Rachel— Hebrew for sheep, the prey of wolves— no doubt lent credence to this reading of the verse. After explicating the ways in which references to Benjamin shed light on lycanthropy, the author of the Pietist text segues into a more abstract discussion of the meaning of werewolves: “It is customary for a man whose nature turns into wolf [to be born with teeth], since a wolf is born with teeth (shinayim). . . . As a result, ritually pure animals do not have upper teeth, for the Holy One, may He be blessed, ‘created a remembrance of His wonders’ (Ps. 111:4): that pure animals do not have upper teeth, but do have lower teeth, to indicate that lower creatures are subject to change (shinui), while [the creatures] above are not subject to change.”58 Once again minimizing the totality of the werewolf’s metamorphosis, the Pietist author notes that humans who will one day turn into wolves are born with a distinct physical marker, fangs, which indicate that they have something wolflike about them even before any transformation takes place. Like Enoch and Elijah with their inborn angelic dimension and the snake with its human eyes, the werewolf contains within himself the seeds of his eventual transformation. Identity is maintained in the midst of metamorphosis; what appears to be radical upheaval is in fact the

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coming to fruition of an inborn characteristic. The lexical linkage between the words for “teeth” (shinayim) and “change” (shinui) is made explicit in this passage, and used to theological effect. According to the Pietist author, kosher (“pure”) animals do not have fangs (presumably because kosher animals are all herbivores, and hence “do not have upper teeth”), 59 but do have teeth below. So, too, it is only the creatures below, the physical beings who live in the material world, who are subject to the kinds of transformations described above, unlike the complete, immutable denizens of the celestial realm. The passage concludes by pointing out one further linkage between Benjamin and lycanthropes: “This verse [Gen. 49:27] begins with [the letter] bet, Binyamin (“Benjamin”), and ends with lamed, shalal (“spoils”). Therefore Jews have thirty-two teeth (the alphanumerical equivalent of lamed-bet). Since teeth (shinayim) recall change (shinui), they fall out of every person and grow in a second time. And just as a person who turns into a wolf has a tail at all times, even when he is in human form, so too a strip [of land] linked the allotment of Benjamin with the allotment of Judah, upon which the Temple was built.”60 This conclusion reinforces the points discussed above, but adds one important detail. In attempting to link werewolves’ tails with the strip of land upon which the Temple was built, the author refers casually to the fact that a werewolf has a tail even when he is otherwise in fully human form. This “fact” reinforces the general claim of continuity in the course of metamorphosis found in other Pietistic discussions of lycanthropy. But the reference to the werewolf’s tail also sheds light on an otherwise obscure exemplum in Sefer Hasidim: “A man was once born with teeth and a tail. People said, ‘He will eventually eat people—better to kill him [now].’ A certain sage said to them, ‘Remove his front teeth, and cut off his tail, so that his body will be equal to that of any other man, and he will be unable to harm anyone.’”61 Once the newborn in question is understood to have been regarded as a werewolf, it becomes clear that the Pietists regarded werewolves as human beings, ones whose aberrant bodies could be corrected, normalized, and made “equal to that of any other man.” Despite their apparent metamorphoses, werewolves’ bodies are contiguous with and can be brought into accordance with the “normal” and theologically resonant form of the human body.62 Given the meaning that the Pietists derived from lycanthropy in the passages discussed thus far, it may be possible to make sense of a brief text in Sefer ha- Shem, the work generally considered the most

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esoteric and recondite of the Pietistic mystical corpus.63 There, Eleazar of Worms discusses Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This verse had long served as a locus of theological inquiry for Jewish thinkers, and many Jewish exegetes, mystics, and philosophers grounded their most prized beliefs and commitments in its interpretation.64 Against this background, Eleazar of Worms’s reading of the verse is jarring: “‘Image’ (tselem) in ‘alephlamed bet- mem’ is wolf (ze’ev); it was decreed that the image of a man can change into that of a wolf, and a wolf into a man, called a ‘werewolf’ in the German language.”65 Medieval Ashkenazic biblical commentaries relied at times on an almost cryptological approach to exegesis, in which the letters of the biblical text were converted and recombined via gematriyah (the substitution of letters for corresponding numbers, which are then added together to form word equations), notarikon (in which words are treated as acronyms for longer phrases), and so on.66 Aleph-lamed bet- mem refers to a cipher in which the first eleven letters of the Hebrew alphabet are matched with the remaining eleven, such that the first letter (aleph) substitutes for the twelfth letter (lamed), the second letter (bet) substitutes for the thirteenth (mem), and so on. When the three letters composing the Hebrew word for “image,” tselem, are read in accordance with this system, Eleazar explains, what emerges is the word ze’ev, or wolf. It seems unlikely that Eleazar is claiming that both humans and wolves were created in God’s image, much less that God is Himself a werewolf. Given the meaning of lycanthropic transformation charted above, however, it seems that in exegetically linking tselem with ze’ev, Eleazar is suggesting that werewolves in wolf form remain indelibly linked to their humanity— to the extent that the werewolf in both states retains its tselem elohim, or divine form. A man who apparently transformed completely into a beast is still considered a reflection of the divine, precisely because such a man does not completely transform. Werewolves transform outwardly but maintain their essential humanity; the cryptographic link between tselem and ze’ev implies that a werewolf is still a person. This passage confirms yet again that werewolves were not merely a popular superstition credulously incorporated into Pietistic writings. Werewolves were invested with deep theological meaning, and allowed the Pietists to chart out a unique approach to human embodiment, in which bodies can retain stability even as they utterly transform.

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Incarnation and the Eucharist in the Twelfth- Century Werewolf Renaissance But how did the Pietists come upon this particular interpretive strategy? Earlier Jewish sources did not invoke werewolves in these— or any other— contexts. Nor did werewolves play a significant role in the thought of the Pietists’ Jewish contemporaries. Rather, an analysis of the uses of werewolves in the thought of the Christians among whom the Pietists lived— and with whom they regularly interacted— may shed light on the discursive landscape that the Pietists found themselves in by the high Middle Ages, and hence on their invocation of werewolves for theological ends. As noted above, late antique and medieval Christian authors assumed that God had implanted “monstrous” creatures into the world as a way of conveying divine truths to mankind. In this they followed the lead of numerous classical authors. Aristotle, for instance, defined monsters (teras) as individuals born “contrary to nature,” that is, possessed of physical abnormalities rendering them different from their parents. Such individuals were understood to be portentous; like rare meteorological events and other uncommon natural phenomena, monstrous births were understood to be significant primarily as warnings to their observers.67 Other authors focused on the groups of creatures who, collectively, were thought to manifest sundry monstrous traits. The “monstrous races,” for instance, were discussed in the travel accounts of ancient authorities such as Ctesias and Megasthenes, and were most famously treated in Book VII of Pliny’s Historia naturalis. Unlike the monstrous births of Aristotle, these races could not properly be described as “contrary to nature,” for their own natures in fact endured and remained consistent from generation to generation. Nor did these species lend themselves to the same manner of portentous interpretation, for their existence was not exceptional, but constant and consistent. Pliny and his contemporaries were interested predominantly in reporting on these creatures’ (purported) existence, not in deriving meaning from them. The latter task was taken up by Augustine, who was in a certain sense the earliest and most influential “monster theorist.” Just as natural wonders, as we have seen in Chapter 2, suggested to Augustine that the natural order was incomprehensible absent direct divine involvement, monsters indicated that “God is the artisan of all natures, and that He acted not once only, but does so

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each day.”68 By introducing multiplicity and variety into the created order, God reaffirms His own direct involvement in the continued functioning of the natural world. Indeed, Isidore of Seville, who reiterated Augustine’s view in his Etymologies, argued in an Augustinian vein that the monstrous races’ demonstrative function ensured that they could not have been created “contrary to nature”: “They are not contrary to nature, because they are created by the divine will, since the nature of each thing is the will of the creator.”69 Monsters, in this reading, highlight the extent to which the “natural order” and God’s inscrutable will are in fact one and the same. Augustine was particularly intrigued by the question of whether monstrous births and races should be considered “human,” that is, whether they are created in the divine image. The most comprehensive discussion of the issue appears in his De civitate dei. After citing an array of descriptions of grotesque and hybridized creatures, Augustine leaves the question of the human status of the monstrous races unsettled—but sees no reason in principle that a monster could not embody the Divine image. Hybrid creatures might plausibly exist, he reasons, and if they do, it is simply a question of fact as to whether they are descendants of Adam, and hence created in God’s image.70 But elsewhere in the work, Augustine touches on another reputed type of monster— humans who transform into animals. Augustine is adamant that the existence of such creatures is impossible on theological grounds; human beings, who embody the image of God, cannot possibly transform into animals, which do not. In the case of the hybrid monstrous races, there is no fundamental blurring of categories, merely uncertainty regarding which category is operative. Humans who transform into animals, however, shift from one inviolable category into another, and such boundary transgression is beyond the theological pale. As such, Augustine relegates the tales of transformations found in classical writings to demonic activity, arguing that demons can fool human beings into believing that they had witnessed a transformation, or undergone one.71 Throughout the late antique and early medieval periods, Augustine’s semiotic approach to monsters— and his insistence that human-animal metamorphosis was theologically off limits—held sway.72 Subsequent teratological works, including the Anglo-Saxon Liber monstrorum, the Wonders of the East, and the Marvels of the East, continued to probe their monstrous subjects for theological meaning, while simultaneously expanding upon the Plinian races in a process one scholar has likened

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to “cellular division and mutation.”73 But human-animal transformation remained suspect. Thus, in early medieval Germany, Regino of Prüm warned the readers of his capitulary Canon Episcopi that anyone who believed that “any creature can be . . . transformed into another species or similitude, except by the Creator himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel.”74 Regino’s judgment is echoed by Burchard of Worms in his eleventh-century De Poenitentia: “If you have believed that . . . the divine image can be turned by someone into another form or species— except by all-powerful God—you are to do ten days penance on bread and water.”75 Burchard singles out as particularly absurd the notion that there are men who, “whenever [they] wish, can be transformed into a wolf, called by the Teutons a Werewolf.”76 Belief in lycanthropy, then, is not only misguided, but sinful, even heretical. This approach to human-animal metamorphosis in general, and to werewolves in particular, was widespread not only in Germany, but throughout northern Europe in this time. Thus (the ironically named) Wulfstan, a Benedictine reformer and Archbishop of York, also wrote extensively against belief in werewolves during the same decades that Burchard was composing his Decretorum.77 But surprisingly, the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw a brief resurgence of widespread interest in lycanthropy—what Caroline Walker Bynum has called the “werewolf renaissance of the twelfth century.”78 First and foremost, high medieval literary works increasingly cast werewolves as their protagonists. Marie de France’s Bisclavret centers on the exploits of a werewolf-knight and served as a literary template for similar werewolf romances like the Lai de Melion, Guillaume de Palerne, and Arthur and Gorlagon.79 Concurrently, the twelfth century saw a renewed interest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which included the story of King Lycaon, the archetype of the classical werewolf.80 But significantly, the werewolves that featured in the medieval werewolf romances were, unlike King Lycaon, “sympathetic werewolves.”81 That is, whereas Ovid had described Lycaon as literally devolving from a human being into a wild, senseless animal, the heroes of Bisclavret, Melion, Guillaume de Palerne, and Arthur and Gorlagon are all portrayed as human beings in wolf form. These medieval lycanthropes maintained their internal human consciousness and intellect even as their bodies become lupine.82 Nor were “sympathetic werewolves” confined to works of literature. While theologians such as William of Auvergne83 and Thomas

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Aquinas84 continued to attribute apparent metamorphoses to demonic illusion, others took the existence of actual werewolves as a jumping-off point for theological reflection. One of the most extensive, and theologically fraught, accounts of the “sympathetic werewolf” appears in the Topographia Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, an archdeacon who toured Ireland in the retinue of Henry II between 1183 and 1185.85 Along with varied marvels and wonders that Gerald claimed to have witnessed himself, he retold a tale he had heard secondhand concerning a cleric from Ulster who was confronted by a ferocious looking wolf. Understandably frightened, this cleric was all the more astonished when the wolf addressed him directly, explaining that he was, in fact, a human being who had assumed lupine form as the result of a curse.86 After sharing “some orthodox words referring to God” and “giving catholic replies to all questions” posed to him by the Irish cleric, the werewolf revealed that his wife, also in lupine form, lay dying nearby, and was in need of “the consolations of your priestly office.”87 The priest agreed to follow the wolf back to his mate, and, finding her indeed close to death, administered “all the rites of the church duly performed, as far as the last communion.” But when the she-wolf requested the viaticum as well, the priest was torn. Could he in fact administer the Eucharist to what, to all appearances, was an animal? Sensing his hesitation, the wolf “entreated him not to deny them the gift of God . . . and, to remove all doubt, using his claw for a hand, he tore off the skin of the she-wolf, from the head down to the navel, folding it back. Thus she immediately presented the form of an old woman. The priest, seeing this, and compelled by his fear more than his reason, gave the communion; the recipient having earnestly implored it, and devoutly partaking of it. Immediately afterwards, the he-wolf rolled back the skin, and fitted it to its original form.”88 Just as in the contemporary romances, the werewolf in Gerald’s tale maintains his essential humanity even as he undergoes an ostensibly total transformation— a point vividly illustrated by the image of the she-wolf’s skin being “folded back” to reveal an elderly woman underneath. But by specifying that the priest ultimately acceded to the wolf’s request “compelled by his fear more than his reason,” and that he administered the viaticum “duly rather than rightly,”89 Gerald signals his ambivalence over whether the wolf can in fact be treated as a human being. As the text progresses, we see that he was not alone in this uncertainty. For Gerald later reveals that he only heard about this

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story in the first place because an Episcopal synod, which had been convened in Ireland during his visit, sought his opinion as to whether the priest had acted rightly, and whether “such an animal [is] to be considered a brute or a man.” Gerald composed a lengthy response to the synod, which he included in the text of the Topographia Hibernica itself. Moreover, he reedited this section in later recensions of the text, including lengthier and lengthier disquisitions on the ontological status of the werewolf in question.90 For Gerald, the topic of werewolves was clearly one with serious theological implications. And not just any theological implications. Although Gerald apparently never drew a definitive conclusion regarding the humanity of the werewolf, he did use the story of the werewolf and the priest in order to shed light on two transformations that lay at the core of medieval Christian theology: the Incarnation, in which God becomes man, and the Eucharist, in which food becomes God. In attempting to justify his belief that a werewolf could truly exist, notwithstanding his predecessors’ denials, Gerald claimed that “it cannot be disputed, but must be believed with the most assured faith, that the divine nature assumed human nature for the salvation of the world; while in the present case, by no less a miracle, we find that at God’s bidding, to exhibit his power and righteous judgment, human nature assumed that of a wolf.”91 Not only can werewolves exist, says Gerald, but their existence is no less miraculous than Christ’s Incarnation. Gerald here validated belief in werewolves by equating it with the key moment in Christian salvation history; his reference to the mechanics of the werewolf’s metamorphosis helps to make the miraculous Incarnation somewhat more accessible to his readers. Just as werewolves are simultaneously wolf and man— and just as they maintain their original identity even as they assume a new one— so too Christ incarnate combined humanity with divinity. The nature of werewolves can be understood by reference to Christ, whose dual nature was well established; simultaneously, the miraculous nature of Christ can itself be understood by reference to werewolves, whose existence was not doubted by Gerald’s readers. Having asserted that werewolves can in fact exist, Gerald expands upon the precise means by which such metamorphoses take place: It is, however, believed as an undoubted truth, that the Almighty God, who is the Creator of natures, can, when he pleases, change one into another, either for vindicating his judgments, or exhibiting his divine power . . . or that, the nature within remaining the same, he

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can transform the exterior only, as is plain from the examples before given. Of that apparent change of the bread into the body of Christ (which I ought not to call apparent only, but with more truth transubstantial, because, while the outward appearance remains the same, the substance only is changed), I have thought it safest not to treat; its comprehension being far beyond the powers of the human intellect.92

In the first part of this passage, Gerald lays out two paradigms for metamorphosis— complete substitution, and external change coupled with internal continuity. In his second paragraph, he cautiously— or cagily— declines to link werewolves with the transformation of the Eucharist. Thus, as Bynum has noted, this chapter of the Topographia Hibernica ends “somewhat awkwardly, with an incoherent although orthodox statement that the Eucharist is transformation in which the metamorphosis occurs at the level of substance or nature while the appearance endures.”93 In opting for this formulation, Gerald tips his hand and reveals the true motivation for his disquisition on change: werewolf transformation— interior continuity and external transformation—is the precise inverse of that transformation that affects the consecrated host— exterior continuity and internal transformation. Gerald undoubtedly sensed this but was wary of making any such claim explicitly. Instead, he implicitly “struggles to define transubstantiation via parallelism with werewolf transformation . . . [but] can only conclude that werewolf transformation and orthodox Eucharistic transubstantiation are somehow kindred mysteries.”94 Gerald’s other writings, especially his clerical handbook Gemma Ecclesiastica, reveal an abiding interest in the mechanics of Eucharistic transformation.95 It should come as no surprise that this topic was on Gerald’s mind precisely during this period. The question of how a wafer could turn into God while retaining the appearance, smell, taste, and so on of bread was of interest to both clerics and the laity. The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries— during which Gerald composed and then revised his text—witnessed an assault on the doctrine of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist by rationalist thinkers and heretical groups alike.96 Indeed, the uncertain nature of the change of the Eucharist led Pope Innocent III to establish the doctrine of transubstantiation as official Church dogma at the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council— during Gerald’s own lifetime. For Gerald, widespread belief in werewolves provided a means of conceptualizing the ability of things to retain their identity in the face of apparently

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complete change, whether human identity in the midst of lupine metamorphosis (lycanthropy) or physical accidents in the midst of substantial transformation (transubstantiation). Though Gerald deviates, in other words, from the Augustinian consensus about the impossibility of metamorphosis, he continued to operate within a decidedly Augustinian framework— one that saw monstrous creatures as “specular objects,” significant not merely in and of themselves, but also for the light they shed on an array of theologically significant questions. Another contemporary of the Pietists who, like Gerald, engaged with human-animal metamorphosis was Gervase of Tilbury, an early thirteenth- century canon lawyer in the retinue of Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV.97 In his Otia Imperialia, Gervase invoked werewolves specifically as a means of explicating obscure biblical passages. The story of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, for instance, was not necessarily an episode of temporary insanity according to Gervase, but might well have been a real metamorphosis of man into ox. Such a change is plausible, he notes, since “one thing I know to be of daily occurrence among the people of our country . . . [is that] certain men change into wolves according to the cycles of the moon.”98 As evidence, Gervase describes in detail two specific werewolf contemporaries of his, Raimbaud de Pouget of Auvergne and Chaucevaire of Luch.99 The prevalence of werewolves in contemporary Europe makes it easy for Gervase to conclude that Nebuchadnezzar could in fact have been transformed into an ox as well. Gervase invokes werewolves elsewhere in the Otia Imperialia in his treatment of a topic with which the Pietists would have been quite familiar. Gervase recounts that in tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden, “the devil chose a particular kind of serpent with a woman’s face, because like approves of like, and then gave its tongue the power of speech. On the subject of serpents, popular tradition has it that there are some women who change into them; they can be recognized by a white band or fillet which they have on the head. This allegation that women change into serpents is certainly remarkable, but not to be repudiated. For in England we have often seen men change into wolves according to the phases of the moon. The Gauls call men of this kind gerulfi, while the English name for them is werewolves.”100 For Gervase, the transformation of women into snakes is deemed credible in light of the experience of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and of the “often seen” transformation of men into wolves.101 The parallel with the discussion in Sefer Hasidim is unmistakable.

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Moreover, Gervase, like the Pietists, goes out of his way to note that even these seemingly absolute transformations are more gradated than they appear. Like the wolf who maintains human eyes, Gervase’s snakes have a physical marker— the white band on their heads— that attests to their underlying ontological contiguity.102 All these examples suggest that the Jewish Pietists and their Christian contemporaries were troubled by the same exegetical and philosophical questions, and that they responded to those questions in parallel ways, that is, by marshaling widespread beliefs about werewolves for theological ends. It is plausible, moreover, that the similarities in their writings resulted from actual contacts between the Pietists and Christian figures familiar with the approaches of Gerald and Gervase. Gervase traveled throughout much of Europe (and may have spent time in northern Germany),103 and he seems to have been in contact with learned Jews at some point during his career. A recension of the Otia Imperialia that likely originated with Gervase himself contains a lengthy digression reflecting his knowledge of talmudic astronomical terminology,104 as well as some creative Hebrew etymologies and other traditions that he seems to have learned via oral transmission.105 The possibility that Gervase engaged in exegetical discussions with local Jews is a tantalizing one, especially in light of the direct parallel between his reading of the serpent’s transformation and that of the Pietists.106 Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that medieval Ashkenazic Jews were familiar with contemporary vernacular romances, and with the writings of Marie de France in particular.107 As we have seen above, authors like Eleazar show signs of such familiarity, and it is not implausible that Jewish audiences would have been familiar with Bisclavret and its deployment of the “sympathetic werewolf” trope.108 Gerald, for his part, spent the majority of his life in Britain— outside the orbit of the main circle of the German Pietists109 — but there is evidence that his writings circulated widely. The early thirteenth- century Konungs Skuggsjá, an Old Norse example of the specula principum genre, likely adapted its discussion of the “wonders of Ireland” from the Topographia Hibernica, indicating that the latter work was known in northern Continental Europe soon after it was composed.110 (Indeed, some scholars have argued more broadly that the presence of Irish clerics in the Rhineland during this period could have served as a means of transmission of Irish Catholic ideals and beliefs to medieval Ashkenazic Jews.)111

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Also significant is the fact that Gerald linked his interest in creatures that undergo metamorphoses with another interest of his: antiJewish polemic. In the Topographia Hibernica itself, Gerald argues that wondrous creatures he observed in Ireland, such as barnacle geese—birds that literally “grow on trees”— should prove to the Jews the reasonableness of Christ’s virgin birth, which Jews rejected as physiologically impossible: “Recur to nature, which, in confirmation of the faith for our best teaching, continually produces and gives birth to new animals, without union of male and female . . . engendered of wood!”112 Gerald’s invocation of barnacle geese is of a piece with the widespread tendency, discussed in Chapter 1, to marshal the properties of wondrous animals for polemical argumentation—which served as a means of conveyance of Christian data about animals to Jews, and vice versa. Much as Gerald saw the natural evidence for the plausibility of the virgin birth as sufficiently important to bring to the Jews’ attention, it is easy to imagine him propounding the link between werewolves and the Incarnation and Eucharist to Jews as well. The conceivability of such polemically driven transfer of ideas is buttressed by the fact that medieval Jews (and heretics) were frequently equated with wolves in an array of northern European Christian texts.113 Already in the late tenth century, a Jew in the environs of the Bavarian town of Hirschau was accused of using sorcery to maleficently transform himself into a wolf.114 The Tabula exemplorum, a preaching guide composed in France in the mid-thirteenth century, equates Jews with both Satan and with wolves, since the wicked deeds of all three involve preying on the weak and innocent.115 And by the fourteenth century, Albert of Diessen deepened the association between Jews and lupine metamorphosis, specifying in his Speculum clericorum that one who believes in the existence of werewolves is “worse than a Jew or a pagan.”116

Plus c’est la même chose:

dise m body i ng t h e

mons t rous body

Thus far, I have argued that medieval Jews and Christians understood werewolves to be fundamentally stable beings, who maintained their human essence even while in a lupine state. Werewolves became, paradoxically, a means of understanding how bodies remain stable even at the moment of their greatest instability. But not all references to werewolves in the Pietistic oeuvre conform to this overall approach.

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In a number of passages, the Pietists suggest that monstrous creatures, including werewolves, not only lack bodily stability— they lack bodies altogether. In Sefer Hasidim, for instance, Judah refers to “women called striya, mares, and werewolves, who were created at dusk, who perform an action and change their appearance.”117 Striya appear frequently in Pietistic and other medieval Jewish writings, and refer to a subset of witches known in Latin as strix or striga.118 Unlike the mekhashefot (sorceresses) who also populate Pietistic writings, the striya were not thought to perform magical or diabolical incantations. Rather, they were more akin to vampires— creatures who could transform into animals, drink their victims’ blood, and continue to wreak havoc even from beyond the grave.119 Mares, which appear less frequently in Jewish sources, seem to refer to a disembodied creature that preys on men while they sleep— thus the Middle French cauchemare, or “nightmares.”120 Having grouped werewolves together with these other monstrous beings, Judah makes a further linkage. For in claiming that these creatures were “created at dusk” (bein ha- shemashot), Judah is alluding to the rabbinic notion that demons (mazikin) were created at dusk on the first Friday, and that because the Sabbath began before God was finished constructing their bodies, these creatures were left as eternally disembodied spirits.121 In other words, werewolves, like mares and striya, are demonic, and hence fundamentally disembodied. Indeed, Eleazar expands upon this linkage in his Sefer Tagin, a work that explicates the meanings of the scribal calligraphic flourishes (tagin) that top certain letters in the Torah scroll: “And He completed” (Gen. 2:2): [God] gave the word tagin to indicate that there are those who were not completed. For it says, “He finished the work,” but not “all the work,” as it says, “and He rested from all the work.” This is to indicate that there are works that he did not complete, like mazikin . . . whose bodies were not created. These mazikin include women, called striya, who transform into whatever they desire, like a cat, and kill children, and occasionally adults. And also men who turn into wolves, and eat people. These mazikin were created on the eve of Sabbath at dusk, and are called werewolves— people who change (mishtanim) into animals, wolves, or cats. These creatures were not truly “created,” but rather it was decreed at dusk that they should be thus.122

Here again, the very fact that these creatures “transform into whatever they desire” indicates that they have no bodies whatsoever— that, properly speaking, they were not “created” at all. Indeed,

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shortly afterward, Eleazar reads “the work” (melakhto) that God completed on the eve of the Sabbath as “completed” (mela’ato), indicating that everything “created” by God comprised both body and spirit. He contrasts these with the unfinished demonic forces, “which change (mishtaneh) their appearances into other appearances.”123 It is clear that these descriptions of werewolves (and their monstrous peers) cannot be reconciled with those discussed earlier in this chapter. There, the Pietists insisted upon a stable human corporeality underlying the bodily transformations undergone by werewolves; here, werewolves are denied corporeality altogether. But the difference is perhaps not so stark as it initially appears. For in both instances, the Pietists’ underlying concern is identical— how can bodies, which are supposed to be stable and immutable, transform? The answer, according to both approaches, is that they cannot: either because bodies that apparently transform in fact do not, or because apparent bodies that transform are in fact not bodies. Indeed, the general question of whether or not demons have physical bodies was one that interested the Pietists, and so it should come as no surprise that the Pietists would bring the question to bear on their broader (lycanthropic) theological interests. In his Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, for instance, Eleazar consistently contrasts the perfect, fully formed human body with the demons who seek to do it harm.124 And in Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, the link between change (shinui) and incorporeality is cemented: “Do not be surprised that demons undergo changes . . . for all beings that have no bodies, but are only spirits, change.”125 Sefer Gematriyot features the same correlation: “Anything that lacks a body undergoes changes.”126 Elsewhere in Eleazar’s oeuvre, he specifically contrasts divine constancy and eternality with the mutability of demons by invoking Malachi 3:6: “I am the Lord— I do not change (lo shiniti).”127 In all these contexts, the repeated invocation of shinui highlights the fact that the driving force behind these interpretations is the need to account for (or in this case, limit) the mechanics of corporeal mutability.128 The demonic nature of monstrous, mutable creatures seems to have penetrated into non-Pietistic Ashkenazic sources as well. R. Moses Taku notes in his Sefer Ketav Tamim that “demons can transform into anything they like. . . . Similarly, there are people who change . . . and there are people who, by virtue of their birth, sometimes change into wolves or rabbits, depending on the moment of their conception.”129

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The equation of corporeal mutability with incorporeality also manifests itself in assorted exempla that circulated in medieval Ashkenaz, including a lengthy tale about a shape-shifting dragon that appears in Sefer Hasidim: There is a certain type of demon (mazik) called a dragon in Greek. If one strikes it or [cuts it] with a sword, it cannot be damaged, unless the one doing so was born of a dragon. There was once one who was born [from the union] of the king’s daughter and a dragon—which is a certain type of demon (shed). That [elder] dragon, who was [also] having intercourse with the king’s wife, said, “There is no one I fear other than that [younger] dragon, the son of the king’s daughter.” [The younger dragon] was being held in prison. The king said to [the younger dragon,] the son of the king’s daughter, “I am freeing you— you may leave this prison.” This [younger] dragon went, took his father’s sword, and hid beneath the bed of the king’s wife. . . . [The elder dragon] came to have intercourse with her, and the [younger dragon] hiding beneath the bed waited. After they had finished, he struck [the elder dragon], and gave him a single wound. The demon said, “Strike me a second time!”—for if [a dragon] is struck once, it dies, but if struck again, it lives, and grows several additional heads. . . . The [younger dragon] said . . . “I will not strike you again” . . . and [the elder dragon] died. His flesh then swelled until it filled the entire room, so that they could not remove his body via the door. The king ordered that the roof of the room be removed, and they chopped the body into pieces, and removed many wagons-full of dragon flesh from the room. The queen . . . said, “[The dragon] approached me in the image of the king, with the royal crown on his head.” This is the manner [of such creatures]— they appear to women in the image of their husbands.130

Once again, this exemplum fuses together discourses of monstrosity, demonology, and corporeal mutability. The dragon in this passage is identified alternatively as a mazik and as a shed— confirming that he is understood to be a fundamentally demonic creature. Given the linkage discerned above between demons and those who “transform into whatever they desire,” this identification is not surprising. The dragon, after all, consistently manifests physical instability: it can sprout additional heads when threatened, can appear to women in the guise of their husbands, and ultimately grows to a grotesque size once it is killed. In high medieval northern Europe, many Christian theologians were similarly reconsidering the question of demonic bodies.131 The consensus in prior angelological and demonological texts dating back to St. Augustine had been that “spiritual” beings such as angels and

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demons were indeed possessed of rarified bodies, alternately conceived of as “aerial” or “ethereal.” In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, these beings were increasingly “disembodied.” Figures like Hugh of St. Victor, Honorius Augustodunensis, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas all maintained that angels were wholly incorporeal; Aquinas, invoking Aristotelian terminology, described them as “pure form.”132 This revised understanding was made official in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.133 And significantly, the denial of angelic and demonic embodiment was not viewed by medieval thinkers as an elevation of these beings’ status; on the contrary, disembodiment was understood to be an ontological demotion, which, as a corollary, “[raised] the human condition to hitherto unparalleled heights.” As Dyan Elliott has argued, “If transubstantiation represents the headiest reaches of corporal potential, demonic incorporeality should be construed as the most poignant representation of the repercussions of bodily absence. By lending coherence to the official position of human corporeality versus angelic incorporeality, the scholastic theologians may be perceived as retrospectively confirming the body’s salvific potential . . . as well as jealously protecting this potential as a uniquely human prerogative.”134 At the same time, increased interest in the relationship between demons and the physical body also manifested itself in scientific and theological treatises on the physiology of demonic possession— as demons were denied bodies of their own, they came to be seen as increasingly threatening to humans’ bodies.135 For the Pietists and their Christian contemporaries alike, then, the vaunted theological status of the physical human body led to a reconsidering of the relationship between corporeality, demonology, and monstrosity.

“I Am the Wolf Man” As the high Middle Ages gave way to early modernity, theological engagement with lycanthropic transformation declined. Gerald’s and Gervase’s works continued to circulate, but their fascination with “sympathetic werewolves” seems not to have found many subsequent adherents. By the late medieval period, werewolves had instead become linked with witchcraft in the theological imagination. And as the early modern period progressed, werewolves were increasingly understood to be human beings suffering from a lycanthropic delusion, which led them to believe they were wolves— metamorphosis

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had given way to mental illness.136 While figures like Ziyoni continued to preserve Pietistic teratological writings,137 I am unaware of any subsequent theological or exegetical discussions of lycanthropy in Jewish sources. Jewish authors interested in monsters occasionally subsumed werewolves into the broader category of the monstrous races, eliding the difference between hybrids and creatures that undergo metamorphoses. As the sixteenth- century Italian chronicler Gedalyah Ibn Yahya recounts, It is said that after the languages were divided God created several species of monstri which are dispersed in a number of locations. I will list for you a few of them: In Africa, there are strange creatures which are androgynous, who have intercourse with one another. In the reaches of Scythia there are men who have only one eye, in their foreheads. In India there are those who have no mouth with which to eat or drink. In India there is also a species of men who have tails, and who are not civilized. . . . There is also a species of men who have three rows of teeth . . . and men with only a single broad foot, who run a great deal. And there are those who lack a neck, and have eyes along their spines. . . . In Scythia there is a species that has the form of a man, and the legs of a horse, called a Satyr. And there is a kind of creature that changes into a wolf during the summer, and returns to human form during the winter; they worship the planet Mars, and offer human sacrifices to it. In Libya, there are men who hate the sunlight, and who do not eat any living creatures. . . . In Romania there are those who eat only galni and who wear fish skins. In Ethiopia, there are those who have no nostrils, and those who have no ear, and those who have no mouths, only a small opening which allows them to drink through a straw. . . . And their sages say that anyone who has the form of a human being emerged from the loins of Adam.138

Although the final line of this passage, which speculates about the human ancestry of monstrous being, might have resonated with the Pietists, Ibn Yahya’s discussion as a whole is merely a restatement of the Plinian discussion of the monstrous races— a reflection of the general interest in classical sources typical of Gedalyah and his early modern Jewish peers.139 At the same time that Ibn Yahya was marshaling werewolves in his proto-ethnography, early modern literary compositions were invoking them for narrative ends. Thus the Mayse Bukh, a compilation of Yiddish folktales published in 1602 (only a few years after Ibn Yahya’s death), included a tale of human-lupine metamorphosis, in which a rabbi is transformed into a murderous wolf by his wicked wife, only to eventually recover his humanity and

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turn his wife into a “she-ass” as retribution.140 Not long after, the Ba’al Shem Tov, Israel b. Eliezer, was credited with defeating a wicked sorcerer who had transformed himself into a ferocious wolf.141 By the early twentieth century, lycanthropic motifs were still in vogue among Jewish authors, though they were now being mined for pathos. For instance, in the wrenching 1920 poem “Der Wolf,” the Yiddish poet H. Leivick describes a rabbi who transforms into a wolf due to grief at the destruction of his shtetl during a pogrom. Eventually driven to madness, the rabbi-wolf attacks the new Jewish inhabitants of his town on Yom Kippur, who in turn beat him to death.142 This nexus between madness and wolves may well have resonated in contemporary Europe—just two years prior, in 1918, Sigmund Freud published Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis) on the case of so-called “Wolf-Man” Sergei Pankejeff—a case that itself contained significant Jewish undercurrents.143 And as the twentieth century progressed, and literary monsters increasingly gave way to cinematic ones, the linkage between Jews and werewolves persisted, though its resonance shifted from the tragic to the tragicomic to the farcical. In 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, the titular character David Kessler is a Jew, who at one point in the film dreams about Nazi werewolves attacking his family with machine guns, obliterating a prominently displayed menorah in the process. The fantasy series Being Human, which ran for five seasons on the BBC beginning in 2008, featured a Jewish werewolf who wore a prominent Star of David necklace over his frequently hirsute chest. Most surreally, an episode of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock contained a musical sketch called “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” which featured comedian Tracy Morgan reading from the Torah, talking with his rabbi, and disco dancing, all while decked out in werewolf makeup and garb. The song quickly went viral, and its chorus (“Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, spooky scary; boys becoming men, men becoming wolves”) achieved cult status, cropping up on T-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers.144 A California brewery was soon brewing a “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” beer, which partygoers could drink while dancing to the remixed techno version of the song being played in nightclubs and dance halls.145 It is difficult to pinpoint just what has made the modern “Jewish werewolf” motif so successful. Tempting as it might be, it would be absurd to claim that the linkage has had historical continuity over the ages; if it seems unlikely that the auteurs of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” were gesturing toward “Der Wolf” or the Mayse Bukh, it is an

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even safer bet that they were unfamiliar with the theological writings of the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. But it is possible that the impulse behind the dramatic upsurge in modern Jewish werewolves manifests the same cultural dynamics that this chapter has sought to trace in high medieval Europe. Then as now, Jewish culture adopted regnant themes and motifs, and adapted them for internal consumption; werewolves spoke to pressing and profound Jewish concerns and anxieties. And indeed, the modern cinematic werewolf legend has had a Jewish pedigree, and intentional Jewish meaning, from its inception. Curt Siodmak, the screenwriter behind the classic 1941 film The Wolf Man, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who admitted that the film was consciously imbued with a Jewish subtext: “I am the Wolf Man. I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate. The swastika represents the moon. When the moon comes up, the man doesn’t want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny.”146 Or, as a contemporary critic has more provocatively put it, the modern werewolf narrative “is largely a metaphor for being Jewish in the 20th century. . . . A hairy young outsider becomes saddled with an identity he doesn’t want or particularly like, the meaning of which is told to him by an old European lady speaking a lot of mumbo jumbo. He is in love with a blonde girl who loves him back, but their love is doomed. Eventually he gets chased and killed by a bunch of peasants with pitchforks and torches. And, oh, yes, he feasts on human blood.”147 In medieval northern Europe too, Christians and Jews overcame the hesitancies of their predecessors and wholeheartedly embraced humananimal transformation in their explorations of the mechanics of the Incarnation and the Eucharist (in the case of Christians), and the meaning and potentialities of the human body (in the case of Jews). Both communities marshaled contemporary beliefs about the existence, workings, and theological significance of lycanthropic metamorphosis as a means of shedding light upon their own received traditions. In the eyes of some of their neighbors, Jews may have been identified with monsters or demons, but discourses of monstrosity and demonology served more than merely polemical ends—they simultaneously spurred Christians and Jews to explore the nexus between the world around them and the theological truths it encoded, and encouraged them to confer meaning upon relevant, ostensibly “folkloric” beliefs and to incorporate them into their own sophisticated theological systems.

Chapter 5

Between Sewer, Synagogue, and Cemetery Both Jews and Christians had outhouses. That doesn’t mean they influenced each other. —from a roundtable discussion at the conference “Thirteenth Century France: Continuity and Change,” Hebrew University, February 2011

In the third book of his Guide of the Perplexed, the Sephardic philosopher-rabbi Moses Maimonides offers a novel interpretation of Hebrew’s status as lashon ha-kodesh— the holy language. He writes: I can also give the reason why this our language is called the holy language. It should not be thought that this is, on our part, an empty appellation, or a mistake; in fact, it is indicative of true reality. For in this holy language no word at all has been laid down in order to designate the act itself that brings about generation, the sperm, the urine, or the excrements. No word at all designating, according to its first meaning, any of these things has been laid down in the Hebrew language, they being signified by terms used in a figurative sense and by allusions. It was intended thereby to indicate that these things ought not to be mentioned and consequently that no terms designating them should be coined. For these are things about which one ought to be silent; however, when necessity impels mentioning them, a device should be found to do it by means of expressions deriving from other words, just as the most diligent effort should be made to be hidden when necessity impels doing these things. . . . The term designating excrement is tso’ah, deriving from yatso [to go out]. The term designating urine is meme raglayim [waters of the feet]. The term designating sperm is shikhvat zera [layers of seed].1

For Maimonides, Hebrew’s status as a holy language does not derive from any intrinsic ontological force. 2 The holy language is defined not in terms of what it is or does, but solely in terms of what it does not do— namely, describe in any overt way those physical processes he considers most unbecoming and shameful. Urination, defecation, 161

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and ejaculation, it is clear, have no positive theological content. They are, unfortunately, necessary to the maintenance of human life, but should remain unacknowledged and hidden to the extent possible. The Hebrew language’s sacred status derives exclusively from the indirect, euphemistic ways these biological processes are described. At roughly the same time that Maimonides was composing the Guide in Fustat, R. Judah he-Hasid was in Regensburg compiling Sefer Hasidim. Had Maimonides read it, it seems safe to say that he would not have been pleased— and not only because Judah emphatically believed the Hebrew language was intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, holy.3 More striking is the fact that Sefer Hasidim is positively overflowing with excrement. There is hardly a page that goes by—in the context of legal rulings, exempla, moral teachings, and so on—where feces, urine, diarrhea, flatulence, semen, vomit, phlegm, or mucus is not invoked. This does not necessarily mean that the Pietists thought any more highly of excrement than Maimonides did— on the contrary, the vast majority of the discussions of excrement in their writings focus on ever-more stringent prohibitions, which seek to limit contact between bodily waste and sacred spaces and objects. These strictures far exceed anything that is contained in prior rabbinic literature, or indeed in the legal writings of Maimonides himself.4 The intensity of the Pietists’ preoccupation with excrement and bodily effluvia is unprecedented in any prior Jewish writings, and fairly demands explanation. Moreover, other elements of Pietistic theology— such as their insistence on the immanence of God within every part of the natural world, and hence belief that He is fundamentally unaffected by material filth—would seem a priori to obviate any cause for anxiety about the contaminating power of excrement. What, then, were they so concerned about? In this chapter, I argue that excrement was not merely of halakhic or hygienic concern to the Pietists, but rather that they invested it with decidedly spiritual significance. For alongside the exempla and rulings in Pietistic writings concerning the proper treatment of bodily waste are numerous instances in which feces, urine, semen, and so on are discussed in explicitly theological contexts. The Pietists especially invoke excrement in connection with the fate of the human body after death—in relation to eschatology in general, and to the resurrection of the dead in particular. The timing and workings of resurrection was a controversial issue in medieval Jewish theology, and indeed in medieval theology as a whole. The lives of Judah the Pious and Eleazar of

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Worms— the two preeminent Pietistic theologians— overlapped with the “first Maimonidean controversy,” which centered on the question of bodily resurrection, and which left its mark on Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Islamic East. It should thus come as no surprise that the Pietists manifested deep interest in and anxiety over some of the very issues that inflamed the passions of twelfth- and thirteenth- century Maimonideans and their opponents. But the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also witnessed a flourishing of Christian theological writings that sought to analyze and reinterpret the fate of the soul after death, the timing of the Apocalypse and Final Judgment, and, particularly, the nature and logic of bodily resurrection. In this context, medieval Christian theologians, scientists, preachers, and biblical exegetes all manifested a marked— and unprecedented—interest in the human body and its waste products, and channeled their scatological interest into discussions of the very same theological problems discussed by the Jewish Pietists. Nor did each religious community confine their discussions of excrement to their respective internal discourses. The excreting human body— and its implications for the theological status of the human body generally—was a key component of the polemical literature of both Jews and Christians during this period, suggesting that the theological notions bound up in medieval discussions of excrement could gain cross- cultural circulation. It should come as no surprise, then, if the theological uses to which excrement is put in Jewish and Christians writings of this period mirror and play off one another. In sum, this chapter argues that the Pietists’ concern with bodily waste, and with its implications for the questions of eschatology and bodily resurrection, is an extension of their preoccupation with the human body generally. In previous chapters, I have argued that the Pietists saw the human body— like the natural order as a whole— as a meaningful theological construct, and that their conception of the human soul, prizing of asceticism, and attitudes toward monstrosity were all predicated on a concern for and valuation of a stable and intact human body. I have suggested, moreover, that this approach mirrored that of the Pietists’ Christian contemporaries, who were increasingly invested in a scientific perspective that prized stability, consistency, and regularity. This chapter takes a similar tack in relation to the Pietists’ concern for human waste products, which represent the outermost boundaries of the human body. In doing so, it utilizes—but also, I hope, helps to refine— the nascent field of

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“medieval waste studies,” practitioners of which have begun to make excrement and its meaning in medieval culture the subject of serious historical and theoretical inquiry.

Excrement and the Sacred The German Pietists were hardly the first to address excrement and its halakhic implications. Rabbinic literature devotes numerous passages to the need to keep physical filth away from sacred spaces and objects. Thus, it is forbidden to pass gas while one is wearing phylacteries, or to bring phylacteries into an outhouse; one must not pray while standing next to manure or while needing to relieve oneself; and so on.5 Indeed, in discussing the composition of the incense used in the Temple, the rabbis noted that urine would have been a useful ingredient, but caution that excrement “cannot be brought into the [Temple] courtyard out of respect.”6 Nonetheless, rabbinic literature never treats excrement as ritually defiling— a weightier status reserved for menstrual blood, dead bodies, and so on.7 One talmudic passage goes so far as to emphasize that, far from defiling the body, excretion leaves it cleaner than it was to begin with; in the words of the Amora Rav Yossi, “Is excrement impurity? Why, it is nothing other than cleanliness!”8 In many of their writings, the German Pietists not only cite these rabbinic strictures but augment them, and generate, seemingly ex nihilo, a variety of novel prohibitions. They demonstrate a particularly obsessive interest in protecting sacred objects and spaces from the corrupting presence of bodily waste. Thus the reader is warned against founding a synagogue in a building that was once used as an outhouse;9 against building an outhouse in close proximity to a synagogue or house of study;10 and against pouring urine or feces out one’s window, if the latter overlooks a path that people take to the synagogue, lest the passersby step in excrement and “be filthy with urine when they enter the synagogue.”11 These are reasonable guidelines, no doubt, but not ones that the authors of previous works on halakhah or minhag took any pains to emphasize. In their attempts to keep urine and feces out of the synagogue, the Pietists focus on the role of clothing in particular. Thus: “When a man enters the synagogue or house of study, he must inspect his legs and shoes to ensure there is no excrement on them. [This requirement is hinted at] in the Torah: ‘Remove your shoes from upon your feet’ (Exod. 3:5); and the same

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concerning Joshua (in the Prophets); . . . and in the Writings: ‘Guard your feet when you go to the house of your Lord’ (Eccl. 4:17).”12 This concern about clothing facilitating contact between filth and the sacred recurs again and again in Sefer Hasidim, and numerous stringencies are imposed so as to avoid the possibility. For example, “As the evening [prayer service] approaches, one should not lift a child up into his lap, lest [the child] soil his pants. And if one were to say: ‘Let him wash his pants in water,’ [the pants] would not be as pure as previously.”13 Children, it should be noted, appear repeatedly as metonyms for excremental filth in Sefer Hasidim, to the extent that the reader is warned to shun all but the most unavoidable contact even with one’s own offspring.14 Concern lest one’s clothing become unintentionally soiled leads to other stringencies as well. One should make sure not to wear the same clothes he wore to the privy into the synagogue, lest the smell of excrement cling to him and thereby enter the sanctuary.15 Indeed, one should ideally change his clothes prior to even overhearing words of Torah.16 An alternative to changing one’s clothes is depicted in an exemplum: “Once, a man put a leather pouch in his pants, over the tip of his penis, due to drops of urine— lest they drip on his clothing, rendering his prayers an abomination.”17 One bears responsibility, moreover, not only for his own cleanliness, but for that of his fellow: “When one exits the privy, he must inspect the place he sat on, lest there be filth on it, and lest his fellow come and sit upon it carelessly or at night, and become filthy, and pray or study Torah— this would be reckoned [the first man’s] responsibility.”18 The extent of the concern becomes particularly apparent when these manifold restrictions are compared to the norms recorded in rabbinic literature. There, we find no requirement to wear leather pouches, nor to change clothes after each visit to the privy. Indeed, it is by no means clear that having traces of actual excrement on one’s clothing prevents him from engaging in prayer. A view attributed to the Amora Rav Huna permits one who has excrement on his body to pray, since prayer involves the mouth but not the rest of the body.19 Another passage queries whether having excrement stuck to one’s shoe disqualifies one from praying and leaves the question unresolved. 20 The Pietists consistently side with the most restrictive positions in these talmudic discussions and frequently exceed them in stringency. Not only sacred spaces and prayer services need to be protected from fecal matter. According to Pietistic sources, God’s name cannot be invoked in a privy, and one must refrain from telling someone

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good news in the privy if there is even a chance that the recipient will reflexively bless God when he hears it.21 Indeed, one should preferably refrain from speaking Hebrew in the privy altogether. 22 Torah scrolls, of course, must be shielded from excrement as well— a Torah cannot be stored in a building that contains a chamber pot, even on a different floor. 23 The Pietists are especially punctilious when it comes to protecting not just Torah scrolls—which physically contain God’s name—but books in general. 24 Books should not be brought into the privy or exposed to excremental filth 25 — one should preferably not even discuss the two in the same sentence!26 Even the most indirect contacts between books— or even the ink or parchment used to make them— and human waste is strictly forbidden. Thus, if one has ink stains on his hands following a session of writing, he cannot enter the privy before scrubbing all traces of it off his fingers. 27 The lengths to which the Pietists go to keep excrement from holy objects can be discerned in their sometimes unconventional legal reasoning, as in the following passage from Sefer Hasidim: “If a vessel containing water . . . was poured into a pot containing gallnuts for making ink, and some water was left in the cup, it should not be poured into a pot which contains urine or feces in order to clean it out. Similarly, if one poured water from a cup into a pot containing feces, or used it to wash his hands when they were filthy with excrement, he cannot pour the remaining water onto the gallnuts.”28 The attentiveness mandated by this passage is quite exceptional by conventional halakhic standards. From a ritual standpoint, the gallnut ink itself is not intrinsically sacred— it is merely used for writing texts that will eventually be sacralized. Moreover, in the scenario described, there is no chance of any direct contact between ink and excrement. After all, the water that is poured into the ink mixture never touched any feces—it was merely at one point in contact with water that was later used in an excremental context. This sort of restriction never appears in rabbinic literature, and, indeed, it seems to assume a conception of impurity and the means of its transmission that is decidedly anti-rabbinic. In a number of contexts, the Mishnah states explicitly that impurity cannot be transmitted via nitsok— the upward spread of impurity from the vessel into which a liquid is being poured to the vessel out of which it is being poured. 29 The view that nitsok does impart impurity, moreover, is attributed by the mishnaic text to the Sadducees— the rabbinic arch-heretics who deny the validity and authority of rabbinic tradition!30 Nonetheless, this

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ignominious comparison does not prevent Sefer Hasidim from using the identical logic in further distancing excrement from any hint of sacrality. Another scenario in which books need to be protected even from indirect excrement is in the case of flatulence: “A hasid once came before a sage, and saw that the sage’s cloak was spread out over his books. The hasid asked, ‘Why have you spread your cloak over your books?’ [The sage] responded, ‘It is because I am sick, and constipated, and when I break wind from below it eases my suffering. I do this often—were it not for the fact that I pass gas frequently from below, it would rise up to my heart and endanger me. Thus, I spread my garment over the books and break wind.’”31 And similar stringency is elsewhere described in rather graphic detail: “When a man picks up a cloth to wipe himself from filth below, but realizes that he does not need to use the privy after all and puts down the cloth, he still must not touch books or enter the synagogue until he washes his hands.”32 The desire to protect sacred objects from even indirect contact with excrement sometimes manifests itself in surprising ways. For instance, one of the novel directives that first appears in Sefer Hasidim is a blessing that is to be recited when one remembers something he had previously forgotten: “If one derives great benefit from remembering something [that he had previously forgotten] he should recite, “Blessed are You, O Lord, our God, King of the universe, who remembers all and causes all forgotten things to be remembered.”33 The author takes pains to point out, however, that not all remembrances ought to occasion the recitation of a blessing: “A person who forgot something disgraceful, like a pot full of feces and urine— if he forgot to throw it away outside and then remembered, he cannot recite ‘Blessed is He who remembers and causes forgotten things to be remembered.’”34 Here, it seems that the Pietists’ preoccupation with excrement leads them to incorporate it into any and every discussion— even invoking it in relation to the recitation of a blessing that they had just created from scratch. This invocation of feces and urine in seemingly unrelated contexts is especially apparent in cases where the Pietists, attempting to depict religious role models or to shape the piety of their readers, choose excrement as the means of making their point. In one passage, for example, Sefer Hasidim chastises those whose excessive modesty interferes with their religious observance, and excrement is chosen as the illustrative example: “There is such a thing as modesty whose

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opposite would be preferable. For example, if one has diarrhea but does not lift up his garments all the way [while in the privy], he might become filthy due to the splatter from his liquid waste. Similarly, one who says, ‘How can I have intercourse while fully naked?’ and thus takes a garment and covers himself with it— semen will come in contact with his clothing, and he may wear them into the synagogue.”35 Other exempla in the book also tend to describe pious character traits by reference to excrement. The following example describes a man who put the interests of the synagogue above his own: “A person lived in the courtyard adjacent to that of the synagogue, and many people were always found in the courtyard of the synagogue. He was told, ‘You should block off [your courtyard], for your outhouse will quickly be overflowing.’ He said, ‘God forbid that I should close the gates of my courtyard—for then they would relieve themselves in the courtyard of the synagogue. Thus I leave my courtyard open so that they will not make the courtyard of the synagogue filthy, for a man cannot hold back and refrain from relieving himself.’”36 Excrement is invoked yet again in an exemplum illustrating the permissibility of lying under certain circumstances: “It is [sometimes] appropriate to lie in order to benefit the guilty. . . . A certain woman was once visited by the elders of the community regarding halitsah, and she passed gas (lit., “sneezed from below”). 37 One [of the elders] said, ‘So what? It was I who did it, because I needed to defecate but was too embarrassed to leave.’ [He did this] in order not to embarrass the woman.”38 Sefer Hasidim also attempts to mold people’s behavior and sensitivities through discussions of the etiquette to be observed in the privy, or in relation to bodily waste. Thus, “one should not spend too much time with or delay someone who will be embarrassed in his presence, lest they need to relieve themselves, and will be too embarrassed to go do so.”39 Similarly, “if a man has a guest, who he knows will be crossing a river by boat, and the guest is a respected person who will be embarrassed to be seen relieving himself over the side of the boat, do not give him foods to eat, like milk, which will give him diarrhea.”40 Guidance concerning how one should comport himself in the privy is frequently offered as well.41 The moralistic, exhortatory lens through which personal hygiene is viewed is echoed in Eleazar of Worms’s Sefer ha-Roke’ah. Eleazar begins this halakhic compilation with a section he calls Hilkhot Hasidut, or “The Laws of Piety.” In Shoresh Taharah—“The Root of Purity,” a subsection of the “Laws of Piety”— Eleazar equates purity

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with cleanliness and suggests that excrement is not only defiling but actually shameful. One manifests purity through ensuring “that your garments not be dirty with excrement, or with drops of urine. . . . Thus, one must be sure to wipe themselves thoroughly. Guard your genitals, and do not make a habit of urinating close to the time for prayers, lest you drip on your pants. How can you recite ‘Forgive us, for we have sinned,’ if you are standing there filthy? You must similarly guard yourself from semen, lest it stick to your flesh or to your garments.”42 The assumption is that there is something inherently hypocritical about praying for forgiveness while one is physically dirty— suggesting that excremental filth not only defiles holy objects, but itself manifests sin and shame. The same notion is expressed in Sefer Hasidim, in a discussion of inculcating humility: “In every location, know your Creator— even in a place where it is forbidden to think about words of Torah [e.g., in the privy]. How? Know Him through modesty. And when you are in a bathhouse or privy, remember your impurity, and how much impurity exits your body, and stinks. In this manner, all people can clothe themselves in humility.”43 Pietistic biblical commentaries note that the most modest of all men, Moses, was careful never to soil himself. Indeed, the burning bush was located in a remote and inaccessible location precisely so that the surrounding area, through which Moses had to travel, would not be made filthy by human waste.44 In addition to citing rabbinic precedents, and creating strictures of their own, the Pietists at times saw fit to expand and reinterpret rabbinic sources that did not, in their view, go far enough. One example of this effort is in their treatment of the blessing of Asher yatsar, a rabbinic prayer customarily recited after leaving the privy. The precise text of this blessing is the subject of some debate in the Babylonian Talmud: When one exits [the privy], he should say: ‘Blessed is He who formed [asher yatsar] man with wisdom, and created within him many holes and many openings; it is revealed and known before Your throne of glory that if one opens or closes, [man] is unable to stand before You.’ How does one conclude [the blessing]? Rav said, ‘He who cures the sick.’ Samuel said, ‘If so, you have equated everyone in the world with a sick person! Rather, [conclude with] “He who heals all flesh.”’ R. Sheshet said, ‘He who works wondrously.’ R. Papa said, ‘Therefore we say both: “He who heals all flesh and works wondrously.”’45

Interestingly, this blessing nowhere mentions excrement explicitly; the language to be recited is euphemistic— if it is even meant to refer to

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excrement at all. Indeed, a wide array of later commentators were more than happy to distinguish between the text of the blessing itself and the occasion upon which it is recited, by denying altogether that it refers to the process of producing waste. Thus R. Solomon b. Isaac (Rashi, 1040–1103), the preeminent medieval talmudic exegete, understood the blessing to be saying that “the body is full of holes, like a skin [i.e., a leather bag]— and if this skin has holes in it, it is unable to contain any air (ru’ah) within it. But the Holy One, blessed be He, created man with wisdom, and created many holes— but nonetheless his soul (ru’ah) remains within him all the days of his life. This is the wonder and the wisdom.”46 In order to support this reading, Rashi reads the “openings” and “holes” as referring to the mouth, nose, valves of the heart, and so on—in other words, he universalizes the blessing, making it into a discussion of bodily health in general rather than specifically excretion. He does, it is true, include the anus among the openings referred to in the blessing, but it is clear that the actual organs of excretion have no privileged position in his understanding of the content of the blessing.47 Rashi’s broad, nonexcremental reading of the Asher yatsar blessing is echoed in a variety of other halakhic writings.48 Perhaps the most expansive formulation can be found in the thirteenth- century liturgical guidebook of R. David b. Joseph Abudraham, which, in describing the body parts that are being referred to in the blessing, lists twenty- eight different organs and limbs— ranging from the arms and legs to the belly button to the various components of the circulatory, skeletal, and digestive systems— that collectively manifest God’s wisdom.49 In this reading, as in Rashi’s, one recites Asher yatsar after relieving oneself, but the content of the blessing has nothing to do with elimination or excretion in particular. It should come as no surprise that the Pietists—never eager to downplay excrement or bodily waste— took a different approach. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Pietists were indeed interested in the workings and wondrousness of the human body as a whole— but when it comes to Asher yatsar in particular, they chose to highlight the specifically scatological dimension of the blessing. Thus Eleazar of Worms, in his commentary on the prayerbook, asks: “What does ‘wisdom’ have to do with the openings [in the human body] . . . ? If a man builds a sewer by the door of his house, or within his house, is this not a disgrace? But the Holy One, blessed be He, built a sewer— that is, the nostrils— in front of the door— that is, the mouth— and

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created in man intestines filled with excrement, but all praise Him. As it is written, ‘The Rock’s works are perfect’ (Deut. 32:4).”50 It should be noted that the comparison of one’s bodily openings with a sewer is one that appears in prior rabbinic literature. 51 What is noteworthy, however, is Eleazar’s application of this idea to the blessing of Asher yatsar in particular, a blessing that prior exegetes had attempted to “sanitize” of its excremental implications. It should be noted, moreover, that even in adopting a prior rabbinic teaching, Eleazar takes pains to heighten the excremental content. Thus the discussion of this idea in Genesis Rabbah, for instance, compares the “sewer in front of one’s house” only with the nose, which leaks mucus. Eleazar adds the “intestines filled with excrement” of his own accord— an editorial decision that should not surprise us, given the Pietists’ interest in excrement we have traced thus far. The link between Asher yatsar and excretion is echoed by R. Jonah Gerondi, a Spanish halakhist and moralist who studied in northern Europe and transmitted many Pietistic teachings to Spain. 52 In his Sefer ha-Yir’ah (The Book of Fear), R. Jonah details the procedure one should follow upon awakening in the morning, and specifically the transition from the privy to the synagogue: “He should go and inspect himself in the privy, acting in a modest manner . . . and he should not urinate standing up, lest he sprinkle drops on his legs. . . . And he should inspect himself very carefully, for his innards and organs must constantly bless the Creator, as it says, ‘Let my soul bless God, and all my innards [bless] His holy Name’ (Ps. 103:1), and it is not appropriate to bring a belly full of excrement before the Holy One, blessed be He, to bless Him. You should be careful not to dirty your garments with urine or with feces . . . and you should recite the blessing of Asher yatsar.”53 By juxtaposing the blessing of Asher yatsar with the graphic description of one’s excretory habits, R. Jonah is not only imparting specifically excremental significance to the blessing—he is also echoing the entire approach of the Pietists, that is, detailing in minute detail the lengths to which one must go in order to prevent excrement from defiling the holy.54

“If His Organ Becomes Hard, He Must Not Write the Name of God” It was not only feces and urine that the Pietists saw as threatening to piety and holiness— Sefer Hasidim contains myriad directives that

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seek to regulate spitting, nose blowing, vomiting, and, especially, seminal emissions as well. Moreover, while modern physiology would make fundamental distinctions between defecating and urinating on the one hand, and nasal discharge, vomiting, and ejaculation on the other, the Pietists saw all of these bodily byproducts as fundamentally similar and inextricably linked to excrement. In this, the Pietists reflected the typical Galenic understanding of excrement common in the high Middle Ages. 55 Galen had posited that food, once consumed, underwent four digestions. In the first digestion, masticated food was further processed by the stomach into liquid chyle. The chyle then passed through the intestines in the second digestion; the intestines extracted useful nutrients from the chyle and sent them to the liver, where they were turned into blood. In the third digestion, the heart refines some of this blood and sends it to the arteries, and in the fourth, a small amount of heart’s blood is further refined into semen. Whatever is left over at the end of this process is eliminated from the body via urine and feces, but also in vomit, phlegm, and mucus.56 While semen is in a certain sense the culmination of the digestive process, it too was regarded as excrement, albeit a valuable one, since it could produce life.57 As such, the same strictures that we have seen the Pietists apply to urine and feces are invoked in discussions of these other effluences as well.58 Thus: “After reading from the Torah [in synagogue], one should kiss the scroll; and if he has to spit, he should do so and then kiss the Torah, but should not kiss the Torah and then spit.”59 Elsewhere, Sefer Hasidim gives detailed guidance concerning what points in the prayer service are appropriate for interrupting in order to spit or blow one’s nose. It even cites approvingly the behavior of a certain Pietist, who made it a practice to stop and spit only at points in the liturgy where God is not being explicitly glorified.60 One must similarly be careful not to spit, or even sneeze, while writing a Torah scroll61—yet another instance in which the Pietists supersede rabbinic precedent, which considers sneezing in certain contexts to be a “sign of blessing.”62 All these prohibitions are identical to those emphasized by the Pietists in relation to feces and urine. Indeed, later halakhists, influenced by the Pietistic ideals, expanded these strictures even further.63 Vomiting receives conspicuous attention in Sefer Hasidim as well. Thus the reader is enjoined not to eat anything disgusting, which might cause one to have to vomit;64 and the specific prohibition that is

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invoked is that of al teshaktsu—“you shall not make yourself abominable” (Lev. 11:43). As noted above, this is the very same verse that the rabbis had marshaled to prohibit one from praying when they needed to relieve themselves.65 A similar concern is manifested in another passage: “One who feels the urge to vomit [after a meal] should not say, ‘I will recite Grace and then go vomit.’ Rather, he should vomit, then wash his hands, and then recite Grace. If a man has eaten and wants to vomit, he should not recite Grace until he has first vomited, lest he begin reciting Grace but vomit in the middle. Similarly, one who needs to relieve himself should do so, and only then recite Grace.”66 Not only is the concern here with “contaminating” one’s blessing by contact with effluence recognizable; the passage explicitly equates vomiting with the need to defecate or urinate, and makes clear that the laws are equivalent concerning both bodily functions. Alongside these waste products, the Pietists were exceptionally sensitive to contact with semen, and many of the rulings we have seen above in relation to urine and feces are applied to semen as well. The pious must be sure to have intercourse only while naked, so that no semen adheres to their clothing;67 if they do have sex while clothed, however, they must be sure not to wear the same garment into the synagogue.68 One must avoid even thinking about Torah while in any location where semen stains might be present, and must never lay any sacred objects (books, Torah scrolls, phylacteries, and so on) on a bed where a man and woman may have had intercourse.69 And just as defecating or urinating in close proximity to the synagogue is forbidden, one must also not ejaculate nearby.70 Sefer Hasidim even provides guidance, in numerous passages, about what a man should do when he gets an erection during prayer or Torah study71— and explicitly equates this physical manifestation of sexual excitement with the need to urinate or defecate: “If one needs to relieve himself, or if in the course of speaking with his wife his organ becomes hard, he must not write the Name [of God in a Torah scroll].”72 It must be admitted that, unlike feces, urine, mucus, and vomit— which the Pietists restrict to an unprecedented degree— semen was closely linked with impurity, and was strictly regulated, already in the Bible. As a result, semen is discussed extensively in rabbinic literature, and so the Pietists’ concerns about its contact with sacred objects and spaces come across as less novel than do their discussions of other bodily fluids. Nonetheless, the linkage that they make between semen and excrement is unique,73 suggesting that they saw the two as closely

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related. In addition to the parallels noted above— in which the Pietists’ novel strictures regarding excrement are applied to semen— there are instances in which the Pietists adamantly encourage observance even of rabbinic prohibitions that had fallen out of favor among medieval Jews in general. Ever since the biblical period, for example, any man who had a seminal emission was required by Jewish law to undergo a process of ritual purification, which includes isolation and immersion.74 The Talmud, moreover, attributes to the biblical figure Ezra the Scribe an ordinance that a ba’al keri— one who has ejaculated— must immerse himself in a ritual bath prior to entering a synagogue or studying Torah.75 This stricture, however, was not widely observed among medieval Jews.76 Nevertheless, the Pietists demand of their readers at least a token ritual of purification. According to one tannaitic source cited in the Talmud, one may purify himself by pouring nine kabin (a unit of liquid measurement) of water over himself, rather than by immersing in a ritual bath (which must have a volume of at least 40 se’ah, or 240 kabin).77 Sefer Hasidim repeatedly invokes this ruling— often in contexts that also discuss excremental purity.78 Thus men should keep a glass with nine kabin of water by their beds, and should not enter the synagogue without at least a cursory cleaning of the genitals following intercourse.79

Dirt as “Danger”? Or an “Excremental Golden Age”? Clearly, the Pietists were preoccupied with feces and urine, and also with other effluences— like mucus, semen, and vomit— that they saw as linked. But why were the Pietists so extraordinarily troubled by bodily waste, and so eager to tackle the subject in their legal, moral, and exegetical writings? In tackling this question, it is worth considering the approaches and insights of scholarship in the so- called field of “waste studies.” In recent decades, an array of psychoanalytic and critical theorists have traced the role of excrement in constituting what Julia Kristeva first termed “abjection,” a feeling of horror at boundary violations that occupies a key stage in a child’s psychosexual development.80 Such psychoanalytic approaches are rooted especially in Freudian assumptions about human development, such as the notion that humans are born coprophiliacs— attached to their waste products— and only later sublimate that attachment when they are socialized to treat human waste with revulsion. Historians and

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theorists have used such theories as the bases of their own historical accounts of the development of society’s “shame threshold.” Thus Norbert Elias famously marshaled psychoanalytic conceptions of excrement in his charting of the “sociogenesis” and “psychogenesis” of modern civilization, arguing that as European nation-states grew increasingly centralized in the early modern period, and as networks of social connections became increasingly complex, individuals came to internalize an ethic of self-restraint that manifested itself in newfound punctiliousness toward the body and its functions.81 Dominique Laporte, meanwhile, combined Freudian and Marxist theory in arguing for the centrality of sublimated coprophilia in the origins and development of a market economy.82 These abstract, theoretical accounts of the meaning of excrement have been accompanied by more empirical anthropological studies, tracing back to Mary Douglas’s foundational Purity and Danger, in which she showed that a wide array of cultures symbolically linked dirt (particularly excrement) and danger, and that social structures, treatment of outsiders, and even cosmologies were closely correlated with attitudes toward filth.83 What all these approaches have in common, however, is their underlying conviction that there is an essential, transhistorical meaning intrinsic to excrement—whether because human development inevitably passes through Freud’s anal stage, or because, per Douglas, the very binary opposition between dirt and cleanliness is itself a structurally basic one, shared by all cultures.84 These essentialist paradigms have been persuasively challenged in recent years by historical and literary studies that have pointed to the fluid, contextual meanings of excremental symbolism in varying historical settings. Mikhail Bakhtin helped to inaugurate this approach in his celebrated study of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, showing that the scatological “grotesque body” found in medieval and early modern literature was not merely a literary topos, but was also central to a “carnivalesque” culture that played an important role in mediating stratified social relations.85 The advent of poststructuralism, and particularly Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the social constructedness of the body and its boundaries, further led scholars to posit that “our modern estrangement from excrement is neither natural nor inevitable.”86 Rather, changing views of excrement are often a means of enacting power relations among people and groups, which—like gender and sexuality— are “inscribed” upon the human body.87 Thus David Inglis, for instance, has traced the ways

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in which modern advances in sanitary technology and concomitant changes in excretory “habitus” have been used to reify class, gender, and racial distinctions;88 Georges Vigarello, Kathleen Brown, Douglas Biow, and others have similarly shown how discussions of bodily hygiene were incorporated into early modern social, gender, and scientific discourses, to frequently repressive effect.89 Historians of early modern art and literature have fruitfully utilized Foucault’s, and especially Bakhtin’s, insights as well.90 In each of these historiographic paradigms, the Middle Ages tend to be cast as an “excremental golden age.”91 Whether because the Freudian “civilizing process” had not yet taken hold, or because repressive discourses of sanitation and hygiene were still far off in the future, the medieval period is depicted as one in which modern anxieties had not yet taken root, in which people were unselfconscious about their excretory habits. But recent work by medievalists has resulted in a considerably more nuanced picture. An array of studies have explored the concrete ways in which medieval communities dealt with sewage, manure, and public hygiene,92 as well as the varied, and sophisticated, symbolic and even spiritual meanings that excrement had in the minds of medieval authors, intellectuals, and entertainers.93 Indeed, the anxieties and strictures of the German Pietists seem to decisively belie the notion that medieval Ashkenaz was in the midst of any kind of “excremental golden age”— the restrictions in Sefer Hasidim surpass in intensity the more modern ones that, for Elias and others, mark a much later stage in the “civilizing process.” But the contrary notion that filth represented or threatened “danger” in medieval Ashkenazic thought is equally problematic. For in their overtly theological writings, the Pietists explicitly articulate that excrement poses no danger to holy spaces or objects— that, on the contrary, the sacred cannot be harmed by contact with excrement, and that God Himself is present, ontologically, even within excremental filth. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to briefly consider one of the most noteworthy dimensions of Pietistic theology: their panentheistic belief in the absolute immanence of God in the physical world. As Joseph Dan has persuasively shown,94 Pietistic conceptions of divine immanence traced back to the theology of Saadia Gaon, whose Book of Beliefs and Opinions they knew through a preTibbonite anonymous Hebrew paraphrase.95 For Saadia, as indeed for all the medieval Jewish philosophers who wrote in his wake, God

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is absolutely singular, eternal, and incorporeal— and thus unbounded by the limits of time and space. Because God cannot be localized anywhere within the world, Saadia argued that He is in fact to be found everywhere within the world. Saadia is most explicit about this idea in his Commentary to Sefer Yetsirah, which is worth citing at some length: He, may His name be exalted, is found everywhere in the world. . . . We see, for instance, that the air of the world is utterly simple, and that the will of God, namely His power and might, are spread out and inherent within all of the air. . . . This is the parable that I give for His existence. And if one was to say to you: “How do we know that there is air [even] within the rocks and mountains? If you want to say that the air is found within the rocks and mountains [just as it is] within the water, one could counter that this is because the water is soft and light; but this is not true of the mountains and rocks!” Reply to him: “Know that were it not for the air that is within the rocks they could never be shattered or chipped at, and the same is true of the mountains—were it not for the air [within them] no rocks could ever break off from them. Now, since we see that rocks can shatter, and that rocks break off of mountains, we know that there is air within them. And within this air is the might and great strength of God. Now, just as the intellect is not made filthy by bodily excrement, or by anything disgusting within it, the same is true of His glory which is in all the world. I could have demonstrated this through the parable of the light of the sun, which is found in the world, but is not made filthy by its filth. But because the light of the sun is not found within rocks, or within many other places in the world where there is air, I did not present this parable [between sunlight and] the light of God.96

Like air (but unlike sunlight), God is omnipresent in the physical world—not identical with nature, but immanent within every part of it. Moreover, Saadia is aware of the necessary corollary to a theory of radical immanence: if God is everywhere and in everything, he must be found even in locations and materials where we would not expect to find Him—including in all manner of physical filth. Far from being threatening to the divine presence, filth and excrement in fact embody it. It is clear from a number of sources that the Pietists absorbed Saadia’s approach and incorporated it into the larger dimensions of their thought. Thus the Shir ha-Yihud (Song of Unity), a liturgical composition possibly authored by a member of Judah’s circle, and at the very least highly valued by him,97 declares:

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You surround everything and fill everything / and since You are everything, You are in everything Nothing is above You, and nothing below You / nothing is outside of You and nothing within You . . . Nothing in the world is distinct from You / and no place is empty of You . . . Nothing exists except Your existence / You are living, and omnipotent, and there is nothing other than You Before everything, You were everything / and when everything exists, You fill everything . . . No filth can make you filthy / and the Consuming Fire cannot be burned by fire . . . For you are always in everything / everything is Yours and everything is from You.98

Both the language and the theology in this hymn are taken verbatim from the writings of Saadia.99 Thus the author of Shir ha-Yihud is explicit about the fact that God is found in everything, even filth, and that the filth in which He inheres poses no threat to His own sanctity—“No filth can make You filthy.” The theological writings of Judah and Eleazar, too, emphasize God’s immanence again and again. “There is not even the width of a needle that is empty of Him,” writes Judah, “in the air as well. He fills up everything.”100 In the same text, Judah follows Saadia in linking God’s infinitude to His immanence: “If one were to ask: Why is God not visible to the eye? If can be answered that anything which is bounded and finite can be seen, because the one seeing it can stand in front of it or behind it. But the holy One, blessed be He, is both in front of and behind those [attempting to] see Him, and within their eyes, and surrounding their eyes—for he is in everything.”101 Judah makes clear, moreover, that he understands the implications of this approach for God’s relationship with filth: “‘For do I not fill up the heavens and the earth?’ (Jer. 23:24) If one were to ask: If this is the case, how can He be in the material world, and in filth, and among adulterers and other sinners? It can be answered that the Holy One, blessed be He, is in everything, and no filthy location or folly clings to him.”102 Indeed, the Pietists find Saadia’s approach so compelling, they are even willing to further develop the parable that he deemed insufficient to his task, namely the comparison of God’s immanent presence to the light of the sun. Both Judah and Eleazar invoke the light of the sun as a “remembrance” of God’s immanence and of His imperviousness to contamination. In his commentary on the prayerbook, Eleazar writes: “God’s glorious presence fills up the entire world . . . and

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filth does not damage Him—for the sun shines on every location, on mud and on dirt, and the filth does not damage it. ‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders’ (Ps. 111:4), for His glory fills the entire world.”103 And elsewhere, he invokes a related parable: “Now if a questioner were to ask: ‘How can I believe that [God] is found in every location . . . ?’ We see that the glass that covers the windows does not block out the heavenly lights, nor does filth make the heavenly lights filthy. Certainly we should believe that nothing interferes with the Creator of everything, nor does any filth or disgustingness harm Him.”104 The Pietists’ panentheism, and their attendant belief that God can be present even in excrement, was not a minor component of their theology. The question of whether God could be found within or harmed by filth was an extremely controversial one during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and, ironically, it was Judah, Eleazar, and their disciples— that is, the writers apparently most preoccupied with bodily filth and excrement—who were most explicit about the inability of that filth to damage the divine! Thus, R. Moshe Taku, for instance, chose the Pietists in particular as the targets of his ire over those who would claim that God could be found even in excrement. Taku believed unequivocally that God could not inhere in physical filth, and was appalled that Judah and others could disagree on the matter: “Heaven forbid that He who is holy in all manners of holiness be in any sort of improper location! Even the radiance of His presence (shekhinato) is not found in such improper locations.”105 Though he never makes the connection explicitly, this was no doubt due to the fact that Taku believed God did (or at least could) indeed have a physical body.106 Such a bounded and finite existence would preclude the possibility of radical immanence, and would thus obviate the need for explaining how God could be present even in excrement and dirt. R. Elhanan b. Yakar of London, a contemporary of Eleazar of Worms, similarly limits the immanence of God to those locales devoid of contaminating filth: “When people say that God’s presence is in every locale, what they mean to say is every pure locale.”107 What we are left with, then, is an explicit, repeated insistence on the irrelevance of physical filth to God, coupled with an almost obsessive focus on keeping excremental filth out of contact with the places where God is thought to be found. Just as scholars have largely neglected the attention to excrement in Sefer Hasidim and other Pietistic writings, they have not satisfactorily explained the abiding tension between the laissez-faire treatment of filth in the Pietists’ professed

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theological beliefs, and their far more restrictive normative and moralistic exhortations.108 At times, the Pietistic authors themselves seem aware of the ambiguity of their approach.109 Their ambivalence is manifested, for example, in the tension between two characteristic yet competing pietistic values: the need to discern retson ha- bore (the will of the Creator), and the exhortation al tehi tsadik harbeh (do not be excessively pious). The former, which the Pietists also refer to as being arum be- yir’ah (clever in one’s fear [of God]), refers to the Pietists’ tendency to pile new, ever-more stringent norms on top of existing biblical and rabbinic legal precedent.110 Sefer Hasidim in particular encourages the pious to “not merely say, ‘I will glorify [God] through what is written in the Torah.’ Rather, even [glorify Him through] things which are not written. If something seems to you as though the Holy one, blessed be He, might have implanted it in your mind, do it for the sake of God’s glory.”111 This encouragement of stringency leads in a predictable direction: Know that this is the case, for R. Judah said in the name of Samuel: “It is permitted to urinate within four ells of your prayer location. . . .”112 Thus we see that this is permissible a priori. Nonetheless, what is written afterwards? R. Zakai’s students asked him: “On account of what have you lived such a long life?” and he said to them: “I never once urinated within four ells of my prayer location.” . . .113 [That is to say], “since I added onto the Torah of my own volition those stringencies that I thought God would appreciate, and did so even though the law did not demand it . . . when God saw that I added more onto my observance than my peers, he extended my lifetime.”

Here the Pietists admit that stringency regarding urination is extrahalakhic, yet admirable. But elsewhere, the Pietists label comparatively fastidious behavior “excessive piety,” and explicitly discourage it: There was once a certain pious man . . . who would wear phylacteries, and would not bend his head when he went before the elders, for he said, “How can I bow down when I am wearing phylacteries.” He also said, “How can I see my wife or speak with her while the Divine Name is upon me.” [Those who were observing him] said, “Since such asceticism is required, it is intolerable for us”— and so they stopped wearing their phylacteries. [The communal leaders] said to that pious man, “You have separated them from performing the commandments through your strictures! [If you are so concerned with protecting the sanctity of your phylacteries], how can you blow your nose while you are wearing them? Rather, ‘the Torah was not given to the angels of the heavens,’114 and moreover, ‘do not be excessively

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pious, not overly clever.’”115 That pious man, moreover, would only kiss his children when he was already happy on account of observing some commandment.116

In this passage, behaviors we would expect the Pietists to praise— avoidance of mucus, limiting contact with one’s filthy children— is in fact condemned as overly zealous. Indeed, this latter example, which is exceedingly rare in comparison with the ever-increasing limitations on contact with excrement, is the one we would expect to predominate based on the Pietists’ conception of divine immanence and incorruptibility. Similar ambiguity is discernable in reference to a related talmudic precedent, namely the notion that ein divrei torah mekablim tum’ah (words of Torah are not susceptible to impurity).117 In one passage, this notion is used to justify a laissez-faire attitude toward excrement coming into contact with sacred writings;118 elsewhere, it is roundly rejected in favor of a far more stringent approach.119 What emerges from all of the above, then, is a seemingly insoluble contradiction. God is found in all matter, and hence is unaffected by filth—yet God must be assiduously protected from filth, and the pious must go to ever more extreme lengths to be certain that God never comes in contact with the very substances by which He cannot be defiled! The Pietists were aware, perhaps, of the contradiction this entailed, but took no steps to resolve it. To be sure, this is far from the only contradiction or inconsistency to be found in Pietistic writings— as noted in the introduction, medieval Ashkenazic modes of religious thought and styles of theological writings are often devoid of precise terminology and systematic exposition.120 What, then, triggered the ambivalent, obsessive outpouring of scatological interest in Sefer Hasidim and other Pietistic texts? How can we account for this confused state of affairs?

Scatology and Eschatology The beginnings of an answer can be found in a number of passages in Sefer Hasidim that deal with bodily effluvia in a manner we have not yet encountered— as relating to eschatology, and particularly to the fate of the human body in the world to come. In a noteworthy discussion early in Sefer Hasidim, Judah invokes excrement in a most surprising context: “Behold, the pleasure experience by the body during intercourse, and at the time of ejaculation, is like the joy and happiness that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in man’s mind and

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body for him to enjoy [in the garden of Eden].”121 Judah is not here saying that semen is holy, nor is he mitigating any of the strict prohibitions he outlines elsewhere in the book. He is, however, invoking excrement as a means of grappling with a fundamental theological issue, namely what the experience of the righteous will be like in the world to come. He can find no better example, it seems, than excretion. Nor is ejaculation the only pleasurable excretory experience. We have noted above how Judah’s disciple Eleazar writes extensively on the Asher yatsar prayer in his commentary on the prayerbook. In the course of that commentary, Eleazar cites approvingly a startling passage from the Babylonian Talmud: “Three things are akin to the world to come, and they are as follows: the Sabbath, sunlight, and ‘service’ (tashmish). Service of what? If it is sexual intercourse (tashmish hamitah, service of the bed)— this is harmful! Rather, it is excretion (tashmish nekavim, exercise of the orifices).”122 Given the depictions of excrement we have encountered thus far, this passage is surprising, to say the least. That the Sabbath and sunlight should offer humanity a taste of the world to come seems unproblematic, even prosaic. After all, rabbinic literature makes frequent comparisons between the day of rest and the afterlife; the Sabbath is in several contexts said to be one-sixtieth of the world to come,123 and the afterlife is often compared to a “day”— one that is “wholly good” and “wholly long.”124 The sun, too, appears as a symbol in descriptions of the wonders of the world to come.125 But the inclusion of “excretion” in the list is far more difficult to understand. What possible connection could there be between tashmish nekavim— urination and defecation— and the reward awaiting the righteous in the next world? One could argue, perhaps, that there is a certain pleasure one gets from relieving one’s self,126 but why would this pleasure be singled out among all the others available to serve as a metaphor? Perhaps on account of these difficulties, not a single Geonic or medieval writer known to me invoked this passage, in any context, prior to Eleazar.127 It is thus noteworthy that Eleazar found the passage appealing enough to cite it.128 While the notion that excrement has a positive valence seems admittedly difficult to square with the positions we have charted above, it is nonetheless telling that excrement is again referenced here in an eschatological context. While the above passages are suggestive, the most explicit and developed discussion of excrement vis-à-vis eschatology comes in an extended homily in Sefer Hasidim, where excrement is recurrently,

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insistently linked with the future resurrection of the dead.129 The passage begins by laying the groundwork for “faith in the resurrection of the dead,” specifically by recounting and explicating the various liturgical references to the doctrine. Thus in the Amidah, the central prayer of the daily liturgy, the second blessing (“Blessed are You, God, who brings the dead to life”) was established in part to prevent anyone from doubting the eventual resurrection, for “one who denies the resurrection of the dead has no share in the world to come.”130 From the Amidah, the homily transitions to the Birkat ha- mazon (the Grace after Meals), focusing in particular on the fourth section, known as ha-tov veha- metiv (the good and beneficent). On its surface, this section recounts God’s beneficence and thanks Him extensively, if somewhat generically, for the good He performs in the world. But Judah suggests that the implicit, underlying “good” referred to in the blessing is the resurrection of the dead— a notion that is nowhere found in the explicit text of the blessing. Thus, “we recite ha-tov veha- metiv following [the blessing on] Jerusalem, for it is in Jerusalem that the dead will come back to life.”131 Judah goes on to cite a well-known talmudic account of the blessing’s origins: “Why was the blessing of ha-tov veha- metiv added to the Grace after Meals? Because the martyrs of Beitar were given over for burial.”132 According to this rabbinic tradition, the fourth blessing was composed in response to the burial of the martyrs of the city of Beitar,133 who were massacred during the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 ce and left unburied for some time by decree of the victorious Romans.134 According to rabbinic tradition, the decomposition of the bodies of those slain was miraculously delayed until they were safely in the ground, thus occasioning the new blessing praising God’s abundant goodness. Having thus linked together God’s goodness, resurrection, corporeal decay, burial, and the consumption of food, the passage arrives at its main argument— that the excretion of food is fundamentally analogous to death and decomposition, and that resurrection is consequently a triumph over excrement: For it is written, “[When I fed them they were satisfied, and] when they were satisfied, they became proud” (Hosea 13:6), “When they eat their fill and thrive [they will turn to other gods and worship them, rejecting me and breaking my covenant]” (Deut. 31:20). Thus [this blessing] was instituted following the Grace after Meals, so that man’s heart will not become exalted when he is satisfied, and [not] think that everything is a ready meal, and that “all the snow is

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white”—for it will become blackened. For man must keep in his heart the fact that he is [now] beautiful, but he will end up a heap of dust (tarvad rakav).135 Behold how much man desires to eat, and afterwards [his food] stinks; so too man lives and dies and stinks. Thus, just as we were commanded to bury excrement, we were commanded to bury [the dead]. . . . A man who has not yet eaten should think that what he will eat will become dirt and stench, and one will be prohibited from uttering words of Torah in proximity to it— the same is true of a dead body.

The linkages in this passage serve, first and foremost, a moralistic purpose: one should never feel haughty or self-satisfied— a feeling likely to set in after a good meal—because he should realize that just as his food will soon reappear in disgusting, rotting form, he too will soon be nothing more than a decaying corpse. The association between excrement and decomposition is heightened by reference to some of the halakhic strictures we have already encountered above— although excrement is not ritually defiling, it must be kept away from sacred words and objects just as a dead body must be. Further, the passage likens the burial of dead bodies to the burial of excrement mandated in Deuteronomy 23. There, Moses instructs the Israelites on how they should comport themselves during times of warfare: When you are encamped against your enemies, keep away from everything impure. If one of your men is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he is to go outside the camp and stay there. But as evening approaches he is to wash himself, and at sunset he may return to the camp. Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.136

The biblical requirement to bury excrement when encamped in the desert seems clearly to be a means to an end—“your camp must be holy,” and thus contact between excrement and God, who “moves about in your camp,” must be prevented. Indeed, no earlier rabbinic or contemporary halakhic sources mandate burial of excrement in contexts other than warfare.137 But the Pietists read this verse as a general injunction, applicable in all contexts, and focused on burial per se— the requirement to bury excrement is identical to the requirement

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to bury the dead, since excrement is analogous to death. Indeed, many of the strictures on excrement that we discussed in detail above do claim that it is not until excrement is buried in the ground that it is fully “neutralized” as a source of potential contamination.138 If semen, mucus, vomit, and so on are sources of impurity because they are fundamentally related to excrement, then perhaps excrement is itself a source of impurity because it is fundamentally related to death. The remainder of the homily emphasizes this very point: “When man is satisfied, he should think, ‘Just as that which I ate becomes stench in my innards, which I need to cover, so too my body will require burial when I die’— and since the martyrs of Beitar did not stink, they decided to establish a blessing on their account. For they differed from other dead people, for they did not stink, and were given over for burial— in order that others remember that on the day of their death, they will stink like excrement. . . . For so long as a dead body is unburied, it is prohibited to utter words of Torah in front of it, and in front of [unburied] excrement as well.”139 Judah goes on to assert that “the food that Adam ate while he was in the Garden of Eden did not become waste; rather it was absorbed within his limbs, like the manna, which was absorbed in the limbs [of the Jews in the desert],140 so that he would not need to relieve himself, nor be distracted from words of Torah.”141 That is, Adam never urinated or defecated in the Garden of Eden— his food was simply absorbed in toto by his body, and fully assimilated into his limbs. Or to put the matter somewhat differently: prior to the sin of Adam and Eve, when death had not yet been introduced into the world,142 there was no such thing as excretion or excrement. Only in a world in which human beings die and decompose does the food that one consumes do likewise. While, as our passage notes, the idea that food can be fully absorbed by the human body does appear in prior rabbinic literature in reference to the manna,143 Sefer Hasidim is the first Jewish source that extends this logic to the Garden of Eden.144 Because it preceded the existence of death and decomposition, then, the Garden of Eden was also free of excrement. But according to medieval Jewish thought, the Garden of Eden was not merely the physical locale where the biblical Adam and Eve lived; it also referred to the Paradise where the righteous would eventually be rewarded for their piety, either at the end of their lives or at the end of days.145 As such, it should come as no surprise that excremental symbolism featured prominently in other Pietistic discussions of eschatology as well. Thus, in the context

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of a discussion of the evils of oath-taking, for instance, Sefer Hasidim explains: “Although it was taught that a wise man can dissolve his oath retroactively,146 nevertheless he is punished for [having taken an oath at all]—for this oath resembles one who dipped himself in excrement, and then washed himself off. . . . Know that this is the case, for R. Joshua b. Levi was not allowed into the Garden of Eden until they examined him,147 and determined that he had no oaths or vows that were in need of dissolution.”148 Just as there was no excrement in the biblical Eden, no one marked by excrement will be allowed into the eschatological Eden. A similar idea is expressed elsewhere in Sefer Hasidim, where an otherwise righteous woman who performed a single sin is depicted as having a single spot of filth on her body in the Garden of Eden.149 The conceptual, eschatological link between bodily remains and excrement also explains the need to distance the former from the latter. Thus: “A certain cemetery was given over to a gentile caretaker, and this gentile planted grass in it, and took stinking manure to use as fertilizer for the soil. The elder objected to this, for the cemetery should only contain things whose smells are pleasant.”150 The notion that the abode of the righteous in the next world smells qualitatively better than does the filthy, manure-like material world appears in a number of other contexts in Sefer Hasidim as well.151 Based on these passages, and particularly on the lengthy, coherent homily cited at length above, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Pietists’ anxiety over excrement was at its root a concern for the integrity of the body. The Pietists equated excrement with death and decomposition, and consequently treated excrement with an anxiety bordering on terror.152 Hence, their conceptions of the afterlife were formulated in explicit opposition to the excremental filth of the material world, and their hopes for an eventual resurrection were rooted in a desire to overcome the seemingly inevitable fragmentation and decay of the human body, of which excretion was a constant reminder. As we have seen in previous chapters, the body’s potential for fragmentation and instability— seen in discussions of aging, of monstrous transformation, and so on—was a major theme in Pietistic theology. Here too, it is not that the supernal afterlife is being contrasted with a negatively valenced physical body; on the contrary, it is precisely because of the sanctity of the human body as a whole that the apparent breakdown of the body via excretion is treated with anxiety and equated with death.

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Their concern with the corruptibility of the human body also impacted upon the ways in which the Pietists conceived of the resurrection body itself. In one passage in Sefer Hasidim, Judah tackles the issue of bodily corruptibility and eschatology head on: The spirit which people call the soul (neshamah)—is it possible if it falls from a high altitude, it will not be harmed, and that if it is [the soul of] a righteous person, it will experience only good and not bad? For the way it lives while still in the body [is that] if a man falls it hurts him, and if he burns himself it hurts him, and if he is hungry he weakens, and if he is thirsty he weakens, and if he sees his beloved ones come to harm he is saddened. For if all these things do not afflict a soul once it has left its house and garment, namely the body . . . why should the righteous person, whose soul is exceedingly happy in the next world, why should he live once again at the resurrection of the dead, and be in his body the way he was prior to his death? If he falls while he is alive it hurts him, and if he is hungry or thirsty he is weakened, and he needs to labor and to sleep, and if his body encounters evil he is pained. If so, it would be preferable that he not live again at the resurrection of the dead! Why should a righteous person live again, if it will be bad for him? Rather, [the answer is that] the body will not experience any evil once the spirit returns to it.153

Citing biblical verses, Judah goes on to explain that the new body will be impervious to fire, drowning, and so on; “all the prior troubles will be completely forgotten.”154 Just as the martyrs of Beitar were miraculously spared the bodily process of decomposition, and just as residents of Eden, past and future, are spared the bodily process of excretion, the resurrected bodies of the righteous are spared any and all bodily indignities. The anxiety over bodily corruptibility leads Judah to a vision of a resurrected person who, though embodied, remains eternal, unchangeable, incorruptible— and, presumably, non- excreting as well. The Pietists, it should be noted, were hardly alone in ruminating on the mechanics and meaning of the resurrection of the dead. Medieval Jews expressed deep-seated ambivalence about the prospects of resurrection altogether. The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in particular witnessed vehement debates over the question of how— and if—bodily resurrection of the dead would take place. Thus, the “first Maimonidean controversy” was devoted to the question of bodily resurrection, with critics of Maimonides like R. Meir ha-Levi Abulafia debating Maimonideans like R. Aaron b. Meshulem of Lunel on the question of whether Maimonides indeed believed in an eventual

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resurrection of the dead.155 Alongside those engaged in debating the intricacies of Maimonides’ position, of course, there were also those who simply deemed the resurrection of the dead to be an absurdity. Sheshet b. Isaac Benveniste, for example, made the following cogent argument in his letter to the sages of Lunel: I ask this fool who believes that the souls will return to the dead corpses and that they are destined to return to the soil of Israel. Into which body will the soul return? If it is to the body from which it has departed, [then this will] already have returned to its elements thousands of years earlier; [it is now] earth, dust, and worms. Where it has been buried, a house has been built, a vineyard planted, or some other plants have taken root and you cannot find the earth or the dust or the worms into which the body has turned. . . . To summarize: Most philosophers who are called metaphysicians say that the intellectual soul—which returns to its creator pure and wise and clean of the impurity of the body, as we have said— this is what lives an eternal life, and reaches the heights of God, and this is the true resurrection of the dead. And if you find among those who pretend to be sages, or among the sages (even our true sages, the Talmudists), those who say that the resurrection of the dead is the return of the soul to the body, and that there is a Garden of Eden in which these physical bodies will dwell, and a Gehenna in which the wicked will burn— know that, in truth, they only said so in order to encourage the fools, who do not know or understand or believe that [the soul] is able to exist without a body . . . in order that they will think that their souls will return to their bodies, and that they will enjoy and benefit from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden . . . if they do not sin. . . . And the true sages, our rabbis, only said that the righteous would be in the Garden of Eden allegorically. . . . For all the words of the prophets are intended as parables and allegories.156

It is reasonable to imagine that to thinkers attuned to the body’s biological processes, and the potential for corruption and instability that they imply, Sheshet’s argument against resurrection would strike a particular chord. The human body decomposes, and disappears— how can it possibly return at some future point, when the matter that used to be a person has since taken up residence in a plant or worm? Again, to a thinker who devalued nature or thought of it as essentially unstable, such questions might not be particularly compelling. But the Pietists, as we have seen, placed great stock in the regularity and order of the natural world as they perceived it. Maimonides’ Epistle on the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he came out explicitly in favor of the doctrine, put the Maimonidean controversy (temporarily) to rest in southern Europe and the Islamic

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East. (Though, significantly, he maintained, unlike the Pietists, that the resurrected body would be a mundane one, and would age and die like any other.)157 But it is reasonable to assume that, in their ruminations over the eschatological fate of the human body, Judah and Eleazar were attuned to the extraordinary ferment over the doctrine of resurrection that took place within their own lifetimes. Indeed, it was not only in Spain, Provence, and the Islamic East that such issues were being explicitly debated. Abulafia’s Kitab al-Rasil came to the rabbinic luminaries of northern France in the late twelfth century, and a variety of early thirteenth- century Jewish thinkers tackled the topic of resurrection in northern Europe as well.158 It is surely noteworthy that the topic of resurrection was being interrogated among the Pietists, on quasi-naturalistic grounds, in precisely the same period in which the Maimonidean controversy over resurrection was in full swing.159 Yet positing that the Pietists were responding, implicitly, to this conflagration is of only limited explanatory benefit, for as we have seen, the Pietists are deeply invested in the symbolic power of excrement in particular, and invoke it repeatedly in their discussions of resurrection, eschatology, and bodily process and corruptibility in general. Excrement did not play a comparable role in the discourse over these questions among Maimonides’ supporters and opponents— as we have seen, Maimonides’ discussion of excrement had altogether different implications for the question of the theological value of the physical human body.160 Thus, while the contemporary ferment over Maimonidean ideas likely played a role in the Pietistic preoccupation with the decay and eventual resurrection of the body, it does not provide us with an explanation as to why they seized on excrement in particular in order to cope with this issue.

Excrement and Resurrection in Medieval Christian Thought A more fruitful approach might be to look for answers closer to home— that is, among the twelfth- and thirteenth- century Christian thinkers who lived in close physical proximity to the Pietists, and with whom they interacted regularly. Medieval Christian theologians’ interest in human embodiment resulted in an intense preoccupation with the breakdown of the body in death, and the prospects for its eventual resurrection. These concerns about the process and dynamics of physical change—“a mutability seen as a dark threat to survival

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and identity,”161 what the Pietists called shinui—manifested themselves particularly in scientific-theological analyses of the process of digestion and of its terminus, excretion. The change involved in eating was twofold: in the processes of digestion, food was understood to be somehow augmenting the body, thus changing it; in excretion, food itself was transformed into excrement. In a period during which contemporary science could not adequately account for the workings of the digestive system,162 nutrition and consumption were perplexing, and even threatening, precisely because they suggested that the human body was not stable, and that human identity itself was thus indeterminate. “‘How can any embryo grow into a child, or any child into an adult,’ medieval thinkers wondered, ‘without taking in so much food that it becomes roast pig or bread instead of human nature?’”163 In the explicitly theological realm, of course, these anxieties shaped the ways in which clergymen and the laity alike related to the Eucharist. That the bread and wine of the sacrament could transform into flesh and blood was troubling enough;164 that both of the latter were themselves transformed into excrement within the human body— that is, that they were coopted by the threatening process of digestion—was all the more problematic. Indeed, adherents of the so- called “stercoran heresy” were accused of denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist precisely because of their concerns over Christ’s body and blood becoming excrement.165 Moreover, digestion and excretion were often linked to death and decay— and to sin. Martha Bayless has recently called attention to a “popular medieval metaphysics” according to which excrement was “both the emblem and the actual embodiment of the sin that made that flesh impure and corrupt.”166 In this view, “excrement did not just mean sin; in medieval thought, it was sin, the material embodiment of corporeal corruptibility.”167 This correlation between death and excretion led many Christian theologians to question whether Christ himself could possibly have excreted while on earth; some early Christians, for instance, denied altogether that Christ excreted while incarnated in a human body.168 Other sources admitted that Christ was fully human (even in his digestive system), but sought to minimize the attendant shame of his having excreted; one set of scholastic quaestiones, for example, grudgingly admitted that Christ had to put aside “whatever [he had] from exterior food . . . in the twinkling of an eye.”169 Caroline Bynum has argued that medieval female

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mystics in particular harnessed the interrelationship between change, digestion, and sin for their own spiritual ends; transcending excretion, particularly menstruation and defecation, and living on no food other than the Eucharist were apprehended as triumphs over physiological process, and hence over death.170 This general preoccupation with bodily change, and particularly with digestion, shaped the ways in which many medieval theologians conceived of eschatology. Peter Lombard, whose Sentences became the scholastic textbook par excellence, is a representative example. Lombard discussed the scientific problem of digestion specifically in the context of “Last Things.” The human body, he argued, will be resurrected containing every particle it contained while living—including things like hair and fingernails that were apparently long ago shed. This concern that the resurrected body be intact and immutable leads him to further posit— in the context of his discussion of the Garden of Eden— that the resurrected body will not include anything derived from food, which only apparently expands and augments the human body: “Materially and causally, not formally, everything is said to have been in the first man which is naturally in human bodies; and it descends from the first parent by the law of propagation; in itself it is enlarged and multiplied with no substance from the exterior going over into it; and the same will rise in the future. Indeed, it has help from foods, but foods are not converted into human substance.”171 The essentially stable, materially continuous human body, that is, comprises the core of human identity, and it alone will rise at the resurrection. Food is an extraneous, albeit necessary, part of life on earth, which does not impact the composition of the human body in any fundamental way. Thomas Aquinas reached similar conclusions in his own commentary on the Sentences, where he considers whether excrement will be resurrected along with the human body that generated it: “None of these kinds of [bodily fluids] will rise again, because they are not part of the perfection of the individual rising again.”172 The Garden of Eden was frequently invoked in these conversations as well. Since sin and excrement were conceptually linked, an array of theologians sought to determine whether Adam excreted in Paradise prior to the Fall and the advent of original sin (and hence death). Medieval Christian thinkers debated this question intensively, and the most popular resulting approach seems to have been a compromise. Thus, though Aquinas admitted that Adam would have needed to purge his body of food’s residue, he asserted that such purgation was

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accomplished “not indecently”; Bonaventure, in his commentary on the Sentences, agreed that Edenic excretion had been unavoidable, but was not attended by “such a stench and filthiness, as happens nowadays.”173 By the later Middle Ages, this continued preoccupation was discernable in the writings of the fourteenth- century Spanish Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis, who argued that absent original sin, “even though man would still have to empty his bowels through the natural opening, it would not stink nor would it have that shamefulness.”174 Martin Luther would further popularize this approach: “The conversion of food in [Adam’s] body would have taken place, but not in such a disgusting manner as now.”175 Of course, the optimal solution for scholastics concerned about the resurrected human body would simply have been to distinguish between man’s spiritual and physical components and assert the primacy of the former. But this solution was viewed with hostility by the majority of medieval Christian theologians. Indeed, those who claimed, like Origen in late antiquity, or John Scotus Eriugena during the Carolingian Renaissance, that the resurrected body would be spiritual rather than material were suspected of heresy or, in Origen’s case, condemned outright.176 Christian theologians were thus in the awkward position of on the one hand valuing man’s physical body, and hence insisting on the absolute material identity of living and resurrected bodies, while on the other hand attempting to distance themselves from those biological processes, primarily digestion, that reflected the material body’s inherent flux and instability. This concern for biological process, particularly digestion, and the preoccupation with the implications of the latter for human bodily stability, was at the root of the symbols medieval Christians used for the fate of the body after death. Excrement featured especially prominently in this regard. Resurrection, for one, was frequently described as the ground vomiting forth resurrected bodies, intact and immutable— the bodies of the righteous were understood to be fundamentally indigestible.177 While they may appear empirically to rot and disappear, at the resurrection it will prove clear that the earth could not assimilate the righteous, and thus vomited them forth whole. These same thinkers correspondingly conceived of the resurrected body as being impervious to change. In the aftermath of Peter Lombard’s discussions of the resurrected body, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, and others went on to maintain that the resurrected human body would not excrete; that the human feces and semen produced throughout

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one’s life would not be reunited with the resurrected body, unlike, say, one’s hair or fingernails; and so on.178 The body of the sinner, inversely, underwent a process of utter digestion. Artistic and literary descriptions of Hell were suffused with excremental and scatological symbolism— hence the “mouth of Hell” consumes the bodies of the sinners, which are then imagined to be digested and literally excreted from the bodies of the devils populating the realm of eternal punishment. The body of the sinner became excremental filth, just as the bodies of the righteous were assiduously guarded from it.179 As such, scatological depictions of the torments of Hell were a commonplace in both learned and vernacular accounts of the afterlife. The Middle English Sawles Warde (The Custody of the Soul) describes Hell as populated with “dragons with tails, as dreadful as devils, which swallow [souls] whole and vomit them out again before and behind.”180 Dante’s Inferno describes some sinners as plunged up to their necks in excrement, and others who “are ripped right from his chin to where we fart; how bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable sack that makes of what we swallow excrement.”181 A common trope in medieval exempla was a story of the Devil appearing in a latrine— an appropriate locale, given the recurrent equation of Hell with feces.182 Caesarius of Heisterbach— to whose stories and exempla the Pietists were likely exposed183 — describes priests who took ill and contemplated suicide after encountering Satan in the privy.184 Caesarius even argued that demons can inhabit people by literally taking up residence in their bowels, where the presence of excrement makes them feel welcome.185 Not only does Hell “digest” sinners, then, but the digestive tract can itself become a miniature Hell, populated by demons and afflicted by “irritable bowel syndrome” avant la lettre. This conception of scatological eschatology can be seen in visual form in any number of medieval Christian artistic depictions of Hell and its torments, including those produced in close proximity to medieval Ashkenazic population centers. Thus the Hortus deliciarum, a twelfth- century illuminated encyclopedia produced at the Alsatian Hohenburg Abbey, depicts Hell as almost a digestive tract, in which the bodies of the sinners are sequentially cooked by demons, consumed by the throne of Satan, and then defecated back out by the Devil himself (Figure 9).186 The “mouth of Hell” motif was a common one in medieval visual culture, and appeared in manuscript

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illuminations, stained glass windows, and church exteriors throughout medieval Franco- Germany (Figure 10). The theoretical linkage between digestion/excrement and eschatology informed the moralistic literature of Christian communities as well as their theology. Thus the thirteenth- century Middle English Ancrene Wisse, for example, links bodily filth with the inevitability of corporeal decay: “In the middle of the glory of your face, which is your most beautiful part, between the mouth’s taste and the nose’s smell, do you not bear two toilet holes, as it were? Are you not come of foul slime, are you not a vat of filth, will you not be worm’s food?”187 Excrement reminds one of his eventual fate as worm food— that is, excretion is essentially decomposition and a prelude to death. Harangues of this sort were especially characteristic of works in the contemptus mundi tradition that flourished in the later Middle Ages.188 With this theological backdrop in mind, the specific elements of Pietistic thought described above appear in a different light. After all, many of the concerns, and even the specific images, that animated Christian eschatological discourse are emphasized in Pietistic writings as well. Thus anxiety over the process of digestion and its implications for bodily stability are addressed in both the Sentences and in Sefer Hasidim—in both instances, in the context of discussions of the Garden of Eden. While Peter Lombard’s conclusion (that food is fundamentally inassimilable into the human body) differs from Judah’s (that the manna and the fruits of Eden were completely absorbed), the context of each discussion suggests that their underlying concerns were identical. So, too, were the parallel concerns regarding Adam’s excretory habits, scatological depictions of suffering in Hell, and equation of bodily integrity with imperviousness to digestion. All of these attest to a common theological mentalite, which each community addressed using a common store of potent (and pungent) symbols.

The Polemical Meaning of Resurrection and Rot Indeed, there is reason to believe that Jews and Christians were not only familiar with one another’s internal excremental discourses but, to a certain extent, developed them in tandem. For scatology figures prominently in both Jewish anti- Christian and Christian anti-Jewish polemic; in both cases, the fundamental issues of bodily integrity,

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Figure 9. Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum fol. 255 r (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Facs. fol. 8, xi, plate 20)

corruption, and salvation were directly in the background. Attention to this polemical dimension allows us not only to detect similar underlying conceptions of human embodiment, but also to reconstruct the shared social sphere in which those very conceptions were being developed and mobilized.189

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Figure 10. Bourges Cathedral, Ambulatory, Last Judgment Window

Of course, competing conceptions of the human body were central to Jewish- Christian polemics as a whole. Ever since Paul, the Jews had been negatively associated with corporeality— the Jews were “Carnal Israel,” while the Christians were verus Israel, the true Israel, the Israel of the spirit.190 Subsequent disagreements over the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, or the Crucifixion were essentially debates about the nature, potentialities, and limitations of human physicality.191 And Jews, moreover, “were accused of such violent corporeal crimes as ritual-murder, host desecration, and well poisoning— all of which were thought to threaten Christian bodies at the same time that they expressed a certain monstrous Jewish bodiliness.”192 In a variety of polemical sources, these broad differences are frequently expressed through the specific symbol of excrement. Indeed, the association between Christ and human waste finds expression in

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some of the earliest Jewish criticisms of Christianity. Thus the Talmud, for example, claims that Jesus’ fate in the afterlife is to suffer eternally in a vat of boiling excrement.193 But Jewish scatological polemic came into its own in the Middle Ages. Let us consider, for instance, Sefer Nitsahon Yashan— a text that was composed in roughly the same period and setting in which the Pietists flourished.194 In one passage, R. Kalonymus of Speyer (a member of the Kalonymide family that included both Judah the Pious and Eleazar) is cited as explaining to a “King Henry” the superiority of the Temple in comparison to a church recently built in Speyer. As he explains: “Regarding the time when Solomon completed the [Temple], see what is written: ‘And the priests were unable to stand and minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord’ (I Kings 8:11). In this case, however, if one were to load a donkey with vomit and filth and lead him through the church, he would remain unharmed.”195 Here, excrement is invoked with no apparent theological agenda— this passage comes across as a punch line delivered by Kalonymus, with King Henry, who initiates the dialogue, playing the role of straight man. This is not the case, however, in another passage from the same work: With your gear you should have a spike [and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement] (Deut. 23:14). There are priests who ask: Why don’t you observe this now? The answer is: First of all, this proves that even men of flesh and blood are commanded to be clean. This would certainly be true of God; so how can you say that Jesus was both flesh and blood and God? Moreover, you don’t know the proper explanation, for this spike was a requirement only in time of war. . . . Another interpretation: “You shall have a spike” ready to hang him, i.e., to hang Jesus, “and then cover up your excrement,” because he was a filthy sinner who wanted to cause you to sin. Indeed, they admit that the cross originally had but three corners, like this: T. It was on such a cross, which resembles a spike, that they hanged him, until a passerby took pity on him when he saw that his head had no support and added a fourth corner behind his head.196

This passage indicates that Jews were well aware of Christian anxieties over the “cleanliness” of the incarnate Christ— a reference, presumably, to the fact that he excreted while he was living as a man on earth. As we have noted above, this was a presumption that was shared, grudgingly, by some Christian theologians as well. The polemical association between Jesus and excrement is continued in the latter half of the Sefer Nitsahon Yashan passage, which explicitly

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equates Jesus with excrement, and the cross with the spike with which Jews are commanded to bury their feces. A similar passage in the same work further links Jesus with filth, this time by reference to his mother. The biblical Israelites, argues the author of this passage, were condemned for having worshipped a physically clean idol, namely the Golden Calf: “Certainly, then, you who err in saying that something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place—for there is nothing in the world as disgusting as a woman’s stomach, which is full of feces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as the receptacle for man’s semen—you will certainly be consumed by ‘a fire not blown’ (Job 20:26) and descend to deepest hell.”197 Here again, Jesus, in this case with his mother, is denied divine status precisely because of intimate contact with physical excremental filth. It is impossible for the author of this passage to countenance a God who could spend time in a woman’s belly among feces, urine, and semen. Indeed, we see here yet again the perceived connection between digestion and punishment in the world to come. Christians, who believe in an excremental God, that is, a God whose body is subject to fragmentation and decomposition, are themselves condemned to “deepest hell”— the paradigmatic site of digestion and excretion. Sefer Nitsahon Yashan was explicitly intended as a guide to debating with Christians, and so it seems safe to assume that contemporary Christians would have been familiar with Jewish lines of scatological argumentation. And indeed, much of the excremental discourse in Christian polemical texts comes in response to Jewish charges, real or imagined. In his 1240 debate with R. Yehiel of Paris, for instance, the apostate Nicholas Donin repeatedly cited the passage in BT Gittin that asserts that Jesus is suffering in Hell in a vat of boiling excrement.198 In his disputation with “Leo the Jew,” Odo of Cambrai is similarly perturbed by Leo’s charge that Christ would have been contaminated by the filth of the physical world—like that found in Mary’s womb— and invokes a familiar metaphor as evidence. Just as sunlight is not contaminated by any filth with which it comes in contact, he argues, Christ, who can be analogized to a ray of light, is impervious to excremental filth.199 This metaphor, as we saw above, recurs frequently in Pietistic writings as well. That both Jewish theologians and Christian polemicists invoked this line of argument lends credence to the supposition that polemical exchange could indeed lead to theological influence; or that, at the very least, the issues that troubled

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medieval Christians were the same as those troubling contemporary Jews. The Benedictine abbot Guibert of Nogent responded to similar accusations in his Tractatus de Incarnatione contra Judaeos: “Ask, most shameful and wicked one, about our Lord: if he spat, if he wiped his nose, if he picked the discharge from his eyes or ears with his fingers; and understand with what honor he did these things above, and carries out all the other things. Or tell me, that man of yours, that God who appeared to Abraham— the things he ate: in what gut did he deposit them? How also, if the functions continued—what happened next (quod consequens fuit)?”200 The question of “what happened next” was so galling to Guibert that he apparently could not even bring himself to articulate it explicitly. Excremental rhetoric appears in literary and historical writings in addition to overtly polemical tracts. Matthew of Paris, for instance, recounts how “Abraham,” a rich Jew, bought “a nicely carved and painted statue of the blessed Virgin, as usual nursing her son at her bosom,” which he then “set up in his latrine and, what is thoroughly dishonorable and ignominious to mention, as it were in blasphemy of the blessed Virgin, he inflicted a most filthy and unmentionable thing on it, daily and nightly, and ordered his wife to do the same.”201 The blood libel and host desecration accounts that flourished from the thirteenth century onward frequently included similar contents. Thus, Miri Rubin has highlighted how tales of Marian devotion frequently featured Jews throwing consecrated hosts into latrines.202 Susan Signe Morrison, 203 Steven S. Kruger, 204 and others have similarly highlighted the same narrative move in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” in which a murdered Christian child is thrown into “a cesspool . . . wherein these Jews did empty their entrails.” Martha Bayless has traced the wide diffusion of yet another story equating the Jews with excremental filth— one that was so prominent that it became known to Jews as well, and was eventually recorded in early modern Jewish historical writings.205 In this tale, a Jew fell into a sewer or latrine on Saturday but refused to be extracted by the Christian onlookers, lest he violate the Sabbath in the process. When the Jew then requested to be helped out of the sewer on Sunday, his Christian neighbors declined to do so, since Sunday was their Sabbath. The story often ends by cheerfully observing that by Monday, the Jew was dead. In recent years, numerous scholars have attempted to account for the excremental language and themes employed in these examples. Thus Rubin, drawing on the work of Anna Sapir Abulafia, 206 Lester

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K. Little, 207 Gavin Langmuir, 208 and others, has argued convincingly that the Marian narrative choice of a privy is related to Christian anxieties over the logic of transubstantiation, and over the inevitable excretion of the Eucharist by those taking the sacrament. 209 This approach, which looks within Christian theology for an explanation of increasingly virulent antisemitism in the high Middle Ages, has much to recommend it. But the Christian awareness of the parallel excremental arguments being made by contemporary Jews has the potential to cast matters in a new light. For a Christian encountering the claims of Sefer Nitsahon Yashan or Tractate Gittin, it might not have been unreasonable to imagine, as Matthew of Paris or Chaucer did, a Jew who would expose Christian sacred objects to feces or urine if given the chance. Indeed, Sefer Hasidim itself explicitly assures us that the “excremental libel” was not solely imposed from without. In a number of passages, Judah discusses the impropriety of urinating or defecating on the holy objects of heretical religious groups. Thus, he cautions, “Do not think, ‘I shall degrade this foreign worship,’ and urinate or defecate on it, since they used to worship Pe’or in this manner.”210 Based on the context of this passage, it is clear that the “foreign worship” in question is Christian— probably a cross or a church. Judah’s readership is thus warned not to degrade Christian sacred objects with excrement— suggesting that Judah’s readers might well have done so given the chance. This passage lends further credence to several recent studies that have argued that the anti-Jewish “excremental libel”211 was not solely an imagined Christian construct. 212 This warning against degrading a competing religious groups’ holy objects would seem to be almost conciliatory, were it not for the reason given—“they used to worship Pe’or in this manner.” Judah here refers to a talmudic description of the biblical cult of Ba’al Pe’or. In Tractate Sanhedrin, the Talmud narrates: R. Judah said in the name of Rav: A certain gentile woman was very sick, and said, “If I am cured of my illness, I will go and worship every foreign cult in the world.” She was cured, and worshipped every foreign cult in the world. When she reached Pe’or, she asked the priests, “How is this one worshipped?” They said to her, “One eats spinach, and drinks beer, and squirts diarrhea before [the idol].” She said, “Better that I return to my illness rather than worship this in such a manner.” . . . The rabbis taught: [A certain Jew] once rented his donkey to a certain gentile woman, and when they passed Pe’or, she said to him, “Wait for me while I enter and exit.” After she exited he said to her,

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“You, too, wait while I enter and exit.” She said to him, “Are you not a Jew?” He said to her, “What difference does it make to you?” He entered, uncovered himself before [the idol], and wiped himself on its nose. The priests praised him, and said, “No one has ever worshipped this that way!” One who uncovers himself before Ba’al Pe’or— this is its mode of worship, even though he intends to disgrace it. 213

There is doubtlessly an element of scatological humor in this passage— though it may also manifest an awareness among late antique Jews that excrement can have an array of competing valences (sacred or disgraceful), which can differ relative to one’s perspective. For our purposes, however, it is significant that Sefer Hasidim cautions Jews against defecating on churches based on this logic. While Judah must have known that Christians did not worship Christ by defecating before him, the link between excrement and Christianity was sufficiently strong to prohibit urinating or defecating on their sacred objects, even if the intention was to defile them. We can be certain of this interpretation, moreover, because elsewhere Judah cautions Jews not to defecate on Karaite synagogues based on an altogether different logic: “They only pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, so you should not act in a disgraceful manner toward them.”214 Were there a generic prohibition against excreting on sacred objects, based on the original precedent of Ba’al Pe’or, Judah would certainly have phrased the two passages in a similar manner; the fact that the prohibition on defecating differs when the target is Karaite from when it is Christian reinforces the fact that in the mind of Judah the Pious, as in Sefer Nitsahon Yashan and myriad other Jewish polemics, there was a perceived special link between Christianity and excrement. In her comprehensive study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic polemical literature, Alexandra Cuffel has argued that scatological passages such as these are fundamentally gendered: that they reflect contemporary attitudes toward women, and see filth as being fundamentally related toward the feminine. Moreover, she argues that the disgust this discourse is meant to generate was aimed primarily at social ends: “Insinuating that the other was morally and physically filthy served two functions. Fist, it fostered a sense of community solidarity based on hatred. Second, it set up barriers against interfaith intimacy on any level.”215 This reading, which draws on Mary Douglas’s work on dirt and boundary maintenance, is undoubtedly true. But the excremental discourse we have traced through Pietistic writings allows us

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to add new dimensions to Cuffel’s reading of these passages. On the one hand, scatology is not solely related to women—in Sefer Hasidim, defecating is a gender-neutral activity, and while some polemical passages in Sefer Nitsahon Yashan and elsewhere link feces and urine with menstruation and pregnancy, many others connect them to semen and male physiology. Similarly, the account of Matthew of Paris, along with the many others like it, belies the notion that excrement is always invoked in gendered contexts; for Matthew, it is clearly the proximity of the Virgin to excrement that is objectionable, regardless of whether it is excreted by Abraham or his wife. 216 On the other hand, it seems reasonable to conclude based on the above that the scatological contents in polemical literature were not solely intended as social dividers. Rather, there is a cogent theology behind these passages, one that sees divinity and bodily corruptibility as inherently irreconcilable— the very same theology that, as we have seen, informed both Pietistic and contemporary Christian understandings of resurrection and eschatology.

“This Is the Window Through Which Excrement Is Removed” More than 800 years after the deaths of both Maimonides and Judah the Pious, the relationship between the Hebrew language and excrement was once again at issue, thanks to an unexpected discovery that serves as a fitting coda to the argument of this chapter. In late 2011, archaeologists excavating the medieval Jewish quarter of Cologne happened upon a unique and initially puzzling finding. A team led by then-director Sven Schütte discovered an engraved lintel in the cellar of the “Lyvermann Haus,” a dwelling dating to ca. 1266 that was built by a wealthy Jewish family. The lintel topped a sealed- off opening in the cellar wall and contained the following inscription, in Hebrew: “This is the window through which excrement is removed” (Figure 11). Behind the opening was a cesspit, six meters deep. In an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, Schütte later described his bemusement at his team’s discovery: “It is a very amusing story, it is our attraction. . . . At first we thought it was an important religious or rabbinic inscription, and so we were surprised when we were told that it says ‘excrement’ there. . . . We assumed that next to the synagogue there would be only serious things.” As opposed to the more solemn gravestones and synagogue ruins that he had found

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Figure 11. Inscribed window lintel, twelfth century, Cologne (Jüdisches Museum, Köln)

elsewhere in the Cologne excavations, Schütte characterized the lintel inscription dismissively as “a Jewish joke.” After all, “the wealthy householders did not need to write instructions in Hebrew for their Christian workers, who cleared away the trash.”217 The seemingly self- evident assumption that cesspits were not “serious things” for medieval Jews, that there exists an opposition between the word “excrement” on the one hand and “important religious or rabbinic inscription[s]” on the other, is typical of a neo-Maimonidean approach, in which excrement is insignificant, disgusting, and shameful but in no way meaningful. But the Lyvermann family might have begged to differ. For after further research, it emerged that the location of the cesspit opening in the house’s cellar was itself the result of a compromise with the local communal authorities. Typically, a cesspit would be periodically opened and emptied from above, through an opening in the ground. But because the Lyvermann house bordered on the courtyard of the Cologne synagogue, opening the cesspit from above would have resulted in the excrement being transported through the synagogue property itself— an indignity that the communal authorities were apparently unwilling to countenance.218 In this, they were faithfully observing the strictures imposed in texts like

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Sefer Hasidim, which, as we have seen, obsessively sought to maintain a safe distance between sacred spaces and physical effluvia. The need to find a work-around for the Lyvermann family’s excrement was far from a joking matter— in the eyes of the rabbinic authorities of medieval Ashkenaz, nothing could be more serious. This chapter has argued that the Pietistic obsession with human waste can tell us something about the broader theological issues with which they were concerned. The Pietists’ privileging of the human body as a meaningful theological construct led them to be especially concerned about what happens to that body when it dies and apparently decomposes. Medieval Jewish and Christian concerns about decomposition, resurrection, and the afterlife— and the symbolism of excrement in relation to each—mirrored and played off one another, and, in the case of the Pietists, led to increasingly strict standards of behavior. For the Pietists, as for their Christian contemporaries, the body was not characterized by filthy excrement—rather, the former was contrasted with the latter. And it was precisely because of the central, positively valued role of the human body in Pietistic thought that physical instability and decomposition was treated with such apprehension.

Conclusion

This book has argued that the German Pietists saw the natural world, and particularly the human body, as infused with theological meaning, and that they subjected both nature and the body to empirical and theoretical study in their pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. The Pietists’ were undoubtedly preoccupied by magic, monstrosity, and occult and inexplicable phenomena—but this recurring interest in the apparently supernatural does not reflect Pietistic disdain for nature, as previous scholars have claimed. Rather, the Pietists ruminated extensively on these phenomena precisely because the construct of a meaningful, stable natural order was so central to their theological worldview. In doing so, moreover, they proved themselves to be active participants in the broader culture that they inhabited. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern European thinkers were preoccupied by the natural world and its theological meaning, and sought to uncover the latter not only through study of Aristotelian “natural philosophy,” but also through exploration of wonders of nature, natural magic, occult properties, and the fantastic animals, plants, and stones they discovered in works of natural history. The German Pietists were exposed to these discourses through varied means of transmission— discussions with Christian “philosophers,” confrontational encounters with Christian preachers and polemicists, day-to-day contacts with Christian symbolism and artwork, and possibly even direct exposure to Christian texts in either Latin or the vernacular. In arguing that the Pietistic theology of nature mirrored, and drew upon, contemporary Christian intellectual and theological 205

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developments, this book thus adds to an already robust scholarship demonstrating that medieval Ashkenazic Jewry interacted with and was shaped by the Christian culture within which it was embedded. But while that existing scholarship has dealt primarily with social norms, ritual practices, and religious ideals, this book has focused on the spheres of Jewish and Christian theology per se— a realm that has mostly remained governed by “internalist” paradigms and assumptions. In both their exoteric and esoteric writings, the Pietists stake out theological positions that closely mirror those of their Christian contemporaries— indicating that the Pietists crafted and reshaped their own beliefs and ideals in light of the intellectual developments of high medieval Europe, and in (sometimes polemical) dialogue with their neighbors. Attention to the synchronic setting in which the Pietists flourished, however, must not lead us to ignore the diachronic tradition to which they were heirs. As this book has shown, the Pietists selectively read and creatively adapted an array of prior Jewish “nature writings”: late antique and early medieval texts like Sefer Yetsirah, Sefer Refu’ot, and other works on ma’aseh bereishit; scientific and philosophical writings by Shabbatai Donnolo, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Saadia Gaon; and so on. Far from blindly copying from these works, the Pietists responded to an array of triggers that led them to seek out the specific works and subjects that appealed to their particular interests. As such, this book challenges the regnant truism that Ashkenazic Jews, lacking knowledge of Aristotelian science or Maimonidean philosophy, were therefore oblivious, if not hostile, to exploration of the natural world. Although the Pietists’ approach to the investigation of nature had little in common with the Aristotelianism of Maimonides or Gersonides, it adopted and adapted existing trends of Jewish science and philosophy and recombined them in creative ways with the paradoxography, naturalism, and neoplatonism that were flourishing in contemporary northern Europe. As I noted at the outset, the German Pietists serve as a case study of broader medieval Ashkenazic conceptions of the natural world and exposure to contemporary Christian thought. This book has noted numerous instances of overlap between the writings of the Kalonymides and those of contemporaneous Ashkenazic authors, including the theologian Moses Taku; esotericists like Nehemiah b. Solomon of Erfurt, Elhanan b. Yakar of London, and other members of the “Unique Cherub Circle;”1 and understudied figures like Solomon

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Simhah of Troyes, author of the still-unpublished Sefer ha-Maskil, 2 and the anonymous author of Sefer ha- Hayyim.3 Scholars’ continuing attempts to reconstruct the beliefs of these figures and to map the sources they utilized can be further aided by analyzing their heretofore neglected writings on the natural world in the manner modeled by the present book. But recognition of the pervasiveness of Ashkenazic engagement with the natural world also promises to illuminate new facets of Ashkenazic halakhic and exegetical texts, which survive in far greater numbers than do overtly theological or naturalistic ones. Once we are attuned to them, we are likely to find relevant discussions of the natural world in works of this sort as well. For instance, Ashkenazic piyyut commentary, an enormous corpus that remains predominantly unpublished and understudied, contains potentially relevant material that has only recently merited in-depth investigation.4 As more texts of this sort are identified and analyzed, potential linkages with the ideas and beliefs discussed in this book can be further explored.

The Reception History of “Peripheral” Texts Of course, this book’s claim that medieval Ashkenazic thinkers engaged with the natural world through a non-Aristotelian lens should not obscure the experiences of medieval Jewish scientists who did have access to rationalistic “Greek wisdom.”5 For instance, Norman Golb, Tamas Visi and others have recently reopened the important question of whether and how Ashkenazic culture consumed the writings of figures like Abraham Ibn Ezra and Berakhiah b. Natronai haNakdan—both of whom lived and wrote in twelfth- century northern France.6 By and large, these figures have been deemed “peripheral” to the main currents of Ashkenazic culture; as David Berger has put it, “exceptions remain exceptions, allusions remain allusions . . . and the reading of a few books does not necessarily alter entrenched modes of thought.”7 And indeed, while Eleazar of Worms evinces some knowledge of Ibn Ezra’s writings (as does the anonymous author of Sefer ha- Hayyim), scholars have yet to identify any subsequent Ashkenazic engagement with the scientific and philosophical works of Berakhiah, such as Musar Haskel (a compilation of excerpts from Sephardic philosophical and moralistic treatises) and Dodi ve-Nekhdi (a Hebrew paraphrase of Adelard of Bath’s dialogical Quaestiones naturales).8 The latter work in particular was intended by Berakhiah to distill

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contemporary Christian science for a Jewish audience, and introduce Ashkenazic Jews to “a new, naturalistic worldview in which God governs the universe through nature.”9 To all appearances, this ambitious project was unsuccessful— other than a few surviving manuscripts of Dodi ve-Nekhdi itself, scholars have not identified a single citation of or engagement with Berakhiah’s work in subsequent Ashkenazic sources.10 But the widespread interest in cosmology, physiology, and the boundaries of the natural world that this book has reconstructed should give us pause before dismissing Ibn Ezra’s and Berakhiah’s scientific interests as “peripheral.” Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that these authors’ works were consumed more widely than scholars have heretofore realized. An example of such engagement can be found in Sefer Kushiyot (The Book of Queries), a work compiled in late thirteenth- or early fourteenth- century Germany that records a succession of brief questions and answers on an eclectic array of halakhic, exegetical, and moralistic topics.11 The book’s 392 pairs of questions and answers are arranged atomistically, listed in seemingly haphazard order, without segues or internal cross-referencing. The broad and unstructured nature of Sefer Kushiyot makes it a useful lens onto the kinds of topics and issues that were of interest to at least some rabbinically educated Jews in the high Middle Ages. Precisely because of its lack of coherent organization, the book highlights which questions and concerns were on the mind of an author who could have chosen to ask literally anything. Most of Sefer Kushiyot consists of straightforward queries about the details of Jewish practice— such as “Why do first-born sons fast on the eve of Passover?”12 or “Why do we read from the Torah [in synagogue] three times per week?”13 But interspersed among these conventional topics are numerous questions focused on the workings of the natural world: “Why does wood float upon the water, while stones sink underneath the water?”14 “Where does human sight come from, since the [pupil of the] eye is dark?”15 In the course of answering these questions, the compiler demonstrates wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary scientific and medical principles. In a detailed discussion of uroscopy, for instance, the author ably describes the four temperaments of Hippocratic medicine, interspersing technical terms in German and Latin.16 And while the compiler of Sefer Kushiyot does not cite his sources, certain passages in the text clearly draw upon, and even cite verbatim from, Berakhiah’s Dodi ve- Nekhdi. This

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dependence is apparent in parallel discussions of botany,17 of optics,18 and of zoology.19 In some of these parallel passages, the compiler of Sefer Kushiyot seems not to have fully grasped all of the details of Berakhiah’s (and Adelard’s) explanations. But the very fact that he was exposed to Berakhiah’s text, and cited it in a work that circulated within Ashkenazic culture, 20 belies the notion that Berakhiah’s efforts were consigned to oblivion from the outset. That these excerpts from Dodi ve-Nekhdi were integrated into Sefer Kushiyot’s predominantly halakhic and exegetical framework also suggests that such scientific contents were not seen as categorically distinct in the minds of the author and his audience, but rather were “domesticated” by the genre and context in which they are invoked. Also noteworthy is the fact that Sefer Kushiyot evinces wide familiarity with Pietistic materials— and hence that the reception history of Berakhiah’s work intersected at times with that of Pietistic thought. 21 Indeed, in at least one instance, the transmission of scientific knowledge from Berakhiah’s Dodi ve- Nekhdi to Sefer Kushiyot may have been mediated by a Pietistic text. Dodi ve- Nekhdi contains the following meteorological discussion of the origins of thunder: “Where does thunder come from? . . . I have heard that the rains that are in the upper firmament, above the firmament containing the earth’s atmosphere, when great heat is generated and the lower firmament is warmed by the heat, and the rain flows onto [this lower firmament] from the one above it, it makes a tokh tokh [noise], just as iron that is being heated by fire, when water is sprinkled on it, it makes a tokh tokh [noise]. Know that this is true, for one never sees such noises in the wintertime, only in the summertime, and [even then] only after great heat, and during rainy times.”22 In this scheme, thunder is the sound that rain makes when it strikes the heated “lower firmament” containing earth’s atmosphere. This can be proven empirically, since water that is sprinkled on hot iron makes the same tokh tokh noise as thunder, and also logically, since thunder only occurs when the weather is hot and rainy. A nearly identical passage appears in Sefer Kushiyot, in response to the question, “What is the sound of donnerin?”23 Aside from utilizing the German word for thunder (Donnern) in place of the Hebrew one (re’em), the remainder of the passage is a verbatim citation, down to the tokh tokh sound of water striking iron. Significantly, the same passage also appears in the prayerbook commentary of Eleazar of Worms— a text written after Dodi ve-Nekhdi but before Sefer Kushiyot. There, it is invoked in order

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to explain Psalms 135:7, “He has made lightning for the rain.” It is impossible to say for certain whether Eleazar’s prayerbook commentary was the means by which Berakhiah’s explanation was transmitted to subsequent Ashkenazic authors. But Eleazar’s knowledge of Dodi ve-Nekhdi, and the text’s continued resonance into the fourteenth century, clearly demonstrates that “peripheral” Berakhiah had more of a readership than scholars have heretofore realized, and that the reception history of his scientific writings intersected with that of the Pietistic corpus. Sources from late medieval Ashkenaz allow us to further flesh out the reception history of Judah’s and Eleazar’s writings. Eleazar’s halakhic works were widely read and cited in the centuries following his death, as were moralistic texts like Sefer Hasidim. 24 As Joseph Dan has shown, yihud texts suffused with Pietistic ideas continued to circulate well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 25 Indeed, these writings seem to have impacted upon precisely those Ashkenazic Jews who, according to Ephraim Kupfer, had additional philosophical and scientific interests— figures like Avigdor Kara, Menachem Shalem, Yom Tov Lipman Mulhausen, and Abraham Klausner, who composed a circle of correspondents and acquaintances in late medieval Prague. 26 Kupfer believed that this “Prague Circle” represented merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and argued for a continuous and widespread tradition of Ashkenazic rationalism dating back to the thirteenth century. Others, including Yisrael Yuval, have denied the representativeness of these figures. 27 But Dan’s observation that the interest in philosophy manifested by these late medieval Ashkenazic Jews drew particularly upon Pietistic exoteric works has not been picked up by subsequent scholarship and needs to be further explored. For example, in an article on the Sefer Hadrat Kodesh, composed in Regensburg ca. 1400, Joseph Davis notes that the author Simeon b. Samuel “proves” an array of theological truths by appealing to “scientific, albeit naive, argument[s] from empirical evidence.”28 For Davis, Simeon’s application of empiricism to theology confirms that philosophical rationalism did indeed have a hold on late medieval Ashkenazic thinkers. When it comes to identifying the sources of Simeon’s knowledge, however, he speculates that the latter “may have been an autodidact.”29 But this supposition is belied by the specific “proofs” that Simeon marshals—which include the following: “The first proof: If one touches a man’s excrement, still warm from his innards, to

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[hot] coals, it will cause pain to the part of that man’s body from which [the excrement] exited. . . . Even though the excrement has already separated from the man’s body . . . nevertheless, there was initially a natural connection between them (niksharim be- hokhmat hateva) . . . [which] is not quickly disconnected.”30 This is precisely the “remembrance” that Judah he-Hasid had discussed in his yihud treatise, 31 and indicates that Simeon’s interest in empirical proofs of theological concepts derived from his having read Pietistic exoteric works, the same works being read by his contemporaries Menachem Shalem, Abraham Klausner, and so on.32 While those latter figures do not seem to have focused on natural empiricism in particular, Sefer Hadrat Kodesh indicates that the Pietists’ “remembrances” were known and continued to circulate in their milieu— and that, moreover, they were understood to operate “through natural laws” (le-fi metsi’ut hateva) discernable to scientists (hakhmei ha-teva).33 There is thus good reason to believe that the Pietists’ approach to the theological meaning of nature had a discernible impact upon later generations of Ashkenazic Jewry. The recent work of Tamas Visi and Milan Zonca, both of whom have identified new texts from late medieval Prague unknown to Kupfer, further suggests that the body of relevant sources is expansive and not yet tapped. 34 Indeed, other late medieval German texts, such as the neglected Sefer Ziyoni, contain passages that similarly elide the distinction between magic and science. Study of these sources stands to further expand our understanding of the role of science and the natural world in late medieval Ashkenazic theology. To be sure, not everyone who consumed Pietistic writings embraced their underlying approach in the way that Simeon b. Samuel did. Even when the Pietists’ writings on man’s status as an olam katan, for instance, were being read, they were at times understood in a completely different manner than originally intended. Thus the anonymous, late medieval Orhot Tsadikim cites from Pietistic texts extensively in its final chapter, particularly the microcosmic correspondences Eleazar lists in his commentary to the prayerbook. 35 But these lengthy citations, which describe the exalted status of the body and its links to the cosmos, are juxtaposed with overtly disdainful teachings on the theological value of the body and the material world. Rather than the psychosomatic unity envisioned by the Pietists, the essential human being in Orhot Tsadikim is the soul, in comparison to which the body is insignificant (tafel). “Woe, woe, woe!” (oy

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va- voy va- voy), we read, to one who treats the body as anything other than “dirt and maggots and worms!”36 Here, the nuanced approach of the Pietists, their celebration of embodiment and consequent anxiety over filth and decay, has been flattened out, recast into an overt and absolute anti-materialism.

Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad Beliefs akin to those of the Pietists also emerge from studying the views of non-Ashkenazic thinkers. While this book has at times sought to distinguish Pietistic attitudes toward the body, 37 occult forces, 38 and so on from those of contemporary Sephardic Jews, there is still reason to believe that Pietistic ideas about nature and the body resonated with at least some in Spain and Provence. We have seen, for instance, that the Pietistic views regarding excrement and the manna were adopted by not only Ashkenazic works like Sefer ha- Hayyim, but also by Nahmanides and his disciple Joshua Ibn Shueb. 39 While the precise means by which these ideas were transmitted are unclear, it is known that Nahmanides had access to Pietistic yihud texts, and may well have known of other Pietistic writings as well.40 Indeed, Nahmanides’ own attitudes toward natural causality, as recorded in works like Torat Adonai Temimah, are nuanced and sophisticated but have been treated by scholars primarily in contrast to the Maimonidean rationalism with which Nahmanides explicitly engaged.41 But does our reconstruction of Pietistic natural theology have the potential to shed light on the ways in which Sephardic opponents of Maimonides themselves conceptualized the natural order? Did writers on occult properties like Solomon Ibn Adret and his students know of the ways in which these same phenomena had been treated by their Ashkenazic near- contemporaries? These comparisons have the potential to shed new light on the boundaries between Ashkenaz and Sepharad in this period, as well as on the role of Ashkenazic ideas in conditioning Sephardic non-rationalist thinkers during the tumult of the Maimonidean controversies. Particularly suggestive similarities exist between the theology of nature of the German Pietists and that of the Jewish intellectuals who flourished in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These figures manifest interest in nature that is remarkably parallel to that of the Pietists— they write extensively on mirabilia, demonology, monsters, and so on, and seek to synthesize their occult and mystical

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interests with contemporary scientific discourse on the one hand and with Jewish tradition on the other.42 Of course, these interests developed in intensive dialogue with the Italian culture of which they were a part, and the early modern context in which they wrote differed in dramatic ways from the high medieval context of the Pietists.43 This parallel may thus be of heuristic value, but it is also possible that Pietistic works were known to these later figures, and might be related to them genealogically. The extensive copying of Pietistic manuscript materials in early modern Italy, and the fact that influential Christian theologians such as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola read Pietistic treatises in Latin translation, bolsters the possibility that similar Jewish- Christian dynamics were at play in both high medieval Ashkenaz and early modern Italy.44 Even if the medieval German and early modern Italian phenomena prove to be textually unbridgeable, the conceptual parallels between the two are significant in and of themselves. As discussed in the introduction, scholarship on early modern science has, ever since the work of Frances Yates and her students, insisted on the interrelationship between “science” and “magic” and “mysticism”— indicating that the conceptual categories that twenty-first- century people accept unself- consciously cannot be retrojected onto the historical figures they study. The scholarship that has informed this study, which argues that the same categorical hybridity and fluidity governed the mental universes of medieval Jews and Christians, has extended the early modern findings backward. In doing so, this scholarship— and, I hope, this book—have paved the way for the reconsidering of other reified dichotomies as well. Just as the sharp divisions between nature and the supernatural, or man and monster, or body and soul were less absolute than they might initially appear, so too the very real polemical disputes that divided medieval Jews and Christians did not prevent discussion, dialogue, and the interpenetration of ideas and ideals. Jews and Christians constituted a shared culture despite, indeed through, their battles for theological supremacy. In doing so, they left to posterity a rich, nuanced conception of the natural world that has much to contribute to the often strident debates over ecology and theology that continue to be worked through nearly 800 years later.

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Not es

Introduction The epigraph is from Steven Schwarzschild, “The Unnatural Jew,” in Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader, edited by Martin D. Yaffe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 267. 1. On evidence of Jewish courtiers in imperial and episcopal courts, see Grossman, Hakhmei Ashkenaz ha- Rishonim, 36– 37, 401– 2. The social, economic, and political history of Jews in medieval Franco- Germany has been the subject of a number of important studies, particularly by scholars associated with the so- called Trier School. See for example Haverkamp, Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee biz zu den Südenalpen; Mentgen, Die Juden des Mittelrhein- Mosel- Gebietes im Hochmittelalter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kreuzzungsverfolgungen; idem, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalterlichen Elsass; Ziwes, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mittleren Rheingebiet während des hohen und späten Mittelalters; Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, and other volumes in the series “Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden.” Still indispensable for the study of specific Jewish communities is Elbogen, Freimann, and Tykocinski, Germania Judaica I, and Avneri, Germania Judaica II. Still in its early stages but already a useful resource is the collaborative project “Medieval Ashkenaz: Corpus der Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden im spätmittelalterlichen Reich” (www.medieval-ashkenaz.org), which is working to transcribe and digitize relevant primary source materials. See especially the comprehensive “Bibliographie” heading under the site’s “Projektbeschreibung.” 2. See most recently Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz. 3. Much relevant material is collected in Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition. The individual beliefs and praxes enumerated here are discussed in detail below. 4. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. For a multifaceted consideration of Haskins’s argument, see Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century.

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5. The term was coined by Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 4. 6. On the stereotypical characterizations of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, particularly with regard to martyrdom, see Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz. 7. The so- called “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” which asserted that Jewish history has been “nothing more than the dark consequences of Christian contempt,” and that “oppression, persecution and expulsions are the staple of medieval Jewish life” (Schorsch, “The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History,” in idem, From Text to Context, 376– 88), has been subjected to dispute ever since it was labeled by Salo Baron early in the twentieth century (Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation”). Yet the staying power of this paradigm, especially with regard to Ashkenazic Jewry, has been remarkably strong, both within and outside the academy. For a recent reassessment, see Teller, “Revisiting Baron’s ‘Lachrymose Conception,’” 431– 39. On the medieval period in particular, see Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, though cf. Nirenberg, “Hope’s Mistakes.” 8. In addition to the studies cited above, see Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, idem, “A Jewish- Christian Symbiosis,” 448–516; Yuval, “Heilige Städte, heilige Gemeinden,” 91–101; Einbinder, Beautiful Death; Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children; idem, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz; Shoham-Steiner, Harigim Ba’al Korham; Shalev-Eyni, Jews among Christians; Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange; Perry, Masoret ve- Shinui. 9. The most influential account of the ability of interreligious violence to stabilize group relations is Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, which is focused on Spain and southern France. Studies of Jewish martyrdom during the First Crusade have foregrounded this dynamic in medieval Ashkenaz, showing that Jews’ willingness to die rather than convert to Christianity was itself an internalization of Christian Crusading ideology. See, inter alia, Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, chap. 7; Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God; Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom. 10. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb. 11. See for example Lasker, “Jewish Knowledge of Christianity in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” 97–109. 12. Resnick, Marks of Distinction. 13. Foundational studies of the Hasidei Ashkenaz include Baer, “HaMegamah ha-Datit-Hevratit shel Sefer Hasidim,” 1–50; Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 80–118; Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz; Marcus, Piety and Society. Other relevant studies will be cited below. Dan’s findings in Torat ha- Sod have been reiterated and occasionally revised in a wide array of subsequent publications, many of which are cited in what follows. For a synthetic summary, see Dan, Toledot Torat ha- Sod ha- Ivrit biYeme ha- Benayim, vols. 5– 6. 14. For detailed discussion of the recension history and various editions of Sefer Hasidim, see Marcus, “The Recensions and Structure of Sefer Hasidim,” 131–53; Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism,”

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455– 93; and the detailed contents of the Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database, especially “Manuscripts and Printed Editions of Sefer Hasidim,” and “Recensions of Sefer Hasidim,” https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim/ index.php?a=about. 15. Marcus, Piety and Society, 4. 16. Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim,” 327. 17. Ibid., 330. 18. Dan, “Ashkenazi Hasidism 1941–1991,” 87–102, and Marcus, “The Historical Meaning of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” 103–16. See also Gruenwald, “Normative und volkstümliche Religiosität im Sefer Chasidim,” 117– 26. 19. Kanarfogel, Peering Through the Lattices. 20. Talya Fishman has made a similar argument in chapter 6 of her Becoming the People of the Talmud. For Fishman, Pietistic writings preserved ideas that were common in Ashkenazic culture prior to the era of widespread “textualization,” inscribing “besieged” oral traditions so as to ensure their continued existence in an age where only texts were authoritative. While I agree that the texts that the Pietists put into circulation were representative of widespread Ashkenazic beliefs, I argue below that the content of many of those ideas drew from contemporary currents rather than solely preserving past ones. 21. Kushelevsky, Sigufim u- Fituyim; Kogman-Appel, A Mahzor from Worms; Offenberg, Illuminated Piety; Dubrau, “Motiv Ikonografi shel Re’im Ahuvim bi-Mahzorim Ashkenazi’im,” 209–40. 22. On the role of Pietistic figures within Jewish hagiography, see Bamberger, Sipurei ha- Shevahim shel Hasidei Ashkenaz. Many of the relevant texts can be found in Dan, R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 163– 76, and in Yassif, Me’ah Sippurim Haser Ehad. On the hagiographic treatment of medieval figures in Ashkenazic texts more broadly, see Raspe, Judische Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Aschkenas. 23. On Coucy, see Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, and Kanarfogel, Peering Through the Lattices, 68ff. Cf. Galinsky, “‘Vi-Lihiyot Lefaneha Eved Ne’eman kol ha-Yamim,’” 13– 31. On Avraham b. Azriel, see Ephraim E. Urbach, Arugat ha- Bosem, vol. 4. On Gerondi, see Ta- Shma, “Hasidut Ashkenaz bi- Sefarad,” 165– 94. On the question of Pietism in eastern Europe, see Ta- Shma, “Li-Toldot ha-Yehudim bi-Polin bi-Me’ah ha-12-ha-13,” 347– 69; Zimmer, Olam ke- Minhago Noheg; Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism”; Fram, “German Pietism and Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Polish Rabbinic Culture,” 50–59; and Soloveitchik, “Pietists and Kibbitzers,” 60– 64. 24. Nahmanides cites from Eleazar’s Sha’arei ha- Sod, ha-Yihud, vehaEmunah in his famous epistle Bi-Terem E’eneh Ani Shogeg, written at the height of the controversy over Maimonidean philosophy in the thirteenth century; Moses b. Nahman, Kitvei Rabenu Mosheh ben Nahman, 1:347. See also Kanarfogel, “Rabbinic Figures in Castilian Kabbalistic Pseudepigraphy,” 77–109; Idel, “Bein Ashkenaz li-Kastiliyah bi-Me’ah ha- Shelosh Esreh,” 475–554; idem, “Ashkenazi Esotericism and Kabbalah in Barcelona,” 69–114.

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25. To be sure, recent scholarship has also emphasized that northern France (Tsarfat) and Germany differed in important ways, and at times constituted distinct subcultures within “Ashkenaz.” On differences in rabbinic cultures, and a survey of relevant scholarship, see now Kanarfogel, “From Germany to Northern France and Back Again.” (I am grateful to Prof. Kanarfogel for sharing a pre-print copy of his article with me.) But, significantly, ideas typically associated with the German Pietists manifested themselves in France as well as in Germany; see Kanarfogel, Peering Through the Lattices. 26. The term is used by Avraham b. Natan of Lunel (ha-Yarhi) (who studied in Germany) throughout his thirteenth- century legal compilation Sefer ha- Manhig, and appears in Jacob b. Asher’s fourteenth- century Arba Turim, Orah Hayyim §113. 27. The balance of continuity and disjuncture between the thought and writings of Judah and those of Eleazar has been most comprehensively studied by Marcus, Piety and Society. Marcus’s findings as to the divergent views and leadership styles of the two does not take away from the many fundamental continuities in their writings. No one disputes that the content of Eleazar’s esoteric and exegetical writings drew heavily on Judah’s teachings. Indeed, on a textual level, it is frequently difficult to determine where the contributions of Judah end and those of Eleazar begin. See for example the treatment of MS Oxford Bodelian Library Opp. 540, and particularly its section titled Sefer haKavod, in Dan, “Hibur Bilti Yedu’a be-Torat ha-Sod li-R. Yehudah he-Hasid,” and cf. idem, “The Book of Divine Glory by Rabbi Judah the Pious of Regensburg.” See also Stal’s discussion in his edition of Eleazar b. Judah, Teshuvot Rabeinu Eleazar mi-Vormayza ha-Roke’ah, 139–49. 28. On the Kalonymides and their prominence within Ashkenazic culture, see Grossman, Hakhmei Ashkenaz ha- Rishonim. 29. This sorting out of Pietistic “schools” was inaugurated by Dan, Torat ha- Sod. On the “Unique Cherub Circle,” see Dan, The ’Unique Cherub’ Circle; Abrams “Review: A History of the Unique Cherub,” 397–403; Ben Shachar, Perush Sefer Yetsirah ha- Meyuhas li- Saadiah Gaon; idem, “Beraita de-Yosef ben Uziel,” 145– 88; idem, “R. Avigdor Katz, R. Nehemiah ha-Navi, ve-Hug ha-Keruv he-Meyuhad,” 175– 226. On Sefer ha- Hayyim, see Necker’s introduction to his edition of Sefer ha- Hayyim, Das Buch des Lebens. On R. Nehemiah, see Idel, “Some Forlorn Writings of a Forgotten Ashkenazi Prophet,” 183–196; idem, “Perusho shel R. Nehemiyah ben Shlomoh ha-Navi li-Piyut ‘El Na li- Olam Tu’arats,’” 5–41; idem, “From Italy to Ashkenaz and Back,” 47– 94; idem, “Al ha-Perushim shel R. Nehemiyah ben Shelomoh haNavi li- Shem 42 Otiyot,” 157– 261; idem, “Ha-Perush ha-Anonimi li-AlfaBeta de-Metatron,” 255– 64; idem, “Bein Ashkenaz li-Kastiliyah bi-Me’ah ha- Shelosh Esreh,” 475–554; idem, “Piyut lo Yadu’a li-Yom ha-Kipurim li-R. Nehemiyah ben Shelomoh ha-Navi,” 237– 61. 30. See for example Abrams, “Ketuvei-Yad Hadashim shel Sefer ha- Sodot shel Rabi Shem Tov bar Simhah,” 49– 70; idem, “Sefer Shakud le-Rabbi Shemuel ben Rabbi Kalonymus,” 217–41. 31. On Ashkenazic involvement in the Maimonidean controversies, see Urbach, “Helkam shel Halkhmei Ashkenaz bi-Pulmus al ha-Rambam

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ve-al Sefarav,” 149–59; Septimus, Hispano- Jewish Culture in Transition; Shatzmiller, “Les tossafistes et la première controverse maïmonidienne,” 55– 82; idem, “Igrato shel R. Asher b. R. Gershom,” 129–40; idem, “Li-Temunat ha-Mahloket ha-Rishonah al Kitvei ha-Rambam,” 126–44. 32. Cited in Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” 118. 33. See the discussion in the conclusion, below. 34. Munk, Philosophie und philosophische Schriftsteller der Juden, cited and translated in Schorsch, From Text to Context, 82– 83. See the multifaceted assessment of the concept and history of the “Jewish contribution” in Cohen and Cohen, The Jewish Contribution to Civilization. 35. Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der judischen Poesie, cited and translated in Schorsch, From Text to Context, 83. 36. I have taken this term from Schorsch, From Text to Context, 71– 92; see also Marcus, “Beyond the Sephardic Mystique,” 35–53, and now the book-length study of Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. 37. Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, 290n.4. 38. Freudenthal, “The Place of Science in Medieval Jewish Communities,” 601. 39. Soloveitchik, “The ‘Third Yeshivah of Bavel’ and the Cultural Origins of Ashkenaz,” 177– 83. 40. Freudenthal, Science and Philosophy in Early Modern Ashkenazic Culture. 41. Ibid., 19. 42. An important exception is Langermann, “Was There No Science in Ashkenaz?,” 67– 92. Another is David Berger, who has noted, albeit without elaborating, that despite Ashkenazic opposition to speculative philosophy, “Ashkenazi literature, probably even more than that of the Sephardim, reflects the keen interest and penetrating eye of Jews evincing intense curiosity about the natural and mechanical phenomena that surrounded them” (“Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” 118 and n. 107). 43. The same a priori filtering out of Ashkenazic material characterizes Tamas Visi’s important recent study of “peripheral” Ashkenazic practitioners of science and philosophy. Defining medieval philosophy as a “literary polysystem,” he suggests that scholars “not hunt for isolated quotations from philosophical sources in Ashkenazi literature, but look for the systematic presence of a sufficient number of characteristics within a given text that indicate that the text was produced in a literary system fairly similar to those which produced the great books of Saadya Gaon, Maimonides, Gersonides, and their followers. Such criteria are, for example, the use of a Tibbonide language register, accepting a literary canon consisting of the ‘classics’ of medieval Jewish philosophy, such as Saadya’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions or Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, or explicit references to non-Jewish sources. Further characteristics are the announcement or partial realization of intellectual-spiritual projects in the style of Saadya or Maimonides; an adoption of the literary genres widespread among philosophers, for example,

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glosses to the ‘classics,’ or compendia summarizing various branches of philosophical knowledge; and the admission of non-Jewish texts, especially Aristotelian literature, to the corpus of the ‘classics’ in the form of quotations, references, interpretations, etc.” Visi, On the Peripheries of Ashkenaz, 17 (and see also 48). 44. It is also ironic in light of the fact that Sephardic thinkers themselves made few original contributions to the scientific discourse that they avidly consumed; see Freudenthal, “Science in the Medieval Jewish Culture of Southern France,” 23–58. 45. Freudenthal, “The Place of Science in Medieval Jewish Communities,” 600– 601. 46. Ibid. Edward Grant has pithily labeled this preoccupation with precedents “the pox of ‘precursoritis’”; for a summary of early historiography, see the Preface to Lindberg, Science in the Middle Ages, and Freudenthal, Science in Medieval Jewish Culture, 2–5. 47. Freudenthal, “The Place of Science in Medieval Jewish Communities,” 601. The classic work on this issue remains Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For a more radical application of some of Kuhn’s insights, see Feyerabend, Against Method. Influential studies by classicists include Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience, and idem, Science, Folklore and Ideology. Relevant studies by anthropologists include Good, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience, and Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. 48. See the historiographic and methodological discussion in Reed, “Ancient Jewish Sciences and the Historiography of Judaism.” 49. Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz, 38– 39; but cf. his “Rabbi Judah the Pious and Caesarius of Heisterbach,” where he is far less receptive to the notion that such communications took place; see also n. 55 below. 50. One exception is Debra L. Stoudt, who has argued (albeit unconvincingly) that commonalities between the thought of the German Pietists and their Christian contemporaries point to an influence of the former upon the latter. She uses this theory to account for a number of allegedly parallel ideas and symbols found within the writings of a number of Christian mystics, including Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdenburg, and Meister Eckhardt. See Stoudt, “Parallels Between Jewish and Christian Mystical Experiences in Medieval Germany,” 39–51. 51. See the discussion in Chapter 2 below. 52. Urbach, Ba’alei ha-Tosafot. The issue of Urbach’s comparative approach was treated in the reviews of the work by Hayyim Hillel Ben Sasson (“Hanhagata shel Torah,” Behinot 9 [1956]: 39–53), Isadore Twersky (in Tarbiz 26 [1957]: 215– 22), and Jacob Katz (in Halakhah ve- Kabbalah [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986], 340–52). More recent treatments have pointed to general resemblances without engaging in in-depth comparative work. See for example Ta- Shma, “Makbilim she-Einam Nifgashim,” and Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz, chap. 1. In contrast to the neglect of comparative study of the Tosafists’ glosses, scholarship on the rise of peshat exegesis in medieval northern France has

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extensively engaged with Christian comparanda; see the up-to-date historiographical survey in Schoenfeld, Isaac on Jewish and Christian Altars, 7– 9. 53. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines, 204. 54. Baer, “Ha-Megamah ha-Datit-Hevratit shel Sefer Hasidim”; idem, “Shnei Perakim shel Torat ha-Hashgahah bi- Sefer Hasidim,” 47– 62; and cf. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 83. In unambiguously claiming that the Pietists adapted actual Christian texts and doctrines, Baer veered from the consensus among prior scholars that similarities ought to be attributed to a general cultural environment, not to specifically Christian influence. The German historian M. Güdemann, for instance, had previously cautioned that “there is no need to speak of derivations; similar causes produce similar effects. Mysticism was in the air and its seeds fell on fertile soil both among Jews and Christians.” Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden im Mittelalter, 1:158; translated in Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 84. For a survey of the historiography on the Hasidei Ashkenaz through the 1980s, see Marcus, Piety and Society, chap. 1. Interestingly, Baer retracted many of his findings concerning Christian influences on Judaism later in his life; see Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” 77– 87. 55. Vajda, “De quelque infiltrations chretiennes dans l’oeuvre d’un auteur Anglo-Juif du XIIIe siecle,” 15– 34. Cf. Dan’s characterization of Vajda’s argument in his “Ashkenazi Hasidism and the Maimonidean Controversy,” 35n.18. 56. For a clear articulation of this comparison, see Lasker, “Jewish Knowledge of Christianity,” 97– 99. 57. This assumption underlies Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, which remains the most comprehensive study of Pietistic views of the natural world, some seventy years after its initial publication! Scholars of Jewish folklore and literature have produced a substantial body of scholarship on the German Pietists, much of which does engage in the kind of comparative methodology I am advocating here; see for example AlexanderFrizer, The Pious Sinner, and the many works of Eli Yassif. The folkloric and especially narratological dimension of medieval Ashkenazic writings on “the wondrous” has recently been studied by Rotman, “Ha-Mufla be- Sipur haIvri be-Yemei ha-Beinayim.” 58. The body of literature on this issue is enormous. Influential articulations of the stark divisions and tensions between folk religion and clerical orthodoxy can be found in the works of Jacques Le Goff and his pupil JeanClaude Schmitt: see for example the essays collected in Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, and idem, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages; Schmitt, ‘“Religion populaire’ et culture folklorique,” 941–53, and idem, The Holy Greyhound. A similar approach grounds Gurevich’s influential Medieval Popular Culture, and many of the works of Carlo Ginzburg. Advocates of a more holistic Christian culture, which minimized sharp distinctions between learned and unlearned, include Brown, The Cult of the Saints; Mansfield, Humiliation of Sinners; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; Rubin, Corpus Christi; and Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious

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Culture,” 321–41. Summaries of the historiographic trends and the methodological stakes can be found in Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” 519–52; Schmitt, “Religion, Folklore, and Society in the Medieval West,” 376– 87; and Arnold, “Histories and Historiographies of Medieval Christianity.” A critical application of some of these insights to the field of premodern Jewish folklore can be found in Stein, “Let the ‘People’ Go?,” 206–41, while an initial case study from medieval Ashkenaz is explored in Benin, “A Hen Crowing like a Cock,” 261– 81. 59. Chajes, Between Worlds, 7– 8. 60. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 238– 39. Cf. Becker, “The Comparative Study of ‘Scholasticism’ in Late-Antique Mesopotamia,” 99. Schäfer and Arthur Green have both employed precisely these assumptions in arguing that the increasing attention to the Shekhinah among thirteenth- century Spanish kabbalists derived in part from the flourishing of Mariology in contemporary Christian culture; see Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 169ff.; Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs,” 1– 52. 61. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood. 62. Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World. 63. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew. 64. Ackerman-Lieberman, The Business of Identity. 65. For recent examples, see Secunda, The Iranian Talmud, Lapin, Rabbis as Romans, and the historiographic overview in Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud, 1– 34. 66. See Chapter 1, below. 67. SHP §1301. 68. See the discussion in Fishman, “The Penitential System of the Hasidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries,” 201– 29. Even scholars who generally tend to focus on the role of hegemonic cultures in shaping various Jewish phenomena tend to revert to an “internalist” approach when it comes to the Hasidei Ashkenaz. Thus Schäfer, who has been eager to anchor various kabbalistic doctrines in their synchronic contexts (see nn. 60 and 86 of this chapter), has at times argued for a strictly diachronic approach to the study of German Pietism; see his “The Ideal of Piety of the Ashkenazi Hasidim and Its Roots in Jewish Tradition,” 9– 23 (though cf. idem, “Juden und Christen im Hohen Mittelalter,” 45–59). Similarly, Marcus, in Piety and Society, has denied that there was significant Christian impact on the theology of the German Pietists, notwithstanding his subsequent work on “inward acculturation” (see above, n. 8). 69. Most influentially in Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. 70. BT Hagigah 11b. 71. Gottlieb, Mehkarim be- Sifrut ha- Kabalah, 18– 28, 59– 87. 72. Wolfson, “Mirror of Nature Reflected in the Symbolism of Medieval Kabbalah,” 322. For an atypical treatment of the role of observation of nature in the thought of a medieval kabbalist (Isaac of Acre), see Fishbane, As a Light Before Dawn, 117ff. 73. Tirosh- Samuelson, “Judaism,” 59n.37.

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74. The work of Frances Yates and several generations of her admirers and detractors have profoundly shaped the way historians understand the relationship between early modern science and the occult; see for example Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and idem, “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,” 255– 74. On the reception history of the “Yates thesis,” see Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 169– 83, 285– 96, and Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermeticism, and Occultism,” 261– 301. Recent scholarly attention to the history of “western esotericism” has spurred additional research into the interconnectedness of premodern discourses of knowledge; see for example Von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge; idem, Western Esotericism; Goodrick- Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions. 75. Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science; idem, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery. 76. Tirosh- Samuelson, “Kabbalah and Science in the Middle Ages,” 476– 510. See further the discussion in Chapter 1, below. 77. Of course, most scholars no longer assume that mysticism has the same underlying core regardless of the religious idiom in which it is expressed. See Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 5: “One cannot speak of mystical experience . . . divorced from some interpretive framework, and that framework is shaped by a particular religious tradition. The Jewish mystic . . . sees the divine glory in a way that is distinctively Jewish and therefore not Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist.” Compare McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, xvi: “No mystics (at least before the present century) believed in or practiced ‘mysticism.’ They believed in and practiced Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism), that is, religions that contained mystical elements as part of a wider historical whole.” But the assumption remains that within the Jewish tradition, one can profitably seek out the transhistorical commonalities that link, say, the Merkavah tradition with the Zohar, or Isaac Luria, or the Ba’al Shem Tov. 78. Idel articulated this approach to Jewish mysticism most influentially in his Kabbalah: New Perspectives, and has expanded on it in many subsequent works. For a survey of Idel’s methods and an analysis of his idiosyncratic use of the term “phenomenology,” see Abrams, “Phenomenology of Jewish Mysticism,” 7–146; Margolin, “Moshe Idel’s Phenomenology and Its Sources,” 41–51. 79. See Marcus, “The Foundation Legend of Ashkenazi Judaism,” 409– 18; Bonfil, “Bein Erets Yisra’el le-Bein Bavel,” 1– 30. 80. See for example Herrmann, “Text und Fiktion,” 89–142; Herrmann and Rohrbacher- Sticker, “Magische Traditionen der New Yorker HekhalotHandschrift JTS 8128,” 101–49; idem, “Magische Traditionen der Oxforder Hekhalot Handschrift Michael 9,” 169– 83; Kuyt, “Traces of a Mutual Influence of the Haside Ashkenaz and the Heikhalot Literature,” 62– 86; idem, “The Haside Ashkenaz and Their Mystical Sources,” 462– 71. 81. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah. For more recent examples of similar guiding questions, see works of Abrams, including his “‘Ma’aseh Merkabah’ as a Literary Work,” 329–45; idem, “Special Angelic Figures,” 363–400;

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idem, “The Limits of Divine Ontology,” idem, “The Emergence of Esotericism in German Pietism,” 81ff. Many studies which do not explicitly seek to situate German Pietism within a diachronic tradition nonetheless argue that Pietistic doctrines resemble those of later kabbalists—by, for example, locating hints toward a dual-gendered, sexualized dynamic within the Godhead. See esp. the studies of Elliot R. Wolfson cited in n. 92 below. For a critique of this approach, see Dan, “The Ancient Heikhalot Mystical Texts in the Middle Ages,” 83– 96, esp. 83, 92n.18; idem, “The Book of the Divine Name by Rabbi Eleazar of Worms,” 129– 77. 82. Dan, “The Language of the Mystics in Medieval Germany,” 7. For a similar articulation of this point couched in somewhat more polemical language, see also idem, The ‘Unique Cherub’ Circle, vii. 83. Huss, “Ha-Mistifikatsiyah shel ha-Kabalah veha-Mitus she haMistikah ha-Yehudit,” 27. 84. Ibid., 26. See also Huss, “The Theologies of Kabbalah Research,” 3– 26; idem, She’elat Kiyumah shel Mistikah Yehudit. 85. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, 247. 86. Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, 25n.91. Idel has in turn questioned the methodological groundings of the “historicist” approach to Jewish mysticism, casting doubt on the ability of scholars to pinpoint historically contextualized “beginnings”; see Idel, “On Binary ‘Beginnings’ in Kabbalah- Scholarship,” 313– 37. 87. Soloveitchik, “Topics in the Hokhmat ha- Nefesh,” 75. 88. Wolfson, “The Mystical Significance of Torah Study in German Pietism,” 47. 89. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 86. 90. This approach, which assumes that the Pietists consciously scattered partial hints to their true theological views across a wide spectrum of their writings, has been utilized most overtly by Abrams and Wolfson. See Abrams, “‘Sod kol ha- Sodot,’” 61– 81; idem, “Ha- Shekhinah Mitpalelet Lifnei ha-Kadosh Barukh Hu,” 509– 32; idem, “The Emergence of Esotericism in German Pietism.” In addition to the studies cited in n. 92, below, see Wolfson, “The Mystical Significance of Torah Study,” 47: “Like many other ideas that are essential to the Pietists’ religious and spiritual outlook, their idea of Torah is never stated in a systematic manner. On the contrary, this idea is alluded to in many places, expressed through such hermeneutical techniques as numerology, letter associations, permutation of letters, and so on. It is the task of the reader to employ these devices as a means to decode the esoteric meaning embedded in the literary works of Haside Ashkenaz, just as they felt that the application of these methods to traditional texts, scriptural, rabbinic, and liturgical, was necessary to ascertain their inner sense.” 91. Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz. 92. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines; idem, “The Image of Jacob Engraved Upon the Throne,” 1– 62; idem, “Sacred Space and Mental Iconography,” 593– 634; idem, “Metatron and Shi’ur Komah in the Writings of Haside Ashkenaz,” 60– 92; idem, “Martyrdom, Eroticism, and Asceticism in Twelfth- Century Ashkenazi Piety,” 171– 220.

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93. Idel, “Al Zehut Mehabrehem shel Shne Perushim Ashkenaziyim lePiyut ha-Aderet veha-Emunah,” 67– 208. 94. For a precursor to this methodology, see the classic article of Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim.” 95. See for example Marcus, “Exegesis for the Few and for the Many,” 1*– 24*; Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines; Dan, “‘Sifrut ha-Yihud’ shel Hasidei Ashkenaz,” 533–44; idem, “Hibur Yihud Ashkenazi min haMe’ah ha-14,” 204– 6. Abrams has disputed the notion that all “yihud texts” were intended for an exoteric audience: see his “Sefer Shakud le-Rabbi Shemuel ben Rabbi Kalonymus.” 96. Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz.

Chapter 1 The epigraph is from Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York: Schocken, 1939), 181. 1. Ta- Shma, “Kuntres ‘Zekher Asah le-Nifle’otav,’” 185. 2. On this term and its applicability, see Kanarfogel, Peering Through the Lattices, 253ff. 3. Dan, R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 145. 4. This conception of the Pietists’ view of the physical world is key to Dan’s overarching understanding of Pietistic ideology as a whole, which he sees as fundamentally ascetic and anti-materialist, and as prizing martyrdom (that is, rejection of and escape from the physical world) above all other religious values. This premise is rooted in his assumption that the Pietistic ideology in its entirety originated as a response to the severe persecutions, and consequent martyrdoms, undergone by the Rhineland Jewish communities in 1096; see Dan, R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 66– 86. (An approach identical to Dan’s can be found in Gross, Spirituality and Law, 39–49; for more nuanced accounts of the linkage between Pietism and the martyrdoms of 1096, see Wolfson, “Martyrdom, Eroticism, and Asceticism,” and Chazan, “The Early Development of ‘Hasidut Ashkenaz,’” 199– 211.) But as Haym Soloveitchik has pointed out in a recent article, there is no real evidence to support Dan’s contention. The Pietists, he argues, “have no special teaching about martyrdom. When one chooses martyrdom and for what offenses it must be endured are not subjects about which the German Pietists gave any special thought or made any special demands. The Pietist suffered martyrdom on the same occasions as did the non-Pietist” (Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom,” 291). 5. Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz, 88 (emphasis added). 6. Wolfson, “Martyrdom, Eroticism, and Asceticism,” 189. 7. Soloveitchik, “The Midrash, Sefer Hasidim, and the Changing Face of God,” 173. While Soloveitchik thus supports Dan’s overall approach, he nonetheless notes that it is in tension with other elements of the Pietistic worldview. As we shall note in a later chapter, the Pietists clearly understood God to be wholly immanent in the natural world, such that “there is no place that is empty of Him.” How, Soloveitchik wonders, can this panentheism

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be reconciled with the Pietists’ ostensible disdain for nature? He answers: “There is a difference between where God is and where man finds him. The first is a theological question, the second a religious one . . . [and] from the point of view of spirituality there is all the difference in the world. God may well reside in nature, but if man does not actively experience His presence there, this indwelling is simply an ontological statement” (173– 74). See further the discussion in Chapter 5 below. 8. Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz, 88– 94; idem, R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 145–53; idem, Toldot Torat ha- Sod ha- Ivrit, vol. 5, chap. 13. A brief discussion of this doctrine can also be found in Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 46–47. 9. Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz, 88. 10. Soloveitchik, “The Midrash, Sefer Hasidim, and the Changing Face of God,” 173. Soloveitchik himself has traced the doctrine of zekher asah le- nifle’otav back to the broader Pietistic ideal of seeking out the supra-legal retson ha- Bore (will of the Creator), the “vast hidden revelation of God’s will coded into Scripture and history and awaiting its decipherment” (Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim,” 315). For a discussion and evaluation of this approach, see Shyovitz, “He Has Created a Remembrance of His Wonders,” 36– 38. 11. Freudenthal, “Ha-Avir Barukh Hu u-Varukh Shemo,” 203, and n. 42 ad loc. See the markedly similar claims of Hasan-Rokem, “Homo viator et narrans judaicus,” 96; Abrams, Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation, 23n.45; Kushelevsky, Sigufim u- Fituyim, 285; and esp. TiroshSamuelson, “Judaism,” 38– 39: “If orderliness and stability were the main manifestations of the rationality of the natural world according to medieval Jewish rationalists, the Jewish pietists in Germany during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries accentuated the extraordinary and the miraculous. . . . [They] believed that the hidden, invisible God was mysteriously and paradoxically revealed in the natural order. In his goodness God implanted in nature events and signs that violate nature, that is, the miraculous and the fantastic. It is the supernatural, unique, and nonrepeatable phenomena that inform the believer about the hidden God and directs him or her toward fulfillment of God’s hidden will.” 12. On this text, see for example Robinson, “Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Perush haMilot ha-Zarot,” 41–76, where previous scholarship on the work is also surveyed. 13. Studies of pre-Tibbonite scientific and philosophical terminology include Malter, “Medieval Hebrew Terms for Nature,” 253–56; Efros, Studies in Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 171– 252; and the relevant sections of Jacob Klatzkin, Otsar ha- Munahim ha- Filosofi’im. Also notable is an ongoing project, under the directions of Giuseppe Veltri and Reimund Leicht, called PESHAT: Premodern Philosophic and Scientific Hebrew Terminology. 14. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 433– 34 (cited from Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Yesod Mora— on the Pietists’ use of the latter, see the discussion in Chapter 3 below). 15. As this book was being completed, Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz’s book Ehad be- Khol Dimyonot was published. The book includes a chapter dealing with

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the Pietists’ doctrine of “remembrances” (see there pp. 123–52), in which Lifshitz critiques Dan’s contention that the Pietists saw the natural world as absent of theological meaning (what Lifshitz, adopting Hegel’s description of Spinoza’s metaphysics, calls “acosmism”). Lifshitz suggests that the Pietists (and “the Ashkenazic sages in general”) posited a more attenuated or moderate acosmism, one in which “God is not missing from the world, but . . . the world itself rests on a supernatural foundation that assumes that [the world] is designed by spiritual processes. What appear to be physical occurrences are in fact spiritual occurrences” (129). The result is “an elevation of the natural reality to [the level of] supernatural reality” (132). Lifshitz’s critique of the conventional understanding of the Pietists’ “remembrances” parallels my own, though our own readings of the doctrine differ in several significant respects. Most substantially, Lifshitz seeks to contextualize the views of Judah the Pious and Eleazar of Worms within a strictly internal, diachronic history of Jewish theology (22), in keeping with a broadly “phenomenological” methodological approach (32). Hence the dichotomy of nature/ supernatural is not interrogated, but is instead conflated with that of physics/ metaphysics, so as to allow for comparison between the views of Ashkenazic and Sephardic thinkers (140–42). Lifshitz’s intervention is a significant one, and this brief précis does not do it justice. But it is worth noting that the present book’s focus on synchronic factors and attention to historical context leads in a different analytic direction, and yields a markedly different conclusion. 16. Menahem b. Shlomo, Midrash Sekhel Tov to Genesis 32. 17. Rashi to Ps. 111:4. 18. Ibn Ezra to Ps. 111:4; Nahmanides to Deut. 6:20. 19. Jacob b. Moses Molin, Sefer Maharil: Minhagim, 10. 20. For a related approach to biblical artifacts, see Malkiel, “The Artifact and Humanism in Medieval Jewish Thought,” 21–40. 21. Yalkut Shimoni, Exodus, Beshalah, §256. 22. Yalkut Shimoni, Esther, §1056; Midrash Panim Aherim, §5. 23. It should be noted that several midrashim do relate Ps. 111:4 to natural, rather than historical “wonders.” The Sifra (Leviticus, Behukotai §1), for instance, invokes the verse in its discussion of the rapid, miraculous growth of fruits and vegetables that took place in the Garden of Eden, which will once again take place in the messianic period; and cf. Numbers Rabbah §18; Midrash Agadah to Leviticus, §26; and Yalkut Shimoni to Leviticus (Parashat Behukotai). The relationship between God and nature that is implied by this reading, however, is the polar opposite of that suggested by the Pietists’ use of this verse. As we shall see, the Pietists are interested in observation of the natural order as it exists today, while this midrash makes predictions about what will happen to nature at some indeterminate point in the future. 24. The most concentrated treatment of the doctrine is in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Mich. 365, a text first published by Israel M. Ta- Shma as “Kuntres ‘Zekher Asah le-Nifle’otav’ li-R. Yehudah he-Hasid” (henceforth ZALN). Ta- Shma transcribed the manuscript and inserted minor annotations, but added little else in the way of scholarly apparatus. More recently,

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Ya’akov Yisra’el Stal has edited an edition of this text under the title Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u- Penimiyot. Stal’s is not a “scientific edition,” but it includes extensive notes, as well as appendices on a variety of topics in Pietistic thought. It should be noted that although Stal accuses Ta- Shma of numerous transcription errors in the latter’s edition of the text, the majority of his examples seem far from clear. Thus, while I have benefited from Stal’s apparatus, I have nonetheless cited from Ta- Shma’s edition and pagination. 25. Judah he-Hasid, Sod ha-Yihud, and cf. ZALN, 192. 26. Eleazar of Worms, Sod ha- Merkavah, “Hilkhot ha-Kavod,” 193, and cf. Perush Sidur Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 325, and ZALN, 199. 27. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 112. 28. ZALN, 202. See also Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 65, 67; and idem, Sefer ha- Shem, 57. In his commentary on the Torah, R. Judah’s son Zaltman similarly quotes his father as describing the process of creation by reference to the making of cheese out of milk: see Perush ha-Torah leRabi Yehudah he- Hasid, 3. Interestingly, the specific comparison of God’s creation of the world to the making of cheese out of milk has been the subject of scholarly attention; see the discussion in Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 56–58. Ginzburg notes that Mennochio’s comparison between the coagulation of cheese and the creation of the cosmos parallels certain Indian myths—“an astonishing coincidence, even disquieting. . . . It cannot be excluded that it may constitute one of the proofs, even though fragmentary and partly obliterated, of the existence of a millenarian cosmological tradition that, beyond the difference of languages, combined myth with science” (58). That this same notion is found in Pietistic writings would seem to indicate either that this motif was more widespread than Ginzburg realized— and perhaps that the analogy is an obvious enough one to appear independently in various cultures without any direct transmission. 29. Judah he-Hasid, Sod ha-Yihud, and cf. ZALN, 197, and Eleazar of Worms, Sod ha- Merkavah, “Hilkhot ha-Kavod,” 195. 30. Judah he-Hasid, Sod ha-Yihud (emphasis added); and cf. ZALN, 193, 197. 31. Eleazar of Worms, Sod ha-Merkavah, “Hilkhot Melakhim,” 158. On the use among Christian theologians of a similar spider analogy in discussions of spiritual entities, see Reynolds, God, Cosmos, and the Microcosm, 421. 32. Based on BT Makkot 23b. 33. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer ha- Shem, 71–72; cf. Sefer Gematriyot, 228, 273. 34. The sum of 613 is reached by including, as does the original verse, the prefix le (here meaning “of”), but also, unlike the verse, using the plene spelling with an additional vav. I thank Eric Schramm for this observation. 35. On the human body as a microcosm of the universe, which was a fundamental tenet of Pietistic theology, see Chapter 3 below. 36. See for example M Ohalot 1:8; Midrash Tehilim, ed. Salomon Buber (Vilna, 1891), §32. 37. Rabbinic sources typically linked the 365 positive commandments with the 365 days of the solar year; see for example BT Makkot 23b– 24a. See also Sefer Gematriyot, 228n.43.

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38. Eleazar of Worms, Sod ha- Merkavah, “Hilkhot ha-Kavod,” 195, and cf. Judah he-Hasid, Sod ha-Yihud. 39. Imrot Tehorot, 46. 40. ZALN, 188–189. The ability of thought alone to generate physical consequences was oft-remarked upon by medieval natural philosophers, who singled out wet dreams as a typical example; see Karnes, “Marvels in the Medieval Imagination,” 331. 41. Imrot Tehorot, 47. 42. ZALN, 189. The rabbinic passage being cited in the final sentence is BT Avodah Zarah 54b. Cf. the parallel passage in MS Oxford Bodleian Library Opp. 540, where this prizing of the constancy and immutability of the natural order is immediately followed by expressions of discomfort with miracles, which reflect shinui (change); see Dan, “Keta mi-Hiburo shel ha-R. Y. H. bi-K.Y. Oxford 1567,” 151. On the Pietists’ discomfort with miracles, see below; on shinui as a perceived threat to the Pietistic theology of nature, see the discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 below. 43. See for example SHP §1787. 44. SHP §196. 45. SHP §386. 46. SHP §1817, and see also Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 385, and Perushei R. Yehudah he- Hasid al ha-Torah, 117–18. 47. SHP §1817. 48. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 407– 8. 49. Perushei R. Yehudah he- Hasid al ha-Torah, 21. Menahem Ziyoni cites these same examples in the name of Eleazar of Worms in Sefer Ziyoni, 39. 50. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer ha- Shem, 138– 39. 51. See n. 21 above. 52. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer Tagin, 438. 53. SHP §516. 54. SHP §419 (emphasis added). 55. BT Megillah 18a. 56. I have based this translation on a slightly emended text— the existing text reads, “Since he is omnipotent, why can he not make today precede yesterday, or yesterday precede today?” The second “yesterday” ought to read “tomorrow,” or else the argument becomes nonsensical. 57. ZALN, 192. 58. For a comprehensive treatment of the historiography and accuracy of this notion, see Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz. 59. On theological doubt in medieval Ashkenaz, see Cohen, “Between Martyrdom and Apostasy,” 431– 71; Marcus, “Kidush ha- Shem be-Ashkenaz ve- Sipur Rabi Amnon mi-Magentsa,” 131–48. 60. SHP §1355. 61. SHP §1451. 62. SHP §1533. 63. SHP §989. 64. SHP §1328. 65. SHP §811.

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66. SHP §820. 67. Dan, “Sefer Sha’arei ha- Sod, ha-Yihud, veha-Emuah,” 143. 68. ZALN, 187. 69. BT Hagigah 11b. 70. On Sefer Yetsirah, see the discussion in Chapter 2 below. 71. Particularly significant in this regard is the Sefer Hakhmoni of Shabbatai Donnolo, a physician, astrologer, and theologian who flourished in tenth- century Byzantine Italy, and whose works exercised a considerable influence upon Pietistic writings. See Sharf, The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo, and Mancuso, Shabbatai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni. 72. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 18. 73. This passage is an abridged and reworked version of a section of Donnolo’s Hakhmoni; see Mancuso, Shabbatai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni, 274– 77. 74. See above, n. 30. 75. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 23– 24. 76. Ibid. The allusion is to Joel 3:3. 77. Ibid., 24. 78. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 413. 79. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 24. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 74. 82. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 263. Interesting, this same idea appears in R. Solomon Simhah of Troyes’s Sefer ha- Maskil, where, in the context of an identical discussion of the creation of freshwater, the mountains of salt, and so on, he alludes to the waters sold by perfumers (bosamim) as evidence. See Freudenthal, “‘Ha-Avir Barukh hu u-Varukh Shemo’ [ . . . ] (Helek Sheni),” 125. Freudenthal, who published selected passages of this lengthy work, notes that there are numerous similarities between Pietistic ideas and those expressed by Simhah (idem, “Ha-Avir Barukh hu u-Varukh Shemo,” 187– 234); but direct, almost verbatim parallels of this nature suggest that Simhah had access to actual Pietistic texts shortly after their composition. (Might the fact that Simhah directs his readers to consult with “perfumers” be a subtle allusion to the works of Eleazar, the author of the halakhic work Sefer ha-Roke’ah, “The book of the perfumer”?) Further investigation of this issue, to which I plan on devoting a future study, may shed light on the vexed question of how quickly Pietistic ideas spread from Germany to elsewhere in northern Europe. Indeed, a comparison with Sefer ha- Maskil in this specific context in fact highlights the uniqueness of the Pietists’ own commitment to the location of theological meaning in naturalistic phenomena. In discussing Donnolo’s “proof” of the ability of water to emerge from fire, Solomon Simhah mentions that “I have seen a certain spring in the land of Viennoise, three parsangs from the city of Grenoble— as soon as one runs around it three times holding a bundle of wool, a flame emerges from the spring and grabs hold of [the wool]. This is a true matter, though I do not understand the workings of it or its cause— perhaps it is accomplished through sorcery (ma’aseh keshafim).” Unlike the Pietists, the

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author of Sefer ha- Maskil is thus willing to acknowledge that certain empirically observable phenomena do not work via naturalistic means. On this spring—which was well known to medieval writers, and which actually did function in a manner similar to that described by Solomon— see Gad Freudenthal, “Ha-Avir Barukh Hu u-Varukh Shemo,” 204n.43. 83. The choice of a walnut is based on Cant. 6:11. Foundational studies of this doctrine include Altmann, “Eleazar of Worms’ Hokhmat ha-Egoz,” 101–13; Dan, “Hokhmat ha-Egoz”; Farber- Ginat, Tefisat ha-Merkavah beTorat ha- Sod be- Me’ah ha-13; Abrams, Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation in Medieval Germany. 84. Avraham b. Azriel, Arugat ha- Bosem, 2:168. 85. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 113. Cf. Genesis Rabbah 10:3, where a similar notion is applied in a different context. 86. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 12; cf. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 249, where the same discussion of echoes is cast in different light, in the context of a distinction between regular sounds that are transmitted through the air, “like the [sounds made by the] hinge of a door, or the axle of a wheel or millwheel, or the sounds of a shofar,” and God’s prophetic speech. 87. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 35, an expanded version of BT Bava Batra 84a. (The text itself has “evening” instead of “morning,” and “east” instead of “west”—but the logic of the passage suggests that this is a mistake.) 88. Dan. 7:10; BT Hagigah 14a. 89. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 357. 90. Ibid. 91. See for example ZALN, 190, 192; Eleazar of Worms, Perush Sidur Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 506; idem, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit 65– 66; SHP §755, 1512, 1513. 92. These passages call into question the conclusions of Shapira, “Al haYeda ha-Tekhni veha-Teknologi shel Rashi,” 145– 61, who argued that Rashi had extensive technological knowledge, but was an exceptional figure in this regard. 93. BT Pesahim 118a. 94. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 103. 95. Based on BT Ta’anit 6b. On water as the “master” (ba’al) of the earth, see the discussion in Chapter 3 below. 96. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 29. 97. BT Hagigah 12a; cf. Isa. 34:11, and Sefer Yetsirah (Saadia version) 4:6. 98. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 19. 99. Ibid., 24. 100. Avraham b. Azriel, Arugat ha- Bosem, 2:168. 101. ZALN, 185. The same “proof” is cited in the name of Judah the Pious by Menahem Ziyoni in his interpretation of Leviticus 15:8 in Sefer Ziyoni, 154. 102. ZALN, 185.

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103. Ibid. 104. Eleazar of Worms, Perush Sidur Tefilah la-Roke’ah, 506. 105. ZALN, 188. Cf. Sefer Gematriyot, 84. 106. BT Shabbat 66b. 107. ZALN, 189, and cf. 190, 191. 108. ZALN, 185. 109. Ibid., 199, and cf. 201, 202; Eleazar of Worms, Sod ha- Merkavah, “Hilkhot ha-Kavod,” 193; Perush Sidur Tefilah le-Roke’ah, “Yoshev beSeter”; idem, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 335, 341, 401. 110. ZALN, 180. 111. ZALN, 185, and cf. 193 and 197. Menahem Ziyoni cites a similar “true proof” (mofet amiti) in the name of Judah in Sefer Ziyoni, 154. 112. ZALN, 188. 113. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 368. 114. Ibid., 367. 115. ZALN, 197– 98. The same “fact” is marshaled in a Pietistic Bible commentary; see Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 25– 26. 116. See for example Sodei Humash ve- ShIR, 130. Discussion of the barnacle goose in Hebrew sources can be found in Oppenheim, “Die BernickelGans” and Zimmels, “Ofot ha- Gedalim be-Ilan,” 1– 9. 117. See references in Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 367, 368. 118. Ibid., 346. The story appears in BT Tamid 32b. 119. A commonplace in biblical, and especially prophetic texts; see for example Ps. 148:9–13 and Isa. 55:12 (and see Stal’s discussion and notes in Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u- Penimiyot, 118–19). 120. Imrot Tehorot, 119. The reference is to Midrash Tehilim 93:6, where the emperor referred to is actually Hadrian; interestingly, Judah is correct in referring to Alexander, since the story of Alexander’s underwater journey was a common one in pre-midrashic Greek and vernacular sources; see further below on the Alexander Romance. 121. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 34. 122. This conceptual opposition between supernatural and natural was long linked to, and in turn strengthened by, a chronological opposition between premodern and modern. Historians and theorists who, following Max Weber, understood modernity to be characterized by a process of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) took for granted that a binary existed distinguishing an enchanted, superstitious premodernity from a naturalistic and comprehensible modernity. The long ubiquity of this paradigm, and its more recent dismantling, is comprehensively traced in Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment,” 692– 716. 123. See the discussion in the introduction, above, at n. 47. 124. Latour, Politics of Nature, 5. 125. The recent scholarship on this set of issues is enormous. For a sampling of the approaches scholars have taken to some of these issues, see the essays collected in Bensaude-Vincent and Newman, The Artificial and the Natural, and Daston and Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature. On the medieval period in particular, see Hanawalt and Kiser, Engaging with

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Nature. Influential feminist critiques of conceptions of nature include Merchant, The Death of Nature; MacCormack and Strathern, Nature, Culture, and Gender; and Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Among the most influential contemporary practitioners of “science studies” is Bruno Latour— see Latour, We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature. Classic works of intellectual history dealing with the changing definitions of “nature” include Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore. 126. Rothenburg, Hands End, xiv. See the discussion of “‘Nature’ in Quotation Marks” in Lancaster, The Trouble with Nature, 285– 92. 127. Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, 1– 2. 128. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, “Appendix.” See also Lewis, “Nature,” 24– 74. 129. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 4. For a trenchant critique of the slippage between medieval conceptions of “nature” and the modern construct of “the natural world” in the writings of Chenu and his followers, see Ritchey, “Rethinking the Twelfth Century Discovery of Nature,” and idem, Holy Matter. See also the sharp critique of “the academic industries deriving from these now tiresome clichés or banalities” in Epstein, The Medieval Discovery of Nature, 8– 9. 130. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, 2– 3. 131. Ibid.; Newman, God and the Goddesses, 51–137. On the invocations of “nature” by medieval scholastics in connection with same-sex desire, see Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful. 132. White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness. 133. The classic study is de Lubac, Supernaturel. See also Watkins, History and the Supernatural, 202– 25. 134. De civitate dei 21; Augustine, The City of God, vol. 7. 135. See the discussion in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 39–48, 123– 24. Indeed, Augustine’s views continued to be invoked and engaged with into the early modern period, when European overseas voyages reinvigorated fascination with the exotic and exceptional. See the discussion in Campbell, Wonder and Science; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Findlen, Merchants and Marvels. 136. An excellent survey is Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 193– 253. On the interplay between high medieval science and theology, see for example Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature; Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages; idem, Science and Religion. 137. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 12. 138. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 109– 33. 139. Ibid., 21–108; Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 37– 76. 140. See the discussion below. 141. Stannard, “Natural History.” 142. See for example Biow, Mirabile Dictu. 143. See Stoneman, Alexander the Great. 144. For a different perspective on “wonders,” see Le Goff, “The Marvelous in the Medieval West,” 27–44. Le Goff, in keeping with his general

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tendency to distinguish the “popular,” illiterate laity from the “elite,” literate, orthodox church, sees “wonders” as superstitious, supernatural beliefs that served as veiled resistance against the repressive medieval church. For a response to Le Goff’s approach, see Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 205– 6n.9. On the problematic nature of a neat dichotomy between “popular” and “elite” altogether, see the discussion in the introduction, above. 145. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 51. 146. Cited in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 73. 147. A term used by Bynum, “Wonder.” 148. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 558. 149. Cited in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 109–10. 150. Hansen, Nicholas Oresme and the Marvels of Nature. Another common method of defanging marvelous phenomena was to attribute them to the imagination, which was itself contiguous with humans’ rational faculties in medieval epistemology; see Karnes, “Marvels in the Medieval Imagination,” 332– 33: “In the context of medieval theories of marvels . . . imaginative accounts are not self- evidently mistaken. The medieval philosophers who attribute marvels in part to imagination intend to articulate a scientifically sound philosophy. Imaginative explanations are potentially legitimate, even rational.” 151. Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful, 36. 152. See the discussion in Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, 1– 34. 153. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 121– 22. 154. See for example Hutchinson, “Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution,” 233–53. 155. Park and Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 127ff. See the comprehensive work of Weill- Parot, Points aveugles de la nature. 156. The best recent overview of this revisionary approach to magic is Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages. In emphasizing the rationality and naturalness of much of medieval magic, Kieckhefer is (implicitly) disputing much previous scholarship that focused on medieval magic from an anthropological perspective; see for example Flint, The Rise of Magic. For a more explicit articulation of the methodological and historiographical issues at stake, see Kieckhefer, “The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic,” 813– 36; Jolly, Raudvere, and Peters, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 6– 26; Sigrit, “Magic and Human Reason,” 295– 316; and Hansen, “Science and Magic.” 157. See for example Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science,” and for Jewish parallels, Barkai, A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts, 80– 86; and Shatzmiller, “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures,’” 383– 407. 158. For a recent overview, see Brevart, “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion,” 1–57. 159. Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages; Ziegler, “Philosophers and Physicians on the Scientific Validity of Latin Physiognomy,” 285– 312.

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160. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 53–58; Ovitt, “The Status of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Classifications of Learning,” 89–105; Whitney, Paradise Restored; Truitt, Medieval Robots. 161. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 15– 90; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 129. 162. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 15– 90; Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, 111–48. 163. Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 2:267. 164. Williams, The Secret of Secrets. 165. The most comprehensive account of medieval Jewish astrological writings is Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica. For studies of specific figures, see for example Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science; Goldstein, “Levi Ben Gerson’s Astrology in Historical Perspective,” 287– 300. A helpful summary of medieval Jewish attitudes toward astrology can be found in Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 23– 29. On Maimonides’ views of astrology and its implications, see for example Langermann, “Maimonides’ Repudiation of Astrology,” 123–58; Stroumsa, “‘Ravings’: Maimonides’ Concept of Pseudo- Science,” 141– 63. 166. Schwartz, Keme’ot, Segulot, u- Sikhaltenut; idem, Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought; idem, “Astral Magic and Specific Properties (Segulot) in Medieval Jewish Thought,” 301–19. 167. Interestingly, this is identical to the solution proposed by Yahya Ibn Adi of Baghdad; see Langermann, “Gersonides on the Magnet,” 271– 72. For a comprehensive survey of medieval discussions of magnetism, see Smith, “Precursors to Peregrinus,” 21– 74. 168. She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Rashba 1:9. 169. Joshua Ibn Shueb, Derashot Rabi Yehoshu’a Ibn Shueb, 1:251. 170. William of Auvergne, De Universo Creaturarem, Prima Partis, Pars III, cap. 29; translation in William of Auvergne, The Providence of God Regarding the Universe, 171. 171. Commentary to Exod. 28:9. 172. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 277 (II:12). 173. Langermann, “Gersonides on the Magnet and the Heat of the Sun,” 267– 84. 174. The most comprehensive survey of medieval and early modern Jewish writings about magnetism can be found in Stal’s edition. of Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u- Penimiyot, 264– 99. 175. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 277 (II:12). 176. Langermann, “Gersonides on the Magnet and the Heat of the Sun.” 177. Smith, “Precursors to Peregrinus.” 178. In addition to the instance of vernacular-to-Hebrew translation that follows, there is possible evidence of Latin lapidaries that absorbed material translated from Hebrew. The discussion of gems in the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais includes a discussion of the compass cited from a certain pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de lapidibus. The passage in question uses terms (zaron for “north,” and aphron for “south”) that may be corrupted Hebrew

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(tsafon and darom, respectively). See Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 148n.10, and cf. Smith, “Presursors to Peregrinus,” 49–50. 179. Numerous copies of the Hebrew translation of Marbod’s lapidary survive in Ashkenazic manuscripts from this time period. See for example MS Berne, Burgerbibliothek 200 (copied in 1290), 104r–112r, and MS Oxford Bodleian Heb. d. 11 352r– 358v (the latter codex also contains a version of the Alexander Romance with which Judah the Pious was surely familiar— see the discussion below). For comprehensive treatment, see Freudenthal and Mandosio, “Old French into Hebrew in Twelfth Century Tsarfat,” 11–187; and cf. Mesler, “The Medieval Lapidary of Techel/Azareus,” 75–143. 180. Freudenthal and Mandosio, “Old French into Hebrew,” 59– 66. 181. Ibid., “Old French into Hebrew,” 50–51. 182. The description of the diamant is in Freudenthal and Mandosio, “Old French into Hebrew,” 84– 87, and see the commentary on 91– 95. Dating the lapidary’s discussion of the compass relative to that of Judah is impossible; Freudenthal and Mandosio argue that the passage was inserted between the mid-twelfth and early fourteenth centuries (contra M. Steinschneider, Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen, 964, and the conclusions of Bos and Zwink in their edition of Berakhyah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, Sefer Ko’ah ha-Avanim). 183. Indeed, stones that are useful in treating women’s ailments are often the most prominently featured in lapidaries; see Bos and Zwink, Sefer Ko’ah ha-Avanim, 10. 184. ZALN, 191. 185. Ibid. 186. Ibid., 185. 187. Ibid. 188. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 86. For a different perspective on these “philosophers” see Dan, “Ashkenazi Hasidism and the Maimonidean Controversy,” 34; idem, “Sipur Ashkenazi al Hitgayerut Melekh Aravi bi- Sefarad,” 31– 33. 189. Kieckheffer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 151ff. 190. See for example Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 375– 77. Cf. Dan, R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 149–50, who interprets this evidence in line with his views summarized above. 191. As noted by Dan, “Sarei Kos u- Sarei Bohen,” 34–43. 192. Policraticus 2.28, translated in John of Salisbury, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, 146–47. 193. Langermann, “Girsah Ivrit shel ha-Entsiklopediyah shel Guillaume de Conches,” 328– 29. 194. MS Cambridge— University Library Add. 1741, 1, esp. 7v ff. 195. I have cited from Gaster, “The Hebrew Version of the ‘Secretum Secretorum,’” 21. For a critique of Gaster’s edition of the text, see Spitzer, “The Hebrew Translation of the Sod ha- Sodot,” 34–54. The Secretum secretorum survives in numerous manuscript traditions, but, as Spitzer points out (45, 49–50), this text appears in all of the major recensions. 196. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 431.

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197. Juda he-Hasid, Sefer Gematriyot, ed. Stal, 255. 198. Spitzer, “The Hebrew Translation of the Sod ha- Sodot.” See also the discussion in Boyarin, “The Contexts of the Hebrew Secret of Secrets,” 451– 72. 199. Judah he-Hasid, Sefer Gematroyot, ed. Abrams and Ta- Shma, 5. 200. SHP §213, 1819. SHP §1459 refers specifically to sifrei sodot, or “books of secrets.” 201. Ibid., §259. 202. Ibid., §544. 203. Ibid., §427, 450. 204. Ibid., §346. 205. Ibid., §348. 206. In addition to these cases, Sefer Hasidim is also replete with descriptions of Jews who convert to Christianity, yet maintain close relationships with their Jewish family members and communities; see SHP §193, and the recent discussion of this issue in Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz; see also Levin, Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Northern Europe. In Sefer Hasidim, there is a similar story of a Christian who “had doubts regarding his god. He established a house of prayer [which he invited both Jews and gentiles to use], and said to the Jews, ‘When you pray, I shall pray with you to your god,’ and he said the same to the gentiles. There would be just a single beam separating between [the two prayer areas]” (SHP §1367). This proposal was rejected by the Jewish sage, but the very fact that such an arrangement was even conceivable attests to the close links existing between certain Jews and Christians within the Pietists’ cultural milieu. 207. On the medieval bestiary tradition, see for example Salisbury, The Beast Within, Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts, Crane, Animal Encounters. 208. While the majority of surviving bestiaries were produced and circulated in England, significant numbers were present in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury France and Germany as well. See the statistics cited in Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages, 145– 83. Indeed, the fact that the same knowledge contained in the bestiaries also appeared in encyclopaedic works composed in Germany, such as Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica, Bartholemaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum, Albertus Magnus’s Animalium, and, eventually, Konrad of Megenburg’s Das Buch der Natur attests to the geographic reach that these ideas had throughout high medieval Europe. 209. On the salamander, for example, see BT Hagigah 27a; BT Sanhedrin 63b; BT Hullin 127a; BT Sanhedrin 108b. 210. On this characteristic, see the discussion in Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 29– 39, and Hassig, “Sex in the Bestiaries,” 86. The notion itself can be found as early as Pliny, Historia naturalis (viii, 41). 211. On Jewish exposure to the lais of Marie, see the discussion in Chapter 4 at n. 107. 212. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, xviii, 15. See also the discussion in Steele, Medieval Lore.

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213. See Steele, Medieval Lore, 110. 214. Clark and McMunn, Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages, 135; McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, 138. 215. See for example Friedman, “Peacocks and Preachers,” 179– 96. For some examples from the English context, see Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 195– 204. See also Salisbury, The Beast Within, 125– 27, for details and references to additional relevant bibliography. 216. Described by Thorndike, “The Properties of Things of Nature Adapted to Sermons,” 78– 83. 217. Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages, 194. 218. Bale, “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290,” 141–42; Cohen, “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages,” 39– 62. 219. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 97– 98; Miyazaki, “Misericord Owls and Medieval Anti- Semitism,” 23–49. 220. On the hyena in particular, see Cohen, “Inventing with Animals.” 221. Translated in Historical Works of Geraldus Cambrensis, 36– 37. 222. The anti-Jewish implications of the Barnacle Goose’s properties was adapted from Gerald’s discussion into subsequent Bestiaries as well; see the discussion in Strickland, “The Jews, Leviticus, and the Unclean in Medieval English Bestiaries,” 213–14. 223. SHP §1809. 224. On the context within which encounters of this sort could have in fact taken place, see Baumgarten, “Seeking Signs?,” 205– 25. 225. In an excerpt from an Ashkenazic scientific treatise preserved in MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek (Preussischer Kulturbesitz) Or. Phillip 1392, fol. 141b, the salted fish reanimated by Alexander (see Chapter 1, below) are invoked in a discussion about the balance between the four elements, and the ability of a single element (in this case water) to predominate over the others: ‫ומתוך זה יש לנו ארבע יסודות אדמה מים איור אש ואע”פ שהפילוסופי’ אומ’ שאין ברייה נבראת אך‬ ‫ אין חיותו כי אם במים‬. . . ‫ אחת נברא ומחייה את דג מלוח שקורי’ הערינק‬. . . ‫ תמצא‬. . . ‫משנים‬. 226. On Jews and rabbits, see Epstein, Dreams of Subversion, 16– 38; Horowitz, “Odd Couples,” 253–55. 227. Resnick, “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses,’” 241– 63; Johnson, “The Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” 273– 95; Bildhauer, “Blood, Jews, and Monsters in Medieval Culture,” 75– 96. 228. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 137–43. 229. Judah he-Hasid, Sefer Gematriyot, 623. Cf. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Perush ha- Roke’ah al ha-Torah, 2:228, as well as the earlier, less developed allusion to rabbit physiology in Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary to Lev. 11:6. Later thirteenth- century references to the dual-gendered rabbit appear in the commentaries on this verse of Bahya b. Asher, Be’ur al haTorah, and in Isaac b. Judah ha-Levi, Paane’ah Raza. 230. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 344. 231. Significantly, prior rabbinic sources had linked the impure animals listed in Leviticus 11 (including the rabbit) to the gentile kingdoms under which the Jews had been exiled— see, e.g., Leviticus Rabbah 13:5.

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The invocation of rabbits and their workings for polemical purposes might have been understood in light of this motif; indeed, this seems to have been the understanding of Eleazar of Worms in Perush ha-Roke’ah al ha-Torah, 2:228. 232. As suggested by Reiner, Aliyah ve-Aliyah le- Regel le- Erets Yisra’el. 233. David, “Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi-Regensburg bi-Nusah Hadash,” 252–53. 234. Grünhut, Sivuv ha-Rav Rabi Petahiyah mi- Regensburg. 235. See for example the comparison in Kuyt, “Die Welt aus sefardischer und ashkenazischer Sicht,” 211– 31. On the conventional tendency to read medieval Jewish travel narratives positivistically, see the comments in Jacobs, Reorienting the East, 67ff. 236. On the “social logic of the text,” see Spiegel, The Past as Text, 3– 28. On texts that “look like history,” see Marcus, “History, Story, and Collective Memory,” 366, and idem, “The Representation of Reality in the Narratives of 1096,” 37. Marcus’s approach to the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles is extended by Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God. For a discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues at play in reading medieval chronicles containing “supernatural” contents, see Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England. 237. Jacobs, Reorienting the East. 238. See the comments of David, “Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi-Regensburg biNusah Hadash.” 239. Grünhut, Sivuv, 6. 240. Ibid., 6– 7. 241. Ibid., 21. 242. Ibid., 7. 243. Ibid., 6. 244. Ibid., 16. Hasan-Rokem, “Homo viator et narrans judaicus,” 93– 102, suggests that this “wondrous” bird seen by Petahiyah was in fact an owl—which would lend credence to my argument above concerning Pietistic knowledge of anti-Jewish Bestiary entries, of which the owl was perhaps the most prominent. But I am not sure on what grounds Hasan-Rokem identifies this bird as an owl in particular. 245. Grünhut, Sivuv, 19. 246. Ibid., 23. 247. As argued by Hasan-Rokem, “Homo viator et narrans judaicus.” By suggesting, albeit briefly, that Petahiyah’s narrative should be read in light of Pietistic theology, however, Hasan-Rokem opens up a new and productive approach to this neglected text. While she calls this methodology “folkloristic,” it is in truth very close to that employed by historians like Marcus and J. Cohen (see the works cited above, n. 236). On the potential links between historical and folkloristic methodologies, see Yassif, ‘‘Agadah ve-Historiyah,” 187– 220, as well as Moshe Rosman, “Omanut ha- Historiografiyah ve- Shitot ha-Folklor,” and Yassif, “Agadah ve-Historiyah bi-Mahshavah Shniyah.” 248. Grünhut, Sivuv, 1. Given that Petahiyah travels long distances by boat several times during the course of his travels, it is possible that the

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Pietists’ knowledge of the nautical compass, discussed above, derives from his own firsthand observations. Pietistic texts contain numerous other references to nautical realia— see for example Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 262. 249. Grünhut, Sivuv, 26. 250. I refer here to MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Heb. d. 11, a manuscript best known for containing the Sefer ha-Zikhronot of Eleazar b. Asher haLevi (available in a critical edition edited by Eli Yassif). The Alexander narratives contained therein were published and translated in Reich, ed., Sefer Aleksandrus Mokdon, and in Dan, Alilot Alexander Mokdon. On the medieval Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romance, see the comprehensive discussion in Dönitz, “Alexander the Great in Medieval Hebrew Traditions,” 21– 39. 251. Reich, Sefer Alexandrus Mokdon, 116–17 (modified translation). 252. The Pietists’ familiarity with the Alexander Romance can be independently verified from their incorporation of a tale from this corpus into Sefer Hasidim; see the discussion in Chapter 5 below. 253. Reich, Sefer Alexandrus Mokdon, 103. 254. Indeed, having shown that some strange elements of the story can be explained in light of textual parallels with the Alexander Romance, it is worth considering what other types of literary borrowings may have shaped Petahiyah’s Sivuv. Numerous events that happen to Petahiyah echo passages in rabbinic literature; thus his benefiting from the healing waters of the Tigris River may well draw on BT Ketuvot 77b, while the reference to “flying camels” likely draws on BT Makkot 5a.

Chapter 2 The epigraph is from Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 1– 33. 1. The best known exemplar (though by no means the first) is of course Maimonides, who included belief in God’s incorporeality in his list of principles or Jewish dogmas (in his Introduction to Perek Helek in the Perush haMishnayot). On the reception of this doctrine, see for example Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology, 45– 70. On the views of divine corporeality that predated the medieval Jewish rationalists (and that resonated well into the Middle Ages), see for example Wyschograd, Body of Faith; Lorberbaum, In God’s Image; Sommer, The Bodies of God. 2. The work of Elliot R. Wolfson has been foundational in working through the medieval kabbalistic conceptions of the human body; for a useful summary, see Wolfson, “The Body in the Text,” 479–500. 3. For a survey of the relevant sources, with particular attention to the determinative impact of Jewish- Christian relations on the issue, see KogmanAppel, “Christianity, Idolatry, and the Question of Jewish Figural Painting,” 73–107. 4. John 1:14.

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5. Ashkenazic authors read Saaidia’s Sefer Emunot ve- De’ot in an anonymous, pre-Tibbonide Hebrew paraphrase; see Kiener, “The Hebrew Paraphrase of Saadiah Gaon’s ‘Kitāb al-Amānāt wa’l-I’tiqādāt’”; idem, The Hebrew Paraphrase of Saadiah Gaon’s “Kitāb al-Amānāt wa’l- I’tiqādāt.” On medieval Ashkenazic approaches to divine incorporeality, see Kanarfogel, “Varieties of Belief in Medieval Ashkenaz,” 117–59; Lifshitz, Ehad be- Khol Dimyonot, 88–107. On the tensions within Ashkenazic esoteric writings regarding God’s body, see Moshe Idel, “Al Zehut Mehabrehem shel Shne Perushim Ashkenaziyim,” 67– 208. 6. The place of Shiur Komah in Ashkenazic esotericism is difficult to pinpoint. Moshe Taku, an avowed “corporealist,” rejected it as a spurious forgery (Taku, Ketav Tamim, 61– 62), even as the German Pietists revered it alongside their anti-anthropomorphic writings. See the discussion in Wolfson, “Metatron and Shi’ur Komah in the Writings of Haside Ashkenaz,” 60– 92. Joseph Dan has argued, paradoxically, that Shiur Komah was an “anti-anthropomorphic” work, which described God’s limbs using gargantuan measurements in order to demonstrate the impossibility of conceiving of God in embodied terms; see Dan, “The Concept of Knowledge in Shiur Komah,” 67– 73, and the expanded treatment in idem, Toledot Torat haSod ha- Ivrit, 3:887– 916. Cf. the treatment of Lorberbaum, Tselem Elohim, 55–56. 7. See the works of Elliot Wolfson referenced in n. 92 of the introduction, above. 8. See the discussion in Frojmovic and Epstein, “No Graven Image,” 89–104. 9. Dan, Torat ha- Sod, 32– 33. The Pietists’ approach to physical asceticism is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. 10. “Asceticism,” EJ, 2:549. 11. The classic study is Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. 12. The relevant bibliography is enormous. Select studies are cited as relevant below. 13. Foundational works include Gilman, The Jew’s Body; EilbergSchwartz, People of the Body; and Biale, Eros and the Jews. The focus on rabbinic discourses of the body was launched by the pathbreaking work of Boyarin, Carnal Israel, and has been further developed and refined by members of “the California school,” e.g., Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, and Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self; this approach has since sunk roots in Israel as well, e.g., Rosen-Zvi, Ha-Tekes she-Lo Haya. Attention to discourses of embodiment in medieval Judaism has focused predominantly on the Jewish mystical tradition, and the work of Elliot Wolfson has been particularly influential: see Wolfson, “The Body in the Text”; idem, Language, Eros, Being, idem, Circle in the Square. Other scholars who have contributed to this larger project include Hecker, Mystical Meals; Abrams, ha- Guf ha- Elohi ha- Nashi bi- Kabbalah; and Koren, Forsaken. A focus on bodily discourse has also been harnessed by scholars of Christian images of Jews, e.g., Kruger, The Spectral Jew; and Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference. For recent surveys and analyses of the place of the body in Jewish studies, see the

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articles collected in Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 3 (2005), on the theme “Overcoming Matter?,” and Diemling and Veltri, The Jewish Body. 14. This verse is cited only in the Bologna recension of this passage, but not in the Parma text; see the following note. 15. SHP §2 (p. 4); SHB §155. 16. BT Berakhot 60b. 17. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 758. The text is published, along with a brief introduction, in Beit-Arie, “Birkhot ha-Evarim,” 265– 72. 18. Beit-Arie, “Birkhot ha-Evarim,” 268. 19. The fact that the body referred to here is a male body is not inconsequential. As many scholars have pointed out, the idealized medieval body was generally a male one, and the Pietists were no exception in this sense. Significantly, though, when it came to empirical observation of the human body, and excavation of theological significance from its physiological workings (to be discussed in detail below), women’s bodies were fair game as much as men’s. 20. A similar list appears in a passage in Midrash Tehillim, 124a–b, which both Beit-Arie and Kanarfogel (Peering Through the Lattices, 74n.114) have linked to the Pietists, and specifically to the Birkhot ha- Evarim. 21. Beit-Arie, “Birkhot ha-Evarim,” 267. 22. See Beit-Arie’s notes to his edition of the text. 23. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 352. 24. Ibid., 332, 334. In his Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 128, Eleazar emphasizes the superiority of the form of the human body over those of the other animals represented in the throne world (i.e., the eagle, ox, and lion). 25. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 508. 26. See above, introduction, n. 23. 27. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, 2:1– 2, and cf. 4:12. 28. Moses of Coucy, Sefer Mitsvot Gadol, Mitsvot Aseh, §3. 29. Ibid. 30. “Otiyot de-Rabi Akiva” in BhM, 3:13. 31. Sefer Gematriyot li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 273. 32. See M Ohalot 2:8; Leviticus Rabbah 10:6; Targum Yonatan to Gen. 1:27. See also Stal’s discussion of this passage in his edition of Sefer Gematriyot, 164, 273. 33. See the discussion of man as microcosm below. 34. See Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices in Germany Around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sefer Asaph,” 149– 64; idem, “Doctors and Medical Practice in Germany Around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sefer Hasidim,” 583– 93. 35. Donnolo, Sefer Hakhmoni, ed. Mancuso, 254ff. 36. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 422. 37. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 506. 38. BT Niddah 9a; BT Bekhorot 6b; Leviticus Rabbah 14:3. 39. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 506. Cf. Sefer Gematriyot, 298, 502– 3.

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40. The origins of the term olam katan itself have been disputed among scholars. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 5:64, noted parallels in Babylonian writings and concluded that “there is no necessity to trace the haggadic conception of the microcosmos to the corresponding philosophical doctrine of the Greeks.” Adolph Jellinek, BhM, 5: xxv, claimed that the term was, on the contrary, a late one to enter the Hebrew lexicon, and that it was a translation from Arabic; Almog, Critical Edition of Moses Ibn Tibbon’s Olam Katan, 65n.4, invoked the Tanhuma passage cited here as counterevidence. 41. Midrash Tanhuma, Parashat Pekudei §3. 42. For an anthropologically informed survey of some rabbinic texts on “metaphorical microcosmism,” see Kiperwasser, “Ha-Dimui ha-Mikrokosmi be-Midrashei Hazal,” 387–408. 43. Published in BhM, 3:164– 95. 44. This text was published by Berliner, “Midrasch des R. Schemaja Schoschanni.” The identity of Shemaiah of Soissons (or ha- Shoshani) remains unclear. Israel Ta- Shma suggests that he may have been identical to Shemaiah of Troyes, Rashi’s pupil and scribe; see “Shemaiah of Troyes,” EJ, 18:456–57. Abraham Epstein linked him to the Shemaiah who was a pupil of Moses ha-Darshan, and who is cited in Bereishit Rabbati and Numbers Rabbah; see Epstein, R. Moses ha- Darshan aus Narbonne. Interestingly, Midrash Tadshe (see previous note) has been linked to Moses ha- Darshan as well; the latter famously was heir to much earlier Jewish and Christian apocryphal sources (see Himmelfarb, “R. Moses the Preacher,” 55– 78), some of which also explicate the correspondences between Temple and cosmos. See Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 125– 28. 45. Ecclesiastes Rabbah 1:4. 46. Pesikta Rabbati §20; this passage is cited in Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 26. 47. Avot de-Rabi Natan 31. 48. Ibid. 49. See for example Pesikta Hadta, published by Jellinek (as “Neue Pesikta”) in BhM, 6:36– 70. This text was dated to the twelfth century, and linked to the German Pietists, by Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 177. Pesikta Hadta also preserves some of the earliest material on Golem creation, a subject to which we return below. 50. BhM, 5:57. 51. Andrew Sharf contrasts all of the above aggadic elaborations of the olam katan motif with the later approaches of Shabbetai Donnolo, Joseph Ibn Tsadik, and others (on whom, see below). While the latter approach the microcosm-macrocosm relationship “systematically” and “realistically,” the midrashic sources are “fanciful” and “haphazard”— see Sharf, The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo, 60– 61. This distinction is to a great extent accurate, though it blurs the differences in the approaches of the various midrashic sources themselves, which I have attempted to highlight above. 52. See the discussion of Sefer Yetsirah’s cosmogony in Chapter 1, above. On the contested question of the dating and provenance of Sefer Yetsirah, see Shulman, “Is There an Indian Connection to Sefer Yesirah?,”

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191– 99; Wasserstrom, “Sefer Yesirah and Early Islam,” 1– 30; idem, “Further Thoughts on the Origins of Sefer Yesirah,” 201– 21; Langermann, “On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature,” 169– 89; Weiss, “Keneged Rakh ve- Kasheh,” 229– 42. Yehudah Liebes’s view (Liebes, Ars Poetica in Sefer Yezirah) that Sefer Yetsirah originated as a coherent (and anti- scientific) text in first- or second- century Palestine has been decisively rejected by the latter scholars, and by Wolfson, “Text, Context, and Pretext,” 218– 28. There have been a number of efforts to arrive at critical editions of Sefer Yetsirah— the current consensus seems to be that we can only speak of varying recensions, rather than of any single urtext; see Hayman’s comments in Sefer Yesira: Edition, Translation and TextCritical Commentary, and idem, “The Original Text of Sefer Yesira,” 175–186. 53. Many scholars have argued that Sefer Yetsirah was originally intended, or at least perceived, as a scientific or neo-Pythagorean text; by the twelfth century, more “mystical” interpretations tended to predominate (though there are indications that such mystical readings also circulated in the earlier Middle Ages). On this reception history, see Langermann, “On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature”; Dan, “Three Phases of the History of Sefer Yezira,” 155– 87; idem, “The Language of Creation and Its Grammar,” 129–53; Jospe, “Early Philosophical Commentaries on the Sepher Yezirah,” 369–415; Ben- Shammai, “Saadya’s Goal in His Commentary on Sefer Yezira,” 1– 9; Weiss, “The Reception of Sefer Yetsirah and Jewish Mysticism in the Early Middle Ages,” 26–46. 54. Sharf, The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo. 55. Al-Bargeloni, Perush Sefer Yetsirah. Scholarship on this work is scant, and a comprehensive study remains a significant desideratum. See Dan, Toledot Torat ha- Sod ha- Ivrit, 4:347– 80. 56. See Tannenbaum, The Contemplative Soul, 36ff. 57. The most comprehensive discussion remains Altmann, “The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism,” 196– 232. 58. Ibid., and see also Almog, Critical Edition of Moses Ibn Tibbon’s Olam Katan, 65ff. 59. Such are the terms used by Joel Kraemer, “Microcosm,” EJ, 14:179. On Ibn Tsadik, see Habermann, The Microcosm of Joseph Ibn Saddiq. 60. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 187 (I:72). 61. Ibid., 190. 62. Ibid. 63. Bland, “Medieval Jewish Aesthetics,” 544. 64. Indeed, while “philosophers” and “kabbalists” are used here for the sake of terminological simplicity, recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the shortcomings of using such ideal types as analytical categories. See the discussion in the introduction above. 65. Wolfson, “The Body in the Text,” 490– 91. 66. Ibid., 492– 93. 67. Wolfson, “Mirror of Nature,” 323– 24 (emphasis added). 68. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 340, and cf. 410.

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69. In Pietistic esoteric writings, linkages between elements of the universe and/or human body and the throne world are not uncommon; see for example Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 130– 32. 70. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 16; idem, Hokhmat haNefesh, 421, 438; Perush Sidur Tefilah le- Roke’ah 3, 503, 508, 727– 28. 71. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 242; Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 328. 72. Abraham b. Azriel, Arugat ha- Bosem, 4:105. 73. The term kipah appears frequently in midrashic sources as a description of the vaulted heights of the heavens; e.g., Genesis Rabbah, Bereishit §4. The terms appears particularly frequently in the Heikhalot texts on Ma’aseh Bereishit from which the Pietists frequently cited; see Schäfer, Konkordanz zur Hekhalot-Literatur, s.v. “kipah.” 74. The equation between the head and fire appears in Sefer Yetsirah (5:1), and is discussed elsewhere in Pietistic writings as well; see for example Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 261. 75. Cited from Agadat Olam Katan. 76. Based on Sefer Yetsirah 2:6. 77. Perush Sidur Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 503. 78. Ibid., 504. 79. Ibid., 505. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Based on BT Ta’anit 6b; see the discussion in Ilan, Massekhet Ta’anit, 20– 23, 146–49. 84. Perush Sidur Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 505. 85. See Chapter 1, nn. 93– 99. 86. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 29, 74. 87. On which see the discussion in Chapter 3. 88. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 505– 6. 89. Ibid., 506. 90. Ibid. Eleazar’s reference here to botanical realia might confirm Daniel Abrams’s contention that the Pietists had access to contemporary medieval scientific treatises; see Abrams, Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation in Medieval Germany, 45–47. 91. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 507. 92. On Ashkenazic texts attesting to knowledge of these correspondences, see Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica, 139ff.; to his list of manuscripts should be added MS Darmstadt Cod. Or. 25, fol. 71a–b. 93. See for example Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 323. 94. The most comprehensive such passage is Stal, Sefer Gematriyot, 269ff. 95. Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le-Roke’ah, 727– 28. 96. Perushe ha-Torah li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 1. Cf. SHP §500. The notion that semen remains in a woman’s womb up to three days before conception is completed is found in BT Niddah 33a–b. Cf. Genesis Rabbah 12:5, where similar logic is invoked, but with markedly different results.

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97. On this point see Idel, Golem, 72. 98. Sefer Yetsirah, chap. 3. To be sure, the cosmogonic scheme of Sefer Yetsirah is itself not always internally consistent, and the language of chap. 3 varies slightly from recension to recension; see the variants in Sefer Yetsirah, Hayman ed. Nonetheless, the disconnect between a system predicated on three avot and one predicated on four elements was profound, and necessitated many additional commentaries in addition to Eleazar’s; see the overview in Dan, “Three Phases in the History of Sefer Yezira.” 99. His discussion here is based on that of Donnolo, who proceeds in a similar though less detailed direction in the introductory section of his Sefer Hakhmoni, ed. Casteli, 25– 27. 100. This passage is found in varying degrees of clarity a number of times in Eleazar’s oeuvre; see Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 507; Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 29; Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 441. I have translated from the version found in Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, which is clearest, and seems freest of the copyist errors that mar the other texts. 101. I.e., the second sefirah. 102. Ru’ah [Elohim Hayyim], i.e., the first sefirah. 103. I.e., the third sefirah. 104. The text in Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 29, reads ‫ ומן האיור תולד רוח‬which, in context, is clearly mistaken. I have emended my translation based on the context. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 29– 30. 107. Eleazar of Worms, Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 507; Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 441. 108. Or perhaps “the wisdom of the planets” (hokhmat ha- mazalot)? 109. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 411; and cf. 344. 110. Sefer Gematriyot, 267– 68. 111. ZALN, 194– 95. 112. Ibid., 195. 113. SHB §162; in slightly different wording in SHPSHP, p. 14. 114. See also SHP §1450, 1460, 1473; Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat haNefesh, 359– 60. 115. Scholem, “Hakarat Pamin ve-Sidrei Sirtutim,” 246– 305; Liebes, “Hakarat Panim be-Kabalah,” 21–40; Davila, Descenders to the Chariot, 60ff. 116. For a brief description of this text, see Berliner, “Likutei Batar Likutei,” 182. For a discussion of this text and its relationship to the Pietistic texts discussed above, see Stal, Gematriyot, 913ff. 117. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 295. 118. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 137. 119. Scholem, “The Idea of the Golem,” in ibid. See the comments of Idel in Golem, xviii. 120. Schäfer, “The Magic of the Golem,” 249– 61. 121. Liebes, Het’o shel Elisha, 133– 37; Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, esp. chap. 2; idem, Golem:

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Mesorot Magiyot u- Mistiyot be-Yahadut al Yetsirat Adam Malakhuti, 271– 75; idem, “Golems and God,” 224– 68. 122. The question turns on the dating of a passage dealing with Golems in the Pesikta Hadta (on which see above, n. 49). The text is cited in the Perush Sefer Yetirah of Judah al-Bargeloni, ostensibly demonstrating that it predated the Pietists by at least a century (and that it was known in Sefarad before Ashkenaz). But it is possible that the “citation” in al-Bargeloni is in fact an addition by a later scribe; see the discussion in Dan, Toledot Torat ha- Sod haIvrit, 4:373ff. For a comprehensive treatment of the Golem traditions of medieval Ashkenaz, see Ben Shachar, Perush Sefer Yetsirah ha-Meyuhas li- Saadiah Gaon, 148–202. While accepting Dan’s critique of Idel’s dating of the passage in al-Bargeloni, Tzahi Weiss has argued that the tradition of Golem creation was indeed a more ancient one; see Weiss, “The Reception of Sefer Yetsirah.” 123. BT Sanhedrin 65b. 124. Schäfer, “The Magic of the Golem.” 125. Ben Shachar, Perush Sefer Yetsirah. 126. Al-Bargeloni, Perush Sefer Yetsirah, 250ff. On Pietistic exposure to the writings of al-Bargeloni, see Dan, Torat ha- Sod, 29. 127. Sefer Yetsirah 5:3. 128. Al-Bargeloni, Perush Sefer Yetsirah, 251. 129. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 293. 130. Sefer Yetsirah 6:4. 131. Donnolo, Hakhmoni, 73. 132. Al-Bargeloni, Perush Sefer Yetsirah, 252. 133. Sefer Yetsirah 5:6. 134. The text here reads shamayim (the heavens), but this is clearly a mistake, and should read esh, which (unlike shamayim) is one of the three amot to which Eleazar is referring here. 135. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 294– 95. 136. As per Scholem, “Idea of the Golem,” 184. 137. Based on Genesis 2:3; the actual verse reads ki vo shavat mi-kol melakhto asher bara Elohim la’asot— this passage truncates the verse in order to arrive at a particular notarikon— the final letters of kol asher bara are lamed, reish, and alpeh—which are numerically equivalent to 231, the same as the number of “gates” of letter permutations in Sefer Yetsirah. 138. Sefer Gematriyot, 487– 89. 139. Ben Shachar, Perush Sefer Yetsirah. 140. See discussion in Dan, The ‘Unique Cherub’ Circle, 16– 35. 141. In keeping with his overarching approach (on which see n. 121 above), Idel suggests that the motif of the creation of a Golem on whose forehead the word emet appears lends credence to the notion that ancient Jewish mysticism conceived of a celestial macroanthropos also associated with the word emet. This motif was presumably passed down to medieval Germany via the same “subterranean currents” discussed by Idel throughout his oeuvre. 142. Sefer Gematriyot, 565. Similar emphases on the word emet in the context of creation appear in Sefer Gematriyot, 696, and Eleazar of Worms,

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Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 141. See also Sodei Humash ve- ShI R., index, s.v. emet. 143. Soloveitchik, “Topics in Hokhmat ha-Nefesh,” 68. 144. Ibid. 145. Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages, 5, and cf. 174. 146. Dan, “Medieval Jewish Influences on Renaissance Concepts of Harmonia Mundi,” 135–52. 147. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century, 275– 76. 148. Allers, “Microcosmus,” 319–407. Less systematic but far more comprehensive is Conger, Theories of Microcosms and Macrocosms in the History of Philosophy. 149. Reynolds, God, Cosmos, and the Microcosm, 212– 69. 150. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 48. 151. An important exception, however, is Nemesius, On the Nature of Man, which does contain lengthy descriptions of the physical correspondences obtaining between man and his physical surroundings. Interestingly, Nemesius’ work has been identified by Giuseppe Sermonetta as a likely source of the microcosmic contents of Donnolo’s Hakhmoni. See Mancuso, Shabbatai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni, 62– 63. 152. See Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 34– 35; Delhaye, Godefroy de Saint-Victor: Microcosmos, 2:148. 153. Reynolds has traced the parallel between the soul’s relationship to the body and God’s relationship to the universe—what he calls “theological microcosmism”— and has shown that Patristic texts tend to focus on the soul- God component of this linkage, but not the body- cosmos one; see God, Cosmos, and Microcosm, 2. 154. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 25. 155. See the comprehensive survey of Campion, A History of Western Astrology, Volume II. 156. On the Cosmographia, see Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century; Newman, God and the Goddesses, 51– 65. On the role of microcosmism in the thought of the Chartrians more broadly, see Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 1–48; Evans, Old Arts and New Theology, chap. 3. 157. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 1–48. 158. Ibid., 31– 32. 159. McEvoy, “Philosophical Developments of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm,” 374– 81. 160. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 49–50. 161. Cohen, Synagoga conversa, 309–40; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 282–85. 162. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 29. 163. Of course, Hildegard and her audiences would have denied that she was “preaching” per se, an activity forbidden to women. But the term is apposite, and has been widely used by scholars; see for example Kienzle, “Defending the Lord’s Vineyard,” 163– 82, and esp. the extensive scholarship cited on 171– 72.

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164. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 163ff.; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 46, 48. 165. Hildegardis Bingensis, Liber divinorum operum; translated in Hildegard von Bingen, The Book of Divine Works, 2– 3. 166. Mews, “Religious Thinker,” 64ff. 167. Farber- Ginat, Tefisat ha-Merkavah bi-Torah ha- Sod be- Me’ah ha13; Abrams, Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation. See the discussion above in Chapter 1, at n. 83. 168. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 25. 169. MS Moscow— Russian State Library, Guenzburg 508, 14v. 170. See above, Chapter 1, n. 82. 171. Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias, 1:3. Indeed, the motif of universeas- egg was widespread in contemporary Christian texts, appearing in the writings of Peter Abelard, William of Conches, and Albertus Magnus; see Dronke, Fabula, 79– 99, and Appendix A. 172. Though see Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism, 79ff. 173. It should be noted, though, that this motif is also mentioned in the Hebrew translation of the scientific writings of William of Conches, found in MS Cambridge— University Library Add. 1741, 1, fol. 31. 174. A full study of possible linkages between the Pietists and Hildegard is beyond the scope of this chapter and remains a desideratum. In this context, however, it is worth calling attention to one additional, suggestive parallel. As we have seen in the present chapter and in Chapter 1, Eleazar refers repeatedly to the greenness (yorkei) of water and plants, and to the connection between this greenness and the tohu out of which God shaped the world. For Hildegard, too, viriditas (“greenness”) is central to the way God’s creative powers manifest themselves on earth, and in people. Alternately defined by scholars as “the resilience and vitality of nature and its source, the Holy Spirit” (Newman, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, 38), or “a living power in which the workings of God’s word is made manifest” (Mueller, “Die Stellung der Pflanzen,” 31), viriditas was invoked hundreds of times in Hildegard’s naturalistic and theological writings as the force through which all things on earth grow. Victoria Sweet has gone so far as to label viriditas as “the green humor,” a fifth substance, shared by plants and people alike, without which growth is physiologically impossible; Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky, 125–54; idem, “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine,” 381–403. Now the Pietists, as we have seen, argued that plants start out as green because of their intimate linkage with water, which is itself green, and that this parallels human fertility and sexual reproduction. Hildegard too claims that “in winter, the roots of plants have viriditas in them, which they put forth in summer as flowers” (Causae et curae 2.120, trans. Sweet, Rooted, 137), and that this viriditas is implicated in human reproduction as well—“if a man lacks his testicles, either naturally or from surgery, then he will also lack the virile viriditas” (Causae et Curae 2.140, trans. Sweet, Rooted, 151); and “the menstrual flow of a woman is her generating viriditas, her flowering, because, just like a tree by its viriditas produces flowers and leaves and fruits, so a woman by the

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viriditas of menstruation brings forth flowers and leaves as the fruit of her womb” (Causae et Curae 2.145, trans. Sweet, Rooted, 150). For Hildegard, “greenness” is intimately linked to water as well—for instance, “when there is enough blood, then water is in the body, which thus is moist enough for viriditas to flourish” (Causae et Curae 2.145, trans. Sweet, Rooted, 150). These conceptual parallels merit further inquiry. (In a brief aside, Hayyim Hillel Ben- Sasson once called attention to some similarities between Eleazar and Hildegard, and mentioned water in particular as one of the subjects in which both are interested. The specific example he cites, however, of Eleazar’s interest in the role of water in creation is in fact not original to Eleazar, but rather is a direct citation from Midrash Konen; see Ben- Sasson, “Hasidei Ashkenaz al Halukat Kinyanim Homriyim u-Nekhasim Ruhaniym,” 71.) 175. See the pioneering study of Saxl, “Macrocosm and Microcosm in Mediaeval Pictures,” 58– 72; and Cohen, “Making Memories in a Medieval Miscellany,” 135–52. 176. To say nothing of their writings on the ma’aseh merkavah, in which the symbol of the keshet figures prominently. 177. Based on BT Berakhot 61b. 178. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 111 20b– 21a. 179. Lorberbaum, “The Rainbow in the Cloud,” 498–540. 180. MS Bodleian Library Opp. 111 20b– 21a. 181. Ibid. 182. Crombie, Science, Optics, and Music, 63, 121; Boyer, “The Theory of the Rainbow,” 378– 90. 183. Fontaine, “Red and Yellow, Blue and Green,” vii–xxv; Meiron, “Mathematical and Physical Optics in Medieval Jewish Scientific Thought,” 172– 81. 184. Genesis und Exodus nach der Milstater Handschrift, 1:30: “Daz zeichen unsir sorgen / stat unuerborgen / ez ist grün unde rot / ez bezeichent wazzir unde blüt / die Christ oz siner siten her / uluzzen nach dem sper / da mit er wart gestochen.” 185. On the theological resonance of rainbows and other optical phenomena, see Scholem, “Colors and Their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism”; Idel, “Kabbalistic Prayers and Colors,” 17– 27. 186. Taku’s precise provenance remains unknown— possible candidates include the Bavarian town of Dachau and Tachov (Tachau) in Bohemia. On Taku’s biography, see Urbach, Ba’alei ha-Tosafot, 348–52; Arugat haBosem, 4:78– 81. For varying perspectives on his theological views, see the analysis and bibliographic survey in Dan, Ketav Tamim, and the works referenced in n. 5 above. Most recently, Tamas Visi has argued that Taku’s approach mirrors— and in fact drew upon— the Hanbalite school of Islamic jurisprudence. Visi argues that Taku would have encountered and familiarized himself with trends in Islamic jurisprudence during his sojourn in the Land of Israel— but the possibility that Taku ever visited Israel is based only on a single reference in a (possibly corrupt) sixteenth- century manuscript. See the discussion in Visi, On the Periphery of Ashkenaz, 141–47. 187. Taku, Ketav Tamim, 64.

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188. Ibid., 67. Taku erroneously believed that this work was composed by Abraham Ibn Ezra. 189. See esp. Taku, Ketav Tamim, 60– 61. Further research is required in order to more comprehensively situate debates over God’s body within the broader theological context reconstructed in this chapter. On the appropriateness of analyzing medieval Jewish theology through the lens of “incarnationalism,” see the discussion in Idel, Ben, and cf. Magid, Hasidism Incarnate, chap. 1. 190. Taku, Ketav Tamim, 64. In the same passage, Taku indicates that allegorical readings of rabbinic literature veer too close to the views of the Karaites, who rejected the rabbinic oral tradition. 191. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics, chap. 5; Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity, 250– 89. 192. Petrus Alphonsi, Dialogue Against the Jews, 52. 193. See esp. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 397.

Chapter 3 1. BT Berakhot 10a; the sugya links the five appearances of barkhi nafshi in Ps. 103 to five similarities between God and the soul— the first such similarity, corresponding to the first verse in Ps. 103, is God’s omnipresence in the world. 2. See the extended discussion in Chapter 5 below. 3. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 337, 338. 4. Eleazar’s lengthy and complex treatise on the soul, Hokhmat haNefesh, has been frequently reprinted, but it remains understudied by scholars. For an initial attempt at a synthetic treatment, see Dan, Toledot Torat ha- Sod ha- Ivrit, 6:595– 637, and see also Soloveitchik, “Topics in Hokhmat ha-Nefesh.” As this book was being completed, I learned of the work of BenYitzhak, Bein Shamayim va-Arets. Ben-Yitzhak seeks to impose a consistent and comprehensive order on Eleazar’s psychology, and in doing so highlights a number of important themes, including microcosmism. For material and analysis relevant to the subject of this chapter, see esp. pp. 67– 73. (I am grateful to Yehuda Galinsky for bringing this source to my attention.) 5. Rubin, “Mi-Monism le-Dualism,” 33– 63; Rosen-Zvi, Guf va- Nefesh, chap. 2. 6. Important studies of rabbinic notions of the body-soul relationship include Urbach, Hazal, 190– 226; Goshen- Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” 171– 95; Lorberbaum, Tselem Elohim; RosenZvi, Guf va- Nefesh. 7. See for example Genesis Rabbah (Vilna) 14:9. 8. See the discussion in the previous chapter. 9. Not least of all BT Berakhot 10a itself. 10. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 376– 77. 11. See Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 356, 365, and Sefer Gematriyot, 163 for knowledge of this scheme. Eleazar also cites a different scheme in Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 13ff, which posits the existence of “outer,”

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“middle,” and “inner” souls. Based on the context, however, this scheme seems intended to roughly correspond to Ibn Ezra’s view discussed below. 12. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 342. 13. On this see Soloveitchik, “Topics in the Hokhmat ha- Nefesh,” 65– 78. 14. This association is based on the link between blood and the nefesh in Deut. 12:23 (ki ha- dam hu ha- nefesh). 15. Avraham Ibn Ezra, Yesod Mora, chap. 7. 16. See for example Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 333, 336, 419. 17. Ibid., 327. 18. See also ibid., 365. In his “Topics in the Hokhmat ha- Nefesh,” Haym Soloveitchik minimizes the significance of the Pietists’ adoption of Ibn Ezra’s anatomical localizations of the components of the soul. “If one ignores the twenty-odd lines of matter in the Hokhmath Ha- Nefesh taken from Ibn Ezra, one’s understanding of the work is hardly impaired. Any theory may amount to influence if it becomes part and parcel of a central, shaping tradition, but the sundry scraps gathered by the tiny band of German Pietists formed no such thing. Under such circumstances its impact depended on how deeply it struck a responsive chord in its readers” (67). Soloveitchik argues correctly that the Platonic or Aristotelian background of Ibn Ezra’s approach were probably lost on the Pietists, but it seems to me that he misses the point in terms of the role played by the passages from Ibn Ezra in this work. The question is not whether or not the work as a whole is comprehensible absent these interpolations. Rather, it is why the Pietists would choose to cite precisely these passages from Ibn Ezra altogether. My argument is that the linkages between specific bodily sites and the soul appealed to them in light of their broader approach to the body and its relation to the soul. Soloveitchik himself admits that the description of the roles of the liver, heart, and brain crop up again and again in Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, and that in discussing the relationship between body and soul, the Pietists do not, as we might expect, denigrate the former at the expense of the latter. See also above, Chapter 2 at n. 143. 19. See for example Zohar 2:153a, and the discussion in Hecker, Mystical Meals, 204n.65. 20. Hecker, Mystical Meals, 75– 76. 21. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 336. 22. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 323; idem, Hokhmat haNefesh, 369; Stal, Sefer Gematriyot, 271. On this topic, see Kuyt, “Hasidut Ashkenaz on the Angel of Dreams,” 147– 64; Harris, “Dreams in Sefer Hasidim,” 51– 80; Dan, “Le-Torat he-Halom shel Hasidut Ashkenaz,” 288– 93. 23. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 419. 24. Ibid., 338, 419, 439–40. 25. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer Tagin, 415. 26. See the discussion in Soloveitchik, “Topics in Hokhmat ha-Nefesh.” 27. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 332, and see also idem, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 337, and Stal, Sefer Gematriyot, 270.

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28. See for example Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica II.36. 29. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 395– 96. Further discussion of medieval Jewish conceptions of mental illness can be found in ShohamSteiner, Harigim Ba’al Korham. 30. See the texts in Meltzer, Asaph the Physician, 104. It is impossible to determine whether this description of epilepsy originated with Eleazar, and was later incorporated into an Ashkenazic manuscript of Sefer Refu’ot, or whether it was adapted from Sefer Refu’ot by Eleazar (or whether both Eleazar and the later manuscripts of Sefer Refu’ot adopted it from some third source). See the discussion in Visi, “Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts,” 193n.32. I am grateful to Prof. Visi for sharing a pre-print copy of this article with me. 31. The same line of argument is included in Sefer ha- Maskil, MS Moscow— Russian State Library Guenzburg 508, fol. 20r. On the possible links between this text and Pietistic literature, see above, Chapter 1, n. 82. 32. Echoing Sefer Yetsirah 4:2. 33. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 15. See also the parallel passage in idem, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 421. 34. On this subject, see further in Chapter 5, below. 35. On rabbinic conceptions of the fetus and embryology see Kessler, Conceiving Israel. 36. Midrash Tanhuma, Parashat Pekudei §3. 37. See Otsar ha- Midrashim, 2:243ff. Indeed, Eleazar cites this version directly in Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 349; see also Sefer Gematriyot, 175– 76. 38. BT Avodah Zarah 5a. On the meaning this cryptic passage might have had in its original context, see the sources surveyed in Rosen-Zvi, Guf veNefesh, 14–16. 39. BT Avodah Zarah 5a, Rashi ad loc. 40. See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 72ff., 117. On the role of the pargod within the so- called “Circle of Sefer ha- Heshek,” see Liebes, “Malakhei Kol ha- Shofar,” 171– 96. 41. This passage is prefaced with the heading “In the name of R. Eleazar of Worms,” which makes it difficult to discern if this line about the anonymous rabbi was inserted by the copyist, or if Eleazar himself wrote this line. In either case, the general tenor of the passage that follows is identical to Eleazar’s views expressed in other sources, as we shall see below. 42. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Mich. Add. 9, 45v. This text appears in a number of other manuscripts as well, under the title Sod haYibum le-Rabbi Eleazar mi- Germayza; see for example MS Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 3152, 49v ff. The actual Sod ha-Yibum, however, is a later addition, which links Eleazar’s discussion of the differing place men and women occupy on the pargod to some classical kabbalistic interpretations of the commandment of levirate marriage. A nearly identical scheme of the yetsirat ha- vlad, which also emphasizes the corporeal nature of the souls prior to their implantation in fetuses, appears in MS Darmstadt Cod. Or. 25, 28v, under the title Yetsirat ha-Vlad li-R. Eleazar ben Yehudah mi- Magentsa. Presumably, this R. Eleazar b. Judah of Mainz refers to our R. Eleazar b.

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Judah of Worms (who was in fact born in Mainz). For similar treatments of embryonic “ensoulment” attributed to Eleazar, see MS Oxford Bodleian Library Opp. 160 fol 107v, 109v (transcribed and analyzed in Hollender, Piyyut Commentary in Medieval Ashkenaz, 125– 26). 43. BT Sanhedrin 22a. 44. Eleazar of Worms, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 330– 31, and cf. 401– 2, as well as Sefer Gematriyot, 170– 71. 45. Translated in Scholem, “Tselem: The Concept of the Astral Body,” 261. And cf. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 372; idem, Perush al Sefer Yetsirah, 165. 46. Idel, “Gazing at the Head in Ashkenazi Hasidism,” 265– 300. For further sources, see also Sefer Gematriyot, 853ff. 47. Sefer Gematriyot, 858. 48. Scholem (“Tselem,” 261) speculated that the concept first articulated by Eleazar might derive from “occult, hermetic sources unknown to us.” 49. Unlike many of the other Pietistic doctrines discussed thus far, the nature and origins of the Pietistic belief in these celestial demuyot has been rather comprehensively treated by scholars. For sources, see Soloveitchik, “Topics in Hokhmat ha-Nefesh”; Scholem, “Tselem”; and Dan, Torat haSod, 224ff. 50. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 425. In Sefer Tagin, Eleazar specifies that there are four deumyot— one for infancy, one for childhood, one for adulthood, and one for old age; see Sefer Tagin, 456. 51. See for example SHP §379; Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 30; idem, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 421; Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 50; and the discussion of man’s hair turning white above (n. 31). In Hokhmat haNefesh, 402, incidentally, Eleazar does seem to indicate that man has only a single demut, which does in fact age with him. 52. Also relevant to this discussion is the “rei’ah ha-guf,” scent of the body, which is discussed vis-à-vis the fate of the soul in the next world. In a number of passages, Eleazar invokes this to explain how the body too, and not only the soul, is physically punished for its sins; see for example Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 343, 348. Elsewhere, too, the Pietists emphasize the close connection that exists between the soul and one’s deceased body or corpse; see for example Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 364, 417, Perushei ha-Torah li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 55, and so on. On eschatology and the body, see further in Chapter 5 below. 53. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 34. 54. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 279ff. 55. Elliott, “Rubber Soul,” 96– 97, 112. For an example of a deceased soul who remains physically recognizable to a medieval visionary, see Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France, 93– 96, and the discussion in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 181ff. 56. Elliott, “Rubber Soul,” 96– 97. 57. Ibid., 92– 93. 58. Ibid. 59. I thank Dyan Elliott for sharing this observation with me.

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60. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?,” 1– 33. Of course, hylomorphism was itself a contested issue among medieval thinkers; see the comments of Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 248. 61. See for example Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 2:2. 62. “Asceticism,” EJ, 2:545. See the debate between Baer, Yisra’el beAmim, 20–57, and Urbach, “Eskesis ve-Yisurm be-Torat Hazal,” 48– 68. 63. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” 253– 88; Satlow, “And on the Earth You Shall Sleep,” 204– 25; Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists. 64. SHP §19 (pp. 23– 24). Similar penances are described in SHP §1556. 65. Ibid., §630. 66. Ibid., §18 (p. 23). 67. Ibid. 68. Such suicide is discussed in a responsum of Judah he-Hasid published from a Bodleian manuscript by Shpitser, “She’elot u-Teshuvot R. Yehudah he-Hasid be-Inyane Teshuva.” To my knowledge, texts of this sort have not been considered in the voluminous scholarship on medieval Jewish martyrdom (kiddush ha- shem), which not infrequently manifested itself in acts of suicide and even homicide. For an initial inquiry into medieval Jewish cases of suicide, see Shoham-Steiner, “Vitam finivit infelicem,” 71– 90. 69. Marcus, “Haside Ashkenaz Private Penitenials,” 57– 84. For a synthetic overview of the relevant sources, see now Kozma, The Practice of Teshuvah. Scholarship on Pietistic asceticism has tended to be oriented around the potential impact of contemporary Christian penitential praxes. Classic studies highlighting this dynamic include Baer, “Ha-Megamah ha-Datit-Hevratit,” 1–50; Rubin, “The Concept of Repentance Among the Hasidey Ashkenaz,” 161– 76; and Fishman, “The Penitential System of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” 201–29. Other scholars have emphasized the “immanent” roots of Pietistic asceticism within prior Jewish sources, e.g., Marcus, Piety and Society, and Schäfer, “The Ideal of Piety of the Ashkenazi Hasidim,” 9–23. The asceticism of the Pietists was extremely influential among subsequent Ashkenazic leaders and decisors; see Elbaum, Teshuvat ha-Lev ve-Kabalat Yisurim. 70. Thus Elliot Wolfson has claimed that “exoteric” texts on asceticism understate the extent of the Pietists’ disdain for the physical body, and that their true, “esoteric” position was far harsher, including the demand for near-total sexual abstinence. See Wolfson, “Martyrdom, Eroticism, and Asceticism,” 171– 220. 71. Kiel, “Toratam ha-Musarit-Datit shel Hasidei Ashkneaz,” 85–101. 72. Rubin has noted this dynamic: “The Pietists believed that divine retribution for a sin could, and should be forestalled by a voluntary acceptance of self-imposed chastisement that in their intensity would correspond to the punishment awaiting the sinner in Hell” (“The Concept of Repentance,” 170). Rubin links this rationale to teshuvat ha- mishkal on the basis of “measure for measure”— the implicit assumption that one’s eventual punishments would correspond to the pleasure derived from the sin in question. 73. SHP §89, and see also SHP §22, 632. Even SHP §13 (p. 12), discussing teshuvat ha- mishkal with reference to bodily pleasure (hana’ah), seems

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to be referring to the “pleasure” of not undertaking penances, rather than to the pleasure derived from the underlying sinful action. 74. Dan, Torat ha- Sod ha- Ivrit, 6:629– 32, and see the sources cited in n. 52 above. As a spiritual entity that nonetheless manifests physical properties, the “scent of the body” parallels both the soul and the demut. It also was invoked implicitly in medieval Ashkenazic texts that sought to make sense of the existence of corporeal revenants; see the discussion in Schur, “When the Grave Was Searched, the Bones of the Deceased Were Not Found,” 171– 86. 75. See above at n. 55. 76. Teshuvot Rabeinu Eleazar mi-Vormayza, 18–19. 77. Ibid., 34– 35. 78. Ibid., 19. 79. See the sources surveyed in ibid.,101. 80. The classic article on the subject is Zlotnik, “Mi-Agadot ha- Shabat u-Minhagehah.” 81. See above, n. 3. 82. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?,” 14–15. 83. On sexual abstinence and its implications for “the body,” see Brown, The Body and Society. On ascetic food practices among medieval women, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 84. Indeed, in a number of the passages describing man as an olam katan, the issues of sin and penitence are in fact raised. In Perush Sidur ha-Tefilah le- Roke’ah 508 and Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit 16, for example, man’s status as a microcosm is marshaled as a reason for why he must refrain from sinning— indicating that sin is seen as a rebellion against the body, rather than as characteristic of the body. 85. See above, n.62. 86. Cf. Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz, 51–102. 87. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 86. 88. Ibid. 89. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xvi–xvii. For this dimension of medieval conceptions of embryology in particular, see Mitchell, Becoming Human, which contains some interesting parallels to Eleazar’s treatment of embryological “ensoulment.” 90. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer Tagin, 415. 91. Ibid., 416.

Chapter 4 1. The bibliography on this shift is enormous; see the selected studies cited in the introduction. 2. The “hermeneutical Jew” was a term coined by Jeremy Cohen; see his The Friars and the Jews, and esp. Living Letters of the Law. Since then, scholars have probed Christian representations of Jews from a variety of methodological vantage points, ranging from intellectual history to art history to gender studies to critical theory; for representative examples, see

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respectively: Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth Century Renaissance; Lipton, Images of Intolerance; Lampert-Weissig, Gender and Jewish Difference; Kruger, The Spectral Jew. For a thorough recent treatment, see Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. 3. De civitate dei 21:8; translated in Augustine, The City of God, 57. For a lexicographical survey of the origins of the term “monster,” see Friedman, The Monstrous Races, 108– 30. 4. See the more extensive discussion below. 5. Recent discussions include Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, and Bildhauer, “Blood, Jews, and Monsters,” 75– 96. 6. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 111. 7. Kushelevsky, Sigufim u- Fituyim, 285 (emphasis added). See also Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale, 352: “The writings of R. Judah the Pious and his pupil R. Eleazar of Worms [contain] dragons, vampires, werewolves, and a host of other demonic creatures. These tales do not echo ancient Jewish literature, but medieval German folklore. It is as if R. Judah the Pious and R. Eleazar heard these tales from non-Jews— and wove them straightaway into their own works. . . . The tales and motifs never underwent a process of Judaization.” 8. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition. Trachtenberg drew substantially on Güdemann’s Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Abendländischen Juden, a work that manifests a similar overarching approach. Nearly seventy-five years later, Trachtenberg’s study remains the most comprehensive one available. 9. Dan, “Rabbi Judah the Pious and Caesarius of Heisterbach,” 308– 9. Cf. idem, “Sipurim Demonologiyim li-R. Yehudah he-Hasid.” 10. See the discussion in the introduction above, at n. 58. 11. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 245– 95; Wittkower, “Marvels of the East,” 159– 97. 12. Freedman and Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New,” 677– 704. 13. Ibid., 683. 14. Ibid., 684. 15. Freedman, “The Medieval Other.” 16. Cohen, “Monster Theory: Seven Theses,” 3– 25. See the historiographical discussion in the introduction to Bildhauer and Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages. For a snapshot of recent scholarship, see Mittman and Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. 17. Cohen, Of Giants, xiv. 18. Cohen, “Monster Theory,” 4. 19. In addition to the works cited above, see for example Williams, Deformed Discourse, and Verner, The Epistemology of the Monstrous. 20. Friedman, The Monstrous Races; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 173– 214. 21. Notwithstanding the exciting new scholarship monster theorists have produced, some scholars interested in alterity and the grotesque have been so eager to read the “center” of medieval culture from the vantage point of its margins that they have at times taken these methods beyond the point of

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usefulness. As Paul Freedman has noted, an overreliance on alterity as an analytic lens can lead to an “undifferentiated Othering” that elides differences and sets up a facile binary between a homogeneous mainstream and its monolithic Others. “Totalizing all unfavorable descriptions as if they fit into a single model of the alien,” he notes, all too often leads to “the fetishization of alterity” for its own sake (Freedman, “The Medieval Other,” 8–11). And indeed, one of the weaknesses of “monster theory” is that anything and everything can be deemed monstrous. Williams, for instance, has been criticized for grouping under the label “deformed” a wide array of phenomena that medieval thinkers would never have seen as linked, ranging from unicorns to numerology to the vagina dentata. And Debra Higgs Strickland, who has linked medieval discourses of demonology, anti-Judaism, and fear of Muslims in her Demons, Saracens, and Jews, labels as “monstrous” diverse phenomena that medieval thinkers themselves never described as such. 22. On rabbinic Jewish monsters, see Slifkin, Sacred Monsters, and BarIlan, “Yetsurim Dimyoniyim,” 104–13; for the medieval and early modern period, see Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science, 59– 88; Toaff, Mostri giudei; Berns, “Abraham Portaleone and Alessandro Magno,” 53– 66; Idelsohn- Shein, “The Monstrous Mame,” 37– 71. Finally, some of the specific texts treated in this chapter have been recently studied by David Rotman from a narratological/folkloric perspective; see Rotman, “Monsters, Metamorphosis, and Intra- Community Conflict,” 83– 98; idem, “At the Limits of Reality,” 101– 28. 23. Genesis Rabbah 23:6; Yalkut Shimoni, Genesis 4:39 and Chronicles 1:1072. 24. BT Bekhorot 8a, Rashi ad loc., s.v. Bnei Yama; Sifra Shemini 3:7, and Ra’avad ad loc.; Moshav Zekeinim to Lev. 11:10, s.v. mi- Kol Sherets ha- Mayim. 25. Rabbinic interpreters considered an array of biblical characters, including Og, Goliath, and the Nefilim, to be giants. 26. See Job 5:23, and Rashi ad loc.; M Kilayim 8:5; JT Kilayim 8:5; Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Or Zaru’a, Hilkhot Kilayim, §288; Samson of Sens to Mishnah Kilayim 8:5. See also Sperber, Magic and Folklore in Rabbinic Literature, 21– 25. For an alternate approach to adnei ha- sadeh, see Maimonides, Perush ha- Mishnayot to Kilayim 8:4. The notion of a human-plant hybrid most likely drew on classical descriptions of the mandrake, a plant whose roots were thought to resemble a human child. 27. It seems likely that the pygmies of BT Gittin 14b, described as having “their voices in their chests,” are intended to be Blemyae. 28. On the persona of “Eldad ha-Dani,” and the authenticity and originality of the works attributed to him, see Perry, Masoret ve- Shinui. 29. Epstein, “Sefer Eldad ha-Dani,” 50–51. A more developed version of the cannibal story is found in Judah Hadasi, Eshkol ha- Kofer, 29b; a lengthy tale of Eldad’s encounter with a race of Pygmies is recounted there as well. 30. On this figure, see Beit-Arie, “K.Y. Oxford Bodl. Or. 135,” 631– 34; Reiner, Aliyah ve-Aliyah le- Regel, 41ff. Menahem’s travelogue was printed in Luncz, ha- Me’amer 3, 36–46 (Pygmy ref. on 44–45). Pygmies are also

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referred to in Tales of Alexander the Macedonian, 33, 37 (for details on this work, see the following note); Ezekiel 27:11 and Rashi, R. Eliezer of Beaugency, and Radak ad loc.; BT Gittin 14b; Genesis Rabbah 37:5; etc. See also Hurwitz, “Pygmy-Legends in Jewish Literature,” 339–58. 31. Tales of Alexander the Macedonian, 89. Reich’s edition of this work utilizes the Bodleian MS of Alilot Alexander Mokdon, which Reich argues (not entirely convincingly) was of Sephardic origin. Whatever its original milieu, however, it seems likely that this version was known in medieval Ashkenaz, as it was appended to the Sefer ha-Zikhronot of Eleazar b. Asher ha-Levi (MS Oxford Bodleian Heb. d. 11). On this MS, see Yassif’s introduction to Sefer ha-Zikhronot. See the more complete discussion of Alexander Romances in Chapter 2, above. 32. Tales of Alexander the Macedonian, 47. 33. Ibid., 91. 34. Midrash Konen, in Otsar ha- Midrashim, 258. The notion that Tevel is a different plane of reality is not the conventional one in midrashic literature; more common is the claim that the references to Tevel in the Prophets and Hagiographa are climatological, and allude to one season of the solar year; see Genesis Rabbah, Bereishit #13. Interestingly, Eleazar of Worms cites an expanded version of this passage in his Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 34. 35. For fuller treatment, see Shyovitz, “Tevel and Its Inhabitants.” 36. BhM, 4:151–52. 37. Tos. to BT Menahot 37a, s.v. O kum gali. 38. In addition to the references above, see Eleazar b. Judah, Sefer Tagin, 458, where he invokes “men with the heads of dogs . . . a nation of people with horns, and a nation with the beaks of birds.” See the discussion in Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden in Frankreich und Deutschland, 1:213. In Perush ha-Rokeah al ha-Torah, 65– 66, pseudo-Eleazar describes sirens and adnei ha- sadeh as well. 39. BT Sanhedrin 67a–b, 68a. 40. See for example Tos. of Solomon of Sens, cited in Shitah Mekubetset to BT Bava Kama 16a. 41. Ibn Ezra to Dan. 4:28. See also the discussion of Shoham- Steiner, Harigim Ba’al Korham, 122– 25. 42. Rashi to Gen. 3:14. 43. SHB §166; a nearly identical passage is found in Eleazar’s Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 362. 44. One of the most influential werewolf tales of antiquity, Ovid’s account of King Lycaon in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, emphasized that King Lycaon’s eyes remained identical even after his transformation into a wolf. See Massey, Corpus Lupi, 56n.21– 23. 45. BT Niddah 24b. Cf. Sifra to Tazri’a, 1:7. 46. Huss, “Demonology and Magic in the Writings of R. Menahem Ziyyoni,” 55– 72. 47. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, 233– 72; Idel, “Enoch is Metatron”; Abrams, “The Limits of Divine Ontology,” 291– 321. Interestingly, Enoch is himself described as a “wildman” in

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a number of Pietistic and contemporaneous Ashkenazic sources— perhaps indicating that the perceived links between Enoch and lycanthropy were even more fundamental than I have described. See Tos. to BT Yevamot 16b, s.v. “Pasuk,” and Perushei ha-Torah li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 9, 16n.60. See also Ben- Sasson, “Hasidei Ashkenaz al Halukat Kinyanim Homriyim u-Nekhasim Ruhaniyim bein Bnei Adam,” 68n.49. 48. Menachem Ziyoni, Sefer Ziyoni, 25-26. 49. Ziyoni (or Judah) supports his interpretation by citing Job 5:23, “You will be at peace with the stones of the field (avnei ha- sadeh)” (Job 5:23). This apparent non sequitur is explicable in light of Rashi’s commentary to the verse in Job, in which he defines the avnei ha- sadeh using the French term garou— or werewolf; see Rashi to Job 5:23. Rashi, in turn, was basing his definition on the Mishnah in Tractate Kilayim (8:5) which explains that “men of the field” (adnei ha- sadeh) are creatures that have an intermediary status between men and beasts. See also Ginzburg, “Beitrage zur Lexicographic des Aramaischen,” 327– 33; Perles, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Hebraischen und Aramaischen Studien, 125; and above, n. 26. 50. MS London, British Library MS Or. 10855, which was copied in Damascus in 1669, begins with Perush Rabeinu Ephraim al ha-Torah; but unlike other surviving versions of this work, the British Library MS contains sections titled “mi-Ketivah Ashkenazit” (“from an Ashkenazic work”) interspersed throughout the actual commentary of R. Ephraim himself. These addenda have long been attributed to Eleazar b. Judah (by R. Hayyim Yosef David Azoulai and others), and many of the specific interpretations found in these sections have close parallels in other exegetical works associated with the German Pietists; see the unpaginated “Editor’s Introduction” of Leitner and Korah to the recent edition of this MS, Perush Rabeinu Ephraim. As we shall see below, the specific terminology used in the passage relevant for our purposes suggests unequivocally that it derived from the Pietistic school. 51. Nishan al ha- rofe. The precise meaning of this phrase is unclear; in context, it seems to mean something like “[Benjamin] would depend upon [Jacob] for a cure,” though this would require emending rofe to refu’ah. 52. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 167. Cf. Perushei ha-Torah li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 57. 53. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 167. Cf. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 540, fol. 12a, where the author (R. Judah the Pious?) asserts that the legs of a werewolf in fact emerge from between his elbows (bein atsilei yadav— cf. the description of a ba’al ov in BT Sanhedrin 65b, as well as SHB §774), rather than his shoulders. (That passage also contains instructions for killing werewolves that differs from the ash-scattering method described below: “[A werewolf] cannot be struck by a sword— it can only be stabbed with wood through its mouth or through its anus until it dies.”) 54. See Onkelos, Targum Yonatan, Targum Yerushalmi, Rashi, and Ibn Ezra ad loc. 55. BT Megillah 26a; BT Zevahim 54b. 56. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 167. In Sefer Gematriyot, 277, the reader is informed that it is a bad sign if a snail digs in one’s house and casts dirt

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about. The snail is referred to there using the lo’az “minvolf” (‫—)מונוולף‬ which is phonetically similar to “werewolf,” ‫וירוולף‬. Might the notion that werewolves are harmed by casting dirt around one’s house derive from this linkage? 57. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 58. Ibid. The citation of Ps. 111:4 in this context confirms that this passage was composed by someone familiar with Pietistic thought, for the Pietists were unique in invoking this verse in this manner— see Chapter 1 above. Cf. also Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Sefer ha- Shem, 48–49. 59. Cf. SHP, 14, where wild hogs are said to have both upper and lower teeth, which they use to fight off attackers; hence, it seems logical that the reference here to kosher animals only having lower teeth refers to their not having fangs, unlike hogs, the prototypical “impure” animal. 60. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 167. 61. SHP, §171. 62. For a different approach, see Shoham- Steiner, Harigim Ba’al Korham, 244ff. 63. Dan, “The Book of the Divine Name,” 129– 77. 64. Lorberbaum, Tselem Elohim. 65. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer ha- Shem, 93. Cf. Perush Rabeinu Ephraim, 23. 66. Sefer Gematriyot, ed. Abrams and Ta-Shma, “Introduction”; Abrams, “From Germany to Spain,” 85–101. On the range of exegetical methods in medieval Ashkenazic Bible commentaries, see now Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz, 111– 374. 67. This view led to a second common explanation of the term “monster,” in which the latter was understood to be derived from the Latin infinitive monere, “to warn.” This etymology was apparently first propounded by the Roman encyclopedist Marcus Terrentius Varo; it is reported in the writings of Augustine (De civitate Dei, 21), and of Isidore of Seville (Etymologies, 11:iii:1). 68. Friedman, Monstrous Races, 3. 69. Isidore, Etymologies, op cit.; translated in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 243. 70. De civitate dei 16.8. 71. Ibid., 18.16–18. 72. See Kratz, “Fictus Lupus,” 57– 80, and Massey, Corpus Lupus, 59– 93. 73. Friedman, Monstrous Races, 22. For a survey of the Anglo- Saxon teratological tradition, see Verner, Etymology of the Monstrous; an important recent contribution is Mittman, Maps and Monsters. 74. Translated in Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 1:179– 80. 75. Burchard of Worms, Decretorum, Book 19 (De Poenitentia), in PL 140:971, translated in Kratz, “Fictus Lupus,” 63. 76. Ibid. 77. Cf. The Homilies of Wulfstan, 240–41, and Massey, Corpus Lupus, 79ff. Even those authors who did describe apparent metamorphoses, like Caesarius of Heisterbach, took pains to deny that any ontological transformation was taking place; see Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 103–4.

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78. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 94. 79. Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf, 39–126; Smith, “A Historical Study of the Werewolf in Literature,” 1–42. On theological valences in the “werewolf romances,” see Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies, 47–49. On Norse and Icelandic sagas, see Davidson, “Shape- changing in the Old Norse Sagas,” 126–42. Because the written versions of these sagas often reflect the final redaction of oral traditions going back several centuries, however, it is difficult to link the predominance of werewolves in these sources to that in the werewolf romances cited above. 80. On the twelfth- century “Ovid revival,” see Desmond, Ovid in Medieval Culture; Clark, Coulson, and McKinley, Ovid in the Middle Ages. 81. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 77–111. 82. Though cf. Harf-Lancner, “La métamorphose illusoire,” 208– 26. 83. De universo 2.iii.13; Guilielmi Alverni, Opera omnia, 1:1043–44. 84. Summa theologica 1, q. 114, art. 4. 85. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales. 86. Historical Works of Geraldus Cambrensis, 79ff. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Sargent, “Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica,” 241– 62. 91. Historical Works of Geraldus Cambrensis, 82. 92. Ibid., 84. 93. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 17. 94. Massey, Corpus Lupus, 120. 95. Ibid., 124–56. 96. Rubin, Corpus Christi, esp. 319ff.; Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith, chap. 6. Significantly, such anxieties about the plausibility of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist were frequently expressed in relation to contemporary Jews, and transformed into accusations of ritual murder and host desecration; see the foundational discussion in Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, and idem, History, Religion, and Antisemitism. 97. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, xxv–lxii. 98. Ibid., 813. 99. Ibid., 813–15. 100. Ibid., 87. 101. On the visual motif of serpents with female heads, which appeared in both Jewish and Christian illustrations of the story of Eve’s temptation, see Laderman, “Two Faces of Eve,” 1– 20. 102. Later in the same passage, Gervase admits, “I do not know whether to attribute all this to an optical trick by which the witnesses are deceived, or whether it is a result of there being demons at large in the world which suddenly reconstitute the elements of the things we are talking about, which is what Augustine says” (Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 89). His discussion of Raimbaud and Chaucevaire, however, seems to presuppose real metamorphosis, and suggests that his cautious tone here is simply an attempt to “cover his bases.”

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103. Wolf, “The Ebstorf Mappamundi and Gervase of Tilbury,” 1– 27. 104. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 828– 31. The talmudic passage in question is BT Hagigah 12b. 105. Ibid., 828n.1. 106. On the Christian Hebraism of the high Middle Ages, and the interpersonal contacts it engendered between Jews and Christians, see for example Signer, “Polemic and Exegesis,” 21– 32. 107. Chernick, “Marie de France in the Synagogue,” 183– 205; Einbinder, “Signs of Romance,” 221– 33; Bibring, “Would That My Words Were Inscribed,” 309– 31. 108. See Chapter 1 at n. 211. 109. Though there is certainly evidence of close contacts in this period between English and Franco- German Jewry. In the case of the Pietists in particular, the connection between figures like Elhanan b. Yakar of London and the Pietists has been discussed by Joseph Dan and others, and it has been suggested that Elhanan had access to Christian texts in their original Latin; see Vajda, “De quelque infiltrations chretiennes,” 15– 34. 110. The King’s Mirror, 22ff. Bartlett (Gerald of Wales, 5) has cautioned against confining Gerald to his immediate British context, arguing that “Gerald’s years at Paris and the internationalism of twelfth- century culture in general mean that he cannot be understood by reference to the English (or British) context alone. He must be related to the development of scholasticism and naturalism in the Latin West.” Cf. Akbari, “Between Diaspora and Conquest,” 30. 111. Fishman, “The Penitential System of Hasidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries,” 201– 29, esp. 215–17. 112. Topography of Ireland, 36– 37. 113. On the medieval application of Matt. 7:15 (“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”) to heretics, see Bueno, “False Prophets and Ravening Wolves,” 35– 65. 114. This case is dated to 970, and reported on in the sixteenth century by Johannes Trithemius in his Chronicon Monasterii Hirsgauensis, as cited in Bodin, De magorum demonomania, 240. See the discussion in Peuckert, “Jude, Jüdin,” in Bächtold- Stäubli and Hoffmann-Krayer, Handwörterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens, 4:811–13. 115. See the discussion and references in Rubin, Gentile Tales, 25– 36. 116. See MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 5668, fol. 63v (1373): “Qui crediderit vel affirmaverit lupos in homines mutari qui vulgariter dicuntur werewolf x diebus in pane et aqua peniteat. Mores enim et ritus gentilium quidam perversi et infidels imitantur affirmando quid fatalis, qui in vulgari dicuntur gaschepfen, hoc faciant dum puer nascitur quod quandocumque ille homo voluerit in lupum se transformare possit quem vulgaris stultitia werewolf appellat. Sed hoc numquam fieri potest, ut ymago hominis ad similitudinem dei facta in aliam formam aut speciem transformetur ab aliquo nisi a solo deo. Et ergo qui credit vel affirmat humanam naturam transformari in aliam speciem vel similitudinem seu quovis modo in melius

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aut deterius mutari nisi ab ipso creatore per quon omnia facta sunt proculdubio infidelis est et deterior iudeo vel pagano.” Albert’s Speculum clericorum is the subject of a forthcoming study by Deeana Klepper, and I am grateful to Prof. Klepper for sharing this material with me. 117. SHB §464; SHP §1465. 118. Borchers, “Hexen im Sefer Hasidim”; Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 13–14, 37ff. 119. Medieval Jewish sources on striya and brosam can be found in Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 278n.34; a more comprehensive bibliography is in Sefer Gematriyot, 795– 803. See also Dan, “Sipurim Dimonologiyim.” 120. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 39, 279n.38. 121. See for example M Avot 5:6; Tanhuma to Genesis, §17. 122. Eleazar b. Judah, Sefer Tagin, 424, and cf. 428, 432, 434. 123. Ibid., 426. 124. Eleazar of Worms, Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 3. 125. Eleazar of Worms, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 329. In a passage on lycanthropy in MS Oxford Bodleian Opp. 540 (see above, n. 53), the author similarly asserts that “demons’ bodies are extraneous to them” (guf ha- shedim huts me- hem). 126. Sefer Gematriyot, 166. 127. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Sefer ha- Shem, 209, and cf. 206. 128. While these sources do not cite rabbinic precedents explicitly, they may have implicitly drawn on rabbinic passages that note demons’ propensity for transformation, e.g., Avot de- Rabbi Natan A 37:3, BT Hagigah 16a. 129. Moshe Taku, Ketav Tamim, 61. 130. SHP §379. This passage was adapted by the Pietists from a contemporary legend about Alexander’s birth, which circulated in Hebrew; see Dan, “Sipurim Demonologiyim,” 12n.13, and the more comprehensive discussion of Hebrew Alexander romances in Chapter 1 above. For a recent treatment of this tale, see Rotman, “At the Limits of Reality,” 112–17. 131. On medieval notions of demonic and angelic embodiment, see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, esp. 127–56. 132. Ibid., 134. 133. Quay, “Angels and Demons,” 20–45. 134. Elliot, Fallen Bodies, 136– 37. 135. See Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 176– 222. 136. On post-medieval approaches to lycanthropy, see the sources and studies collected in Otten, A Lycanthropy Reader. Classic studies of these later periods include Summers, The Werewolf, and Douglas, The Beast Within. 137. In addition to the sources cited above, see Ziyoni’s discussion of demonic bodies in Sefer Ziyoni, 156–59. On the Pietistic sources utilized by Ziyoni in this passage, see Huss, “Demonology and Magic in the Writings of R. Menahem Ziyyoni,” 57. Significantly, a reworked version of this passage from Sefer Ziyoni appears in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Mich. Add. 9 fol. 45b–46a, where it is appended to Eleazar b. Judah’s discussion of

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Yetsirat ha-Vlad (discussed at length above, Chapter 3). This juxtaposition suggests that a subsequent editor perceived the underlying meaning of these two passages to be linked. 138. Gedalyah Ibn Yahya, Shalshelet ha- Kabbalah, 219 (emphasis added). 139. While werewolves continued to be included in such typologies of the monstrous races, the majority of early modern teratological writings were focused on “’monstrous births” in particular. See Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 173– 214; for Jewish analogues, see Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science, 74– 88, and Berns, “Abraham Portaleone and Alessandro Magno,” 53– 66. 140. Mayse- Bukh §227; see the study of Starck-Adler, “Mayse- Bukh and Metamorphosis,” 156– 72. 141. In Praise of Ba’al Shem Tov (Shivhei ha- Besht), 12ff. 142. See the discussion in Liptzin, A History of Yiddish Literature, 301. 143. See for example Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 104– 9; Blum, “AntiSemitism in the Freud Case Histories,” 90– 93. 144. On October 25, 2007, the New York Times devoted a relatively lengthy, four- column article to the phenomenon (Wyatt, “Today I Am a Werewolf”). The piece noted that while 30 Rock had long had difficulty garnering a sizable viewing audience, “television-related Web sites, blogs and message boards . . . have been replaying and kvelling over ‘Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,”’ and that the sketch “had drawn more commentary from fellow comedy writers than any previous segments on the show.” 145. The link between Jews and werewolves was in the news once again in late 2014 and early 2015, when the Argentinian president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner symbolically “adopted” Yair Tawil, the seventh child of a Jewish Argentine family— apparently in keeping with a local tradition meant to prevent such a seventh son from turning into a werewolf (el lobison). The initial report (“Argentina’s President Adopts Jewish Godson Under Law to Counteract Werewolf Legend”) was subsequently disputed (Goni, “No, Argentina’s President Did Not Adopt a Jewish Child to Stop Him Turning into a Werewolf”) and in turn defended (Melamed, “Werewolf Adoption Story was 100% Kosher”). 146. Cited in Martin, “Curt Siodmak Dies at 98.” 147. Wexler, “TV: Should Jews Save the Werewolf from Extinction?”

Chapter 5 The epigraph is taken from the blog “Hagahot,” http://manuscriptboy. blogspot.com/2011/02/underappreciated-hagahot.html (accessed February 21, 2014). 1. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 435– 36 (III:8). 2. On Maimonides’ rejection of an essentialist model of Hebrew’s “holiness,” see Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, 155ff. 3. See for example Dan, The Unique Cherub Circle, 252– 73. 4. On the treatment of excrement in the writings of Maimonides, see now Stern, The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide, 350– 94.

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5. See for example BT Yoma 29b– 30a; BT Shabbat 49a; BT Berakhot 23a– 26a, 62a. The copious rabbinic discussions of excretion and privy comportment have only recently come in for comprehensive study. See Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability, 53– 76; Neis, ‘“Their Backs Toward the Temple, and Their Faces Toward the East,’” 328– 68; Balberg, “In and Out of the Body,” 273– 87. On the prayer to be recited prior to entering a privy, see Septimus, On the Boundaries of Prayer, 24– 93, and Bamberger, “An Akkadian Demon in the Talmud,” 282– 87. 6. BT Keritot 6a. Cf. the rabbinic interpretation of Deut. 23:12–14 as prohibiting excretion on the Temple Mount; on these verses and the history of their interpretation, see in detail below. 7. Medieval Ashkenazic conceptions of ritual impurity have been extensively studied in recent years, with scholars emphasizing the relatively heightened restrictiveness of Ashkenazic men and women. These studies have not explored Ashkenazic views of excrement in this context, nor have they accounted for the remarkably similar restrictions that Ashkenazic rabbis prescribed regarding excrement and other sources of impurity like menstrual blood. See for example Ta-Shma, “Harhakat Nidah be-Ashkenaz ha-Kedumah,” 163– 70; Woolf, “Medieval Models of Purity and Sanctity,” 263– 80; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz, 21–50; Shoham- Steiner, “An Almost Tangible Presence,” 54– 74. 8. PT Pe’ah 7:12. 9. SHP §537. 10. SHP §538, and cf. §1627, which rules that a synagogue building cannot be attached to any adjacent buildings, lest excrement come to be indirectly in contact with the walls of the synagogue. 11. SHP §540. 12. SHP §432. And see also §1064. Cf. the interpretation of this verse in Jacob Anatoli, Malamad ha-Talmidim, 45a–b. 13. SHP §432. 14. See for example SHP §104, 609, 639, 683, 1073, 1663. Interestingly, the attitude toward children in Pietistic writings as a whole is almost uniformly negative. Children are depicted as not only filthy, and thus as threatening to holy pursuits, but generally as impediments to piety and proper religious comportment. Sefer Hasidim and other Pietistic works repeatedly emphasize that the mark of a truly pious man is his neglect of his wife and children, and his refusal to succumb to their blandishments; see Ta- Shma, “Children in Medieval Germanic Jewry,” 263– 80; and Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 154– 83. 15. SHP §1613. 16. Ibid., and cf. §440 and 1612 as well. 17. SHP §1065. 18. Ibid. 19. BT Berakhot 25a, based on Ps. 150:6. 20. Ibid., 25b. 21. SHP §578; see also §771. 22. SHP §799.

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23. SHP §1638*. 24. On attitudes toward books and other written materials in Sefer Hasidim, see Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 182– 217. 25. SHP §683, 799. 26. SHP §668. 27. SHP §730, 1758. 28. SHP §729. 29. M Yadayim 4:7; M Makhshirin 5:9. 30. Only in two cases did the rabbis admit that nitsok could indeed impart impurity. One was when the liquid being poured was especially thick, like honey; this is clearly not true of the relevant passage from Sefer Hasidim, which explicitly mentions water. The other case in which nitsok was a problem was regarding yeyn nesekh (gentile wine). If one poured out a libation to an idolatrous cult, the remaining wine in the cup would be prohibited. For the Pietists to create a prohibition on contact with excrement even partially based on the laws of yeyn nesekh—which, as Haym Soloveitchik has noted in Yeynam, was the most vile taboo medieval Jews could imagine—tells us a great deal about the prominent role excremental anxiety plays in Pietistic thought. 31. SHP §685. 32. SHP §1066. 33. SHP §575. 34. SHP §1643. 35. SHP §1935. 36. SHP §539. 37. This locution is based on BT Berakhot 24b. 38. SHP §115. 39. SHP §833. 40. SHP §876. 41. See for example SHP §568 (which derives in part from BT Berakhot 62a). 42. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer ha- Roke’ah, Hilkhot Hasidut, Shoresh Taharah. Semen, and its linkage with excrement, is discussed further below. 43. SHP §1974. 44. Perushei ha-Torah li-R. Yehudah he- Hasid, 74. Might this same idea explain the cryptic instruction, contained in another Pietistic text, that one should never defecate beneath a nut (egoz) tree, lest he be considered liable for capital punishment?! See Dan, “Hokhmat ha-Egoz,” 81, and the discussion of sod ha- egoz in Chapters 2 and 3 above. 45. BT Berakhot 60b. 46. Rashi to BT Berakhot 60b, s.v. “u- mafli la’asot.” 47. See idem, s.v. “she- im yifate’ah” and “o im yisatem.” 48. Additional discussion of the history of this blessing’s interpretation can be found in Gesundheit, “Birkat Asher Yatsar et ha-Adam,” 124– 37, and in Bar-Ilan, “Birkat ‘Yotser ha-Adam,’” *9–*27. 49. Sefer Abudraham, “Birkhot ha- Shahar.” 50. Eleazar b. Judah, Perush Sidur Tefilah le-Roke’ah, “Al Netilat Yadayim-Asher Yatsar.”

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51. Genesis Rabbah 12:1; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2:12. 52. Ta- Shma, “Ashkenazi Hasidism in Spain,” 165– 94. Cf. Shokek, Jewish Ethics and Jewish Mysticism in Sefer ha-Yashar, 3– 28. But see the comments of Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism.” 53. Yonah Gerondi, Sefer ha-Yir’ah. 54. A similar sentiment is expressed in the Pietists’ repeated references to the prohibition of al teshaktsu—“and you shall not act in a disgusting manner” (Lev. 11:43, 20:25), which the rabbis read as prohibiting one from praying when he needs to relieve himself; see BT Berakhot 23a and BT Makkot 16b. The prohibition is discussed— and its scope somewhat expanded— in SHP §462– 63 and 1615. 55. On the Pietists’ general familiarity with Galenic physiology, see above, Chapter 2. 56. Galen, On Natural Faculties, 275ff. For further discussion, see Morrison, Excrement in the Later Middle Ages, 18– 24; Durling, “Excreta as a Remedy,” 25– 35; and Kuriyama, “The Forgotten Fear of Excrement,” 413–42. 57. Though feces also were understood as having a positive biological role, in that they too could produce life by serving as fertilizer; see Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 90. 58. For an explicit link between spitting and urinating in the context of prohibited behavior, see SHP §1649— a passage we shall return to below. 59. SHP §432. 60. SHP §472, and cf. §1606. 61. SHP §721, 1759. 62. BT Berakhot 24b. 63. Jacob Molin (Maharil), for instance, cited Eleazar b. Judah as the inspiration for his expansion of the stricture on blowing one’s nose and spitting in synagogue; see Sefer Maharil (Minhagim), 437. As in the case of feces and urine, the notion that spitting is disrespectful has precedents in rabbinic literature; see for example BT Eruvin 99a. But as in the case of feces and urine, the Pietists extend their strictures well beyond those of the Talmud. 64. SHP §1658, 1802. 65. See n. 54 above. 66. SHP §560. 67. SHP §1612, 1935. 68. SHP §1612, and see also §1184, 1063– 64. 69. SHP §38, 640, 648, 654. 70. SHP §541. 71. SHP §44, 45, 49. 72. SHP §1760. 73. The only passage in the Bible in which seminal emissions are explicitly linked with excrement, Deut. 23:14, is discussed in further detail below. On medieval Ashkenazic attitudes toward semen and other bodily fluids that do communicate ritual impurity, see above, n. 7. 74. See Lev. 15. 75. BT Bava Batra 82a–b; cf. BT Berakhot 20b– 22b.

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76. See the discussion in Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz, 24ff. 77. BT Berakhot 22a. 78. In addition to the examples cited above, see SHP §1066, where cleaning oneself from excrement is explicitly linked with cleaning oneself from semen. 79. SHP §648, 654, 1066, etc. 80. Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 81. Elias, The Civilizing Process. 82. Laporte, The History of Shit. 83. Douglas, Purity and Danger. Douglas’s approach has been amplified and extended by an array of subsequent social scientists, e.g., Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust. 84. This point is made by Inglis, “Dirt and Denigration,” 209. 85. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 86. Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 6. 87. See for example Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1. 88. Inglis, “Dirt and Denigration”; idem, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience. A foundational discussion of the social constructedness of “habitus” can be found in Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 70– 88. 89. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness; Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy; Brown, Foul Bodies. 90. See for example the studies collected in Persels and Ganim, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art. 91. Described as such in Persels, “Scatology: The Last Taboo,” xvii. 92. See Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, 29– 64, and the extensive bibliography cited there. 93. See for example Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages; Allen, On Farting; Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture; Classen, “Transgression and Laughter, the Scatological and the Epistemological,” 41– 61. For a useful collection of medieval fabliaux (a genre in which scatology usually figured prominently), see Enders, The Farce of the Fart. Additional relevant studies are cited below. 94. The discussion that follows draws in part on Dan, Torat ha- Sod shel Hasidut Ashkenaz, 171– 83. 95. Kiener, “The Hebrew Paraphrase of Saadiah Gaon’s ‘Kitāb al-Amānāt wa’l-I’tiqādāt,’” 1– 25; idem, The Hebrew Paraphrase of Saadiah Gaon’s “Kitāb al-Amānāt wa’l- I’tiqādāt.” 96. As cited within Judah b. Barzilai al-Bargeloni, Perush Sefer Yetsirah, 177– 78. This same passage is cited in full by Moshe Taku in Ketav Tamim, 66– 67. 97. The authorship of Shir ha-Yihud remains uncertain, and the composition has been variously attributed to Judah’s father Samuel he- Hasid, to an otherwise unknown “R. Betsalel,” or even to Judah himself. See the discussion of Berliner, Ketavim Nivharim, 147– 70, and the introduction to Dan, Shir ha-Yihud. 98. Habermann, Shire ha-Yihud veha- Kavod, 25– 28.

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99. Berliner, Ketavim Nivharim, and cf. Habermann’s introduction to his edition. 100. ZALN, 206. 101. Ibid., 199. It seems likely that Judah wrote this particular passage with Saadia’s commentary on Sefer Yetsirah in the forefront of his mind— the continuation of the text discusses the question of how God can be present in trees being chopped down, or mountains being dug up, and answers on the basis of the “air” found in the natural world. The precise content of the passage is unclear, and it seems to reflect Judah’s attempt to rework, perhaps on the basis of a faulty manuscript, Saadia’s meaning in the passage cited above. 102. Ibid., 197. 103. Eleazar b. Judah, Perush Sidur Tefilah le- Roke’ah, 325. 104. Eleazar b. Judah, Sod ha- Merkavah, “Hilkhot ha-Kavod,” 193. 105. Moshe Taku, Ketav Tamim, 87; and cf. p. 80. 106. See the discussion in Chapter 2 above. 107. Naama Ben Shachar, Mahadurah Bikoratit u- Pirke Mavo le- Hibur Sod ha- Sodot le- Elhanan ben Yakar mi-London, 56. See also the discussion in Dan, The Unique Cherub Circle, 177– 80. 108. Joseph Dan has argued that the tension can be resolved based on the distinction in Pietistic thought between the Bore (Creator) and Kavod (divine glory)— the latter must be protected from filth, while the former is immanent within, and thus unharmed by excrement. This solution is based on scanty and inconsistent evidence— see the discussion in Shyovitz, He Has Created a Remembrance of His Wonders, 293– 95. 109. See for example SHP §1454, where a lengthy internal debate is waged over whether or not God is indeed immanent in filth; whether due to errors in manuscript transmission, the work’s typical syntactically confused writing style, or, as seems likely, the simple ambivalence of the authors, the passage’s conclusion is difficult to decipher. 110. Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim,” 311–57. 111. SHP §1006. 112. BT Megillah 27b. 113. Ibid., 28a. 114. BT Berakhot 25b. 115. Eccl. 7:16. 116. SHP §1031. 117. Based on BT Berakhot 22a, 24a. 118. SHP §484. 119. SHP §640. 120. See introduction, nn. 87– 89. 121. SHP §15. 122. BT Berakhot 57b. 123. Ibid.; Genesis Rabbah 17:7. 124. BT Kiddushin 39b. 125. See for example Isa. 30:27. 126. Indeed, see the comments of Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 22.

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127. A search for gaonic and medieval references to this passage in the Bar Ilan Responsa Project database turned up no hits, other than Roke’ah’s passage on Asher yatsar. While this is certainly not conclusive, it is suggestive of the fact that the passage never garnered any widespread attention among these scholars. 128. It is possible, of course, that this passage was in the back of Judah’s mind when he compared the pleasures of ejaculation to those of Eden, as we saw above. The repeated comparison of semen and feces in Sefer Hasidim that we have noted makes this an even likelier possibility. 129. SHP §305. 130. Citing M Sanhedrin 10:1. 131. SHP §305. The blessing concerning the future rebuilding of Jerusalem comprises the third section of the birkat ha- mazon, and immediately precedes ha-tov veha- metiv. 132. Following BT Berakhot 48b. 133. BT Berakhot 48b; BT Ta’anit 31a; BT Bava Batra 121b. 134. See for example Lamentations Rabbah 2:4 and BT Gittin 57a–b. 135. Literally, “a spoonful of dust.” See for example M Ohalot 2:1 and 3:2, and M Nazir 7:2, where a tarvad is the minimum measurement of human remains that imparts ritual impurity. The association of the tarvad rakav with resurrection has precedent in Pirkei de- Rabbi Eliezer #33. Compare Eleazar, Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 339. For an additional, though apparently unrelated, discussion of the tarvad rakav in relation to resurrection, and specifically the indeterminacy of the decomposed human body, see the traditions cited by Menahem Rekanati in his commentary to Exodus 25:30. 136. Deut. 23:9–14. 137. Though see Septimus, On the Boundaries of Prayer, particularly on the Qumran reading of this prohibition. In the medieval period, the imperative was widely understood to apply only in times of warfare: see Aaron ha-Levi of Barcelona, Sefer ha- Hinukh §567; Eliezer of Metz, Sefer Yere’im §432; Moses of Coucy, Sefer Mitsvot Gedolot §119. BT Beitsah 8b does discuss the covering of excrement in daily life, but not as a religious imperative. 138. See for example SHP §683, 1663. 139. SHP §305. 140. Following BT Yoma 75b. 141. SHP §305. 142. The question of whether Adam and Eve were indeed immortal while in the Garden of Eden was a contentious one during this period; see for example Sefer ha- Maskil (MS Moscow- Guenzberg 508), fol. 23b. 143. On the basis of BT Yoma 75b. The homily’s linkage of the martyrs of Beitar with the episode of the manna likely drew upon the rabbinic notion that both episodes inspired the authoring of passages in the Grace; BT Berakhot 48b, the text that connected the blessing of ha-tov veha- metiv to martyrs of Beitar, also asserted that the first blessing of the Grace was authored by Moses after the manna first fell in the desert. 144. Interestingly, the same notion appears in the anonymous, roughly contemporary Sefer ha- Hayyim (Necker, Das Buch des Lebens, *37–*38

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[§49]). This idea was subsequently recorded by a wide array of Jewish thinkers and exegetes, ranging from Nahmanides (in his Commentary to Gen. 2:17), to R. Jacob Ibn Shueb (in his Derashot on Parshat Bereishit), to R. Tsadok ha-Kohen of Lublin (in his Mahshavot Haruts, #18, and in his Pri Tsadik, on Parshat va- Ethanan). 145. This metonymic linkage was particularly entrenched in medieval Ashkenaz, where visionary travelogues describing the Heavenly realm circulated under the title Masekhet Gan Eden; see the recent discussion in Perry, Masoret ve- Shinui. On shifts in medieval Ashkenazic eschatology, see Reiner, “Mi- Gan Eden ve-ad Tsror ha-Hayyim,” 5– 28; and Shyovitz, “You Have Saved Me from the Judgment of Gehenna,” 49– 73. A helpful recent overview of the Jewish “reception history” of the image of the Garden of Eden is Elior, Gan bi- Eden mi- Kedem. Gan Eden is used to refer to the afterlife in SHP §26, 1054, 1049, and elsewhere. 146. BT Ketubot 74b. 147. Ibid., 77b. 148. SHP §1285. 149. SHP §619. 150. SHP §1541. See also §1649, where the bodily remains of animals, too, must be guarded from contact with human feces, urine, and even saliva. Interestingly, while animal corpses were doubtlessly of a different status than human remains, Sefer Hasidim nonetheless devotes extensive attention to the treatment of animal remains, particularly in the context of the requirement that an animal’s blood be covered once it is slaughtered. At times, including in #305, our author explicitly equates the need to cover the blood of a slain animal with the need to bury a human corpse, or cover up human excrement. 151. SHP §553, and see also the marginalia cited by Wistinetsky alongside SHP §428 (p. 127). 152. It must be noted, of course, that the Pietists did not invent this linkage out of thin air. Excretion is occasionally linked with death in prior rabbinic literature (see for example Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability, 53– 76, and idem, “Spiritual Exercises in Rabbinic Culture,” 211n.29), and, as a number of scholars have demonstrated, in early Christian and Islamic materials as well. Christian parallels will be discussed below. An interesting Islamic parallel can be found in the ninth- century Hadith collection of Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj al-Naishapuri. See Sahih Muslim (Al- Musnadu Al- Sahihu bi Naklil Adli), “The Book Pertaining to Paradise, Its Description, Its Bounties and Its Intimates (Kitab Al-Jannat wa Sifat Na’imiha wa Ahliha),” Book 040, Number 6800: “Jabir b. Abdullah reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said that the inmates of Paradise would eat therein and they would also drink, but they would neither void excrement, nor suffer catarrh, nor pass water, and their eating (would be digested) in the form of belching and their sweat would be musk and they would glorify and praise Allah as easily as you breathe.” 153. SHP §1543. 154. Ibid. 155. Septimus, Hispano- Jewish Culture in Transition.

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156. The Hebrew original of this text was published in Marx, “Texts by and About Maimonides,” 406– 28. 157. Maimonides, “Igeret (Maamar) Tehiyat ha-Metim,” 354. 158. See the discussion in Kanarfogel, “Medieval Rabbinic Conceptions of the Messianic Age,” 147– 69. The concern evinced by northern European Jews over the details of the anticipated resurrection is further attested to by a text known as “The Ten Questions Asked of R. Eliezer Concerning the Resurrection of the Dead,” found in a number of manuscripts and published in one of its recensions in Jellinek, BhM, 6:148. This text was simply a reworking, in question and answer form, of chapter 7 of Saadia’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions— but was ideally suited for conveying the details of his treatment to an audience who had serious questions about the details and anticipated workings of the resurrection. Indeed, this text appears in close proximity to Pietistic texts in a number of its manuscript forms (for example, in MS Darmstadt Cod. Or. 25). Eleazar’s Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, too, incorporates within its text a responsum written by Eleazar to R. Samuel b. Kalonymus, who had requested that Eleazar enlighten him regarding the fate of the body as well as the soul after death; see Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 362ff. 159. Indeed, this commonality serves as a corrective to those who have argued that the Pietists were wholly disconnected from the contemporary Maimonidean controversy; see for example Dan, “Ashkenazi Hasidism and the Maimonidean Controversy,” 29–47. Shmuel Shepkaru has recently argued that the notion of bodily resurrection was deemphasized in medieval Ashkenazic eschatological theology; see Shepkaru, “Christian Resurrection and Jewish Immortality,” 1– 34. The texts surveyed in this chapter would seem to belie that notion. 160. See above, n. 1. 161. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 86. 162. Reynolds, Food and the Body. 163. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 124. 164. See the discussion in the conclusion below. 165. Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, 105. 166. Ibid., 7. 167. Ibid., 22. 168. Ibid., 101. 169. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 128. 170. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; see also idem, Fragmentation and Redemption. 171. Peter Lombard, Sententia, Bk. 2, d. 30, ch. 14, art. 2; translated in Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 125. 172. Summa theologica, suppl. Q. 80 a.3. 173. See the discussion in Minnis, From Eden to Eternity, 33– 36. 174. Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, 110. 175. Ibid. 176. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 63– 70. 177. Ibid. 178. Reynolds, Food and the Body.

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179. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 117–55. 180. Cited in Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 29. 181. Inferno, 28:22– 27. On the excremental/digestive motifs in Dante’s Inferno, see esp. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell,” 61– 93. 182. Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture. 183. Dan, “Rabbi Judah the Pious and Caesarius of Heisterbach,” 18– 27. 184. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 129, 311–12. 185. Ibid., 293– 94. 186. Ibid. 187. Translated in Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 48. For a more detailed discussion of this passage, see Wogan-Browne, “Chaste Bodies,” 29. 188. Delumeau, Sin and Fear. 189. The examples that I treat in what follows are not comprehensive, but are merely intended to illustrate the general tenor of some of the Jewish and Christian polemical texts. The most thorough treatment of the intersection between scatology and medieval religious polemic is Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, which compiles an extensive collection of relevant passages. I engage with certain elements of Cuffel’s interpretation below. 190. Boyarin, Carnal Israel. 191. Abulafia, “Bodies in the Jewish- Christian Debate.” 192. Kruger, The Spectral Jew, xxiv. 193. BT Gittin 57a. Peter Schäfer has argued that this association between Jesus and excrement was rooted in the same doubts about the consumption of the Eucharist that were invoked explicitly in later polemical texts; see Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud, 82ff., and cf. Ben- Shalom and Yuval, “There Is No Hatred in Polemics,” 16n.35. 194. Berger, The Jewish– Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages. 195. Ibid., §41. An earlier version of this argument appears in Megilat Ahima’ats, 18, and a reworked later version can be found in MS London British Library Add. 18695. See the discussion in Raspe, “Payyetanim as Heroes of Medieval Folk Narrative,” 365– 66. 196. Berger, The Jewish– Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, §56. 197. Ibid., §39. 198. Donin’s claims are detailed in MS Paris, Bibliotéque nationale, Lat. 16558, fols. 211b– 217d, ed. by Loeb in “La controverse de 1240 sur le Talmud.” For Yehiel’s rejoinder, see Vikuah Rabenu Yehiel; on the varying manuscript versions of Yehiel’s text, see Galinsky, “The Different Hebrew Versions of the ‘Talmud Trial,’” 109–40. For a comprehensive introduction to the 1240 “Talmud Trial,” and a collection and translation of relevant documents, see Friedman, Hoff, and Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud. 199. Odo of Tournai, On Original Sin. 200. PL, 156:499; translated in Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, 104. 201. Matthew of Paris, Chronicles, 214–15. 202. Rubin, Gentile Tales.

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203. Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 73– 88. 204. Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages,” 301– 23. 205. Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jew,” 142–56; cf. Bale, “Framing Antisemitic Exempla,” 19–47. 206. Abulafia, Jews and Christians in the Twelfth Century Renaissance. 207. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy, 51ff. 208. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. 209. Rubin, Gentile Tales. 210. SHP §1348. 211. I have borrowed the term from Price, “Medieval Antisemistism and the Excremental Libel,” 177– 88. 212. See Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 163– 67. See also the alternate view of Hames, “Urinating on the Cross,” 209– 20. See also Marcus, “A JewishChristian Symbiosis,” 181– 82. 213. BT Sanhedrin 64a. 214. SHP §1366. 215. Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 7. 216. Indeed, in that case, the (divine) feminine was threated by excremental filth rather than identified with it. 217. Aderet, “Archeological Dig in Cologne Unearths Ancient Jewish History.” 218. The factors that resulted in the cesspit opening’s location in the cellar are described in Aderet, “Inscription Reveals Ancient Jewish Toilet in Cologne.”

Conclusion 1. See for example the discussion of Golem-making in medieval Ashkenaz, Chapter 2 at nn. 122, 125. 2. See above, Chapter 1, n. 82. 3. See above, Chapter 5, n. 144. 4. For a preliminary foray into this material, see Hollender, “Flora and Fauna in Medieval Piyyut- Commentary.” 5. For instance, the anonymous Hebrew translator of the selections from the Pseudo-Albertine Philosophia pauperum which appear in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 583. This translation from the original Latin was likely composed in Germany (or possibly northern France) during the fourteenth century, and the manuscript seems to have been studied subsequently within an Ashkenazic milieu. See Langermann, “Targum Nosag la-Philosophia Pauperum,” 1103–4; Fontaine, “An Anonymous Hebrew Translation of a Latin Treatise on Meteorology,” 221–44. 6. Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy; Visi, On the Periphery of Ashkenaz. 7. Berger, “Polemic, Exegesis, Philosophy, and Science,” 28. 8. See the important study of Visi, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan’s Dodi ve- Nekdi,” 9– 75. 9. Ibid., 69.

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10. Ibid., 44. Israel Davidson identified a number of oblique references to Dodi ve- Nekhdi in the Sefer Sha’ashu’im of Joseph ben Meir Ibn Zabara (79, 103), but as Visi notes, these vague similarities in no way suggest direct (or even indirect) textual transmission. 11. The work survives in three manuscripts, and was published by Stal as Sefer Kushiyot le- Ehad min Rishonim. 12. Stal, Sefer Kushiyot, 9. 13. Ibid., 79. 14. Ibid., 152. 15. Ibid., 161. 16. Ibid., 186– 87. 17. Ibid., 244; cf. Dodi ve- Nekhdi, §11. 18. Sefer Kushiyot, 174; Dodi ve- Nekhdi, §18. 19. Sefer Kushiyot, 154; Berachiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, Dodi veNekhdi, §16. 20. Sefer Kushiyot survives in three manuscripts: MS Cambridge 858, 2, MS Darmstadt 25, and a privately held MS; see Stal’s discussion in the introduction to his edition of the text. 21. These are not the only medieval Ashkenazic texts that contain such lists of naturalistic questions; an example is MS Berlin- Staatsbibliothek (Preussischer Kulturbesitz) Or. Phillip 1392, a late medieval Ashkenazic manuscript that contains a series of questions and answers substantively and linguistically reminiscent of Dodi ve- Nekhdi and Sefer Kushiyot. (Moreover, this manuscript contains extensive discussion of uroscopy, also discussed at length in Sefer Kushiyot, and using the same transliterated technical terms.) An initial description of the Berlin MS can be found in Langermann, “Was There No Science in Ashkenaz?” I plan to devote a future study to tracing the relationship among these texts. 22. Dodi ve- Nekhdi, §55–56. 23. Sefer Kushiyot, 16. 24. Pietistic penitential practices were particularly enthusiastically embraced; see Elbaum, Teshuvat ha-Lev ve- Kabalat Yisurin. 25. Dan, “Hibur Yihud Ashkenazi min ha-Me’ah ha-14,” 204– 6. 26. Kupfer, “Li-demutah ha-tarbutit shel Yahadut Ashkenaz vahakhameha ba-me’ot ha-14–15,” 113–47. See also Talmage, “Mi-Kitvei R. Avigdor Kara ve-R. Menahem Shalem,” 43–52. This “Prague Circle” has been revisited by Visi, On the Periphery of Ashkenaz, and now by Zonca, “Difference and Intellectual Diversity in Late-Medieval Ashkenaz.” 27. Yuval, Hakhamim be- Doram, 286– 311. 28. Davis, “Philosophy, Dogma, and Exegesis in Medieval Ashkenazic Judaism,” 207– 8. 29. Ibid., 208. 30. Shimon b. Shmuel, Adam Sikhli ha- Medakdek Hadrat Kodesh, 29. 31. See Chapter 1, n. 1. 32. Indeed, Yuval has recognized that Simeon incorporated varied Pietistic contents into his work; see his Hakhamim be- Doram, 295– 300. See also Idel, Golem, 65.

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33. Shimon b. Shmuel, Adam Sikhli ha- Medakdek Hadrat Kodesh, 29. 34. Visi, “The Emergence of Philosophy in Ashkenazic Contexts,” 213–43; Zonca, “Difference and Intellectual Diversity in Late-Medieval Ashkenaz.” 35. Orhot Tsadikim, “Sha’ar Yir’at Shamayim.” 36. Ibid. 37. See Chapter 2 above. 38. See the discussion of magnetism in Chapter 1 above. 39. See above, Chapter 5, n. 144. 40. Nahmanides cites from Eleazar’s Sha’arei ha- Sod, ha-Yihud, vehaEmunah in his famous epistle Bi-Terem E’eneh Ani Shogeg, written at the height of the controversy over Maimonidean philosophy in the thirteenth century. See Kitvei Rabenu Mosheh ben Nahman, 1:347. 41. On the potential links between Pietistic and Nahmanidean notions of nature, see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 107n.62. 42. See the sources cited in introduction, n. 75. 43. See for example Jütte, The Age of Secrecy. 44. See Dan, “Hibur Bilti Yedu’a be-Torat ha- Sod li-R. Yehudah heHasid,” 134–47; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, 11–17.

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Manuscripts Berlin, Staatsbibliothek (Preussischer Kulturbesitz) Or. Phillip 1392 Berne, Burgerbibliothek 200 Cambridge, University Library, 858, 2 Cambridge, University Library Add. 1741 Darmstadt, Cod. Or. 25 London, British Library Add. 18695 London, British Library Or. 10855 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 5668 Moscow, Russian State Library, Guenzburg 508 Oxford, Bodleian Library Heb. d. 11 (#2797 in Adolf Neubauer, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906]) Oxford, Bodleian Library Mich. Add. 9 (#1638) Oxford, Bodleian Library Mich. 365 (#1208) Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 111 (#1566) Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 160 (#1205) Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 540 (#1567) Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 583 (#1331) Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 758 (#1105) Paris, Bibliotéque nationale, Lat. 16558 Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Heb. 3280 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 3152

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Italicized page locators denote pages that include illustrations. abjection, 174– 75 Abraham b. Azriel, 39, 55 Abrahams, Israel, 8 Abudraham, David b. Joseph, 170 Ackerman-Lieberman, Philip, 12 Adelard of Bath, 47, 207– 8 Agadat Olam Katan, 83, 88 Albert of Diessen, 153, 263– 64n116 Alexander the Great/Alexander Romance, 42–43, 59, 240n250, 240n254, 259n31; paradoxographic discourses and, 47; travel narratives and, 69– 71, 232n120; wondrous phenomena and, 67, 136 Allers, Rudolf, 101 alterity, 135, 257–58n21 al teshaktsu prohibition, 172– 73, 268n54 Ambrose (saint), 102 animals, 41–42, 62, 65, 153, 238– 39n231, 272n150; see also bestiaries/bestiary texts; werewolves/lycanthropy anthropomorphism, 113; see also divine corporeality; God: corporeality/ invisibility of anti-Jewish attacks/violence, 2– 3, 131, 199– 200 anti-Jewish polemics, 64– 67, 132, 153 Aquinas, Thomas, 48, 157, 191– 92 Aristotle/Aristotelian philosophy and science, 207; microcosmism and, 103; monster theory and, 145; Pietists and, 59– 60; Sephardic Jews and, 8– 9 artisanal/technical knowledge, 38, 49–50 artwork, 63– 64, 106–11, 195– 96, 205 Arugat ha- Bosem, 39, 55 asceticism/ascetic practices, 126– 29, 255nn68– 70, 255n72; see also martyrdom

Asher yatsar blessing, 169– 71 Ashkenaz/Ashkenazic Jews, 1– 2, 208–10, 215n1, 218n25, 276n21; attitude toward science/philosophy/ nature, 8–10, 33, 206– 7, 219– 20nn42–43; Christian culture and, 206 (see also Christianity/ Christian thinkers); worldview, 22, 30– 32, 208; see also Pietism/ Pietists; Sephardic Jews; Solomon Simhah of Troyes; Taku, Moses b. Hisdai astrology, 49–50, 102– 3; see also Donnolo, Shabbatai; Eleazar b. Judah of Worms; Judah b. Samuel he- Hasid Augustine of Hippo, 45–46, 102– 3, 145–46 Augustodunensis, Honorius, 104, 125 Avot de- Rabi Natan, 83 Ba’al Pe’or (cult), 200– 201 Baer, Yitzhak, 11, 221n54 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 175– 76 barnacle geese, 65, 153 Baumgarten, Elisheva, 18 Beit-Arie, Malachi, 77 Beitar martyrs, 183, 185 Benjamin (son of Jacob and Rachel), 140–43 Benveniste, Sheshet b. Isaac, 188 Ben-Yitzhak, Inbal Gur, 251n4 Berakhiah b. Natronai ha-Nakdan, 207– 9 Berger, David, 219n42 bestiaries/bestiary texts, 61– 67, 63– 64, 64– 67, 237n208 Birkat ha- Mazon, 183, 271n143 birth, 91– 93; see also conception and birth bodies/embodiment, 3, 19, 129, 195, 242n19; approaches to monstrosity

326 and, 134, 144; Ashkenazic and Pietistic views, 74– 80, 162– 64; decomposition of (see dead bodies/ death/resurrection); instability/ stability of, 130, 144, 153–54, 163, 191– 92, 194; Jewish- Christian polemics and, 196– 97; spiritual and theological aspects, 73– 79, 101– 2, 112–13, 157; see also divine corporeality bodily fluids: see effluences/effluvia; excrement, human body-soul connection, 115– 29, 252n18, 254n52; Christian view, 124– 25, 128– 29; penitential mortification and, 128 Bonaventure (saint), 192– 93 The Book of the Pious: see Sefer Hasidim books: see the sacred; under individual titles Brague, Remi, 100–101 Bynum, Caroline, 73, 125, 129, 147, 190– 91 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 193 cesspits, 202–4 Chenu, M. D., 44 children, 34, 165, 266n14 chiromancy: see divination/divinatory practices Christ: see Jesus Christianity/Christian thinkers, 45, 112–13; conceptual parallels, 134, 152, 163, 190– 95, 220n50; on death/human embodiment/ resurrection, 163, 189– 94; on digestion and excretion, 190– 94, 199– 201; on embodiment of the soul, 124– 25; eschatological discourse, 192– 94; on Incarnation (see Incarnation/incarnational theology); influence of, 10–11, 19, 60– 61, 112, 145, 152–53, 221n54, 222n68; on penitence and bodysoul connection, 128– 29; see also Pietism/Pietists: parallels with Christianity circles (groups): see Kalonymide Circle; Unique Cherub Circle circles (magic), 62– 64, 64 City of God, 45 Cohen, Jeffrey J., 129– 30, 135 Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, 96– 97, 177 compasses, 54–55 conception and birth, 91– 93, 245n96

Index coprophilia, 174– 75 corporeal mutability, 154–56; see also bodies/embodiment: instability/ stability of; metamorphoses cosmic egg motif, 105, 107 cosmos/cosmology, 35– 36; relationship to God, 248n153; relationship to man/body/Temple, 81– 82, 84– 85, 100–105; see also microcosmism; olam katan; Sefer Yetsirah creation, 34– 35, 37, 228n28; link with human conception and birth, 91– 93; truth (emet) and, 99–100; see also Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit Cuffel, Alexandra, 201– 2 Dan, Joseph, 5, 10, 15, 18, 74; on divine immanence, 176– 77, 270n108; on Pietists’ view of natural world, 22– 23, 225n4; on Pietists’ view of the body, 101; on yihud texts and exoteric works, 210 Dante’s Inferno, 193 Davis, Joseph, 210 dead bodies/death/resurrection, 162– 63, 188– 89, 273n158; excrement and, 184– 87, 192– 94, 272n152; liturgical references, 183; see also world to come Delitzsch, Franz, 7– 8 demons, 154–57; see also monsters/ monstrosity the demut, 123– 24, 254nn50–51 “Der Wolf,” 159 the devil/Satan, 193 digestion, 190– 94, 198 dirt: see excrement, human disembodiment/disembodied spirits, 154–57; see also bodies/ embodiment divination/divinatory practices, 57– 60, 94– 95 divine corporeality, 73– 74, 112–13; see also God divine image, 144, 146 divine intervention: see God: role in human history Dodi ve- Nekhdi, 208– 9 Donnolo, Shabbatai, 84, 90– 91, 100, 230n71, 243n51; see also Sefer Hakhmoni doubt: see skepticism/skeptics Douglas, Mary, 175 Ecclesiastes Rabbah, 82 effluences/effluvia, 171– 73, 268n63; see also excrement, human

Index the egg: see cosmic egg motif Eiximenis, Francesc, 192 ejaculation, 173– 74, 181– 82; see also semen Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, 5, 182, 218n27; on astrology, 90– 91; on creation, 34, 91– 93; on empiricism, 34–40; on excrement, 168– 71, 182; on Genesis 1:27, 144; on God’s all-pervasiveness/existence/ immanence, 28– 29, 178– 79; on human embodiment/instability, 77– 81, 87– 94, 96– 99, 130, 154–55; on miracles/wondrous properties of animals, 31– 32, 41–42; on numerical properties, 59– 60; on olam katan, 87– 93; prayerbook commentary, 78, 87– 88, 170– 71, 178– 79, 182, 209–11; on sin and penance, 127– 28; on the soul, 116– 19, 120– 24 the elements, 35, 82– 84, 91– 94 Elhanan b. Yakar, 179 Elias, Norbert, 175 Elijah, 140 elite culture, 11–12, 133; see also folk beliefs/culture Elliott, Dyan, 157 embodiment: see bodies/embodiment; disembodiment/disembodied spirits; divine corporeality empirical observation/empiricism, 89– 91, 111–12, 211; the body and, 80– 81, 94; esotericism/exotericism and, 34– 39, 211; mechanical knowledge/ the occult and, 49–50 Enoch, 140, 259– 60n47 Ephraim b. Samson, 140–41, 260n50 epilepsy, 118–19 Eriugena, John Scotus, 102, 192 eschatology, 181– 87, 191, 194, 202 esotericism/esoteric teachings, 18, 34– 39; see also exotericism/exoteric teachings; magic/mysticism Eucharist, 149–50, 190, 262n96 Europe, northern: see Ashkenaz/ Ashkenazic Jews even tekumah, 40–41, 56 excrement, human, 20, 161– 68, 193, 203; association with sin, 169, 190– 93; burial of, 184– 85; death/resurrection and, 182– 84, 186– 87, 192– 94, 272n152; literary/historical texts and, 199– 200; magical properties, 21; psychoanalytic approaches/theories, 174– 76; Saadia’s view, 177– 78;

327 theological implications, 162– 70, 176– 82, 201–4, 270n108; see also effluences/effluvia exotericism/exoteric teachings, 18, 33; see also esotericism/esoteric teachings fetuses, 40–41, 56, 93, 121– 24, 353–54n42 filth: see excrement, human Fishman, Talya, 217n20 flatulence, 167– 68 folk beliefs/culture, 18; Germanic, 22, 133; influence of, 11–12, 132– 33, 221– 22nn57–58; theological meaning, 160; see also elite culture; Jewish folklore and literature Foucault, Michel, 175– 76 Franco- Germany: see Ashkenaz/ Ashkenazic Jews Freedman, Paul, 257–58n21 Freud, Sigmund, 159, 174– 75 Freudenthal, Gad, 8– 9, 230– 31n82 Galen of Pergamon, 172 Garden of Eden (Gan Eden), 185– 86, 191– 92, 194, 272n145 geese; see barnacle geese gematriyah, 29, 60, 144; see also Sefer Gematriyot Genesis 1:27, 144 Genesis 19, 26– 27 Gerald of Wales, 148–53, 263n110 German Pietists: see Pietism/Pietists Gerondi, Jonah, 171 Gersonides, 53–54 Gervase of Tilbury, 47, 151–52, 262n102 Ginzburg, Carlo, 228n28 God: arguments for existence of, 21, 28– 29; corporeality/invisibility of, 40, 51, 112–13 (see also divine corporeality); goodness of, 77– 79, 81, 183; immanence in physical world/nature, 114, 176– 81, 227n23, 270n101; omniscience, omnipotence, and all-pervasiveness of, 27– 28, 32, 40; role in human history, 26– 27, 30 Golem creation, 96–100, 247n122 Grace after Meals: see Birkat ha- Mazon Greco-Arabic tradition, 8– 9 Greek wisdom: see Aristotle/Aristotelian philosophy and science greenness, 89, 111–12, 249–50n174 Güdemann, M., 221n54 Guibert of Nogent, 199

328 Guide of the Perplexed, 161– 62; see also Maimonides/Maimonidean controversies Hasan-Rokem, Galit, 239n247 Hasidei Ashkenaz: see Pietism/Pietists Hebrew language/Hebrew translations, 55, 161– 62, 202– 3, 235– 36nn178– 79 Hell, 193– 94, 196, 198 herbs, 39–40, 46, 62– 63, 70 hermeneutical Jews, 131 Hildegard of Bingen, 104–5, 249–50n174 Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 59, 115–19, 252n18 the holy: see the sacred holy language: see Hebrew language/ Hebrew translations Hortus deliciarum, 105, 108, 195 Huss, Boaz, 15 hygiene and sanitation, 176

Index with Christianity; polemics: interreligious Jewish folklore and literature, 132– 33, 221– 22nn57–58; see also folk beliefs/culture Jewish history, 215n1; lachrymose conception of, 216n7; mysticism/ mystics and, 14–16, 224n86; see also God: role in human history Jewish Magic and Superstition, 21, 221n57 Jewish pietism/pietists: see Pietism/ Pietists Jewish werewolf motif, 153, 159– 60, 265nn144–45 Jews of Ashkenaz: see Ashkenaz/ Ashkenazic Jews Jews of Italy, 212–13 Jews of Sepharad: see Sephardic Jews John of Salisbury, 58 Judah ben Barzilai al-Bargeloni, 84, 97– 98 Judah b. Samuel he- Hasid, 5– 6, 200– 201, 218n27; on animals (wondrous properties of), 42; on astrology, 94– 95; on creation, 34; on even tekumah/power of stones, 40–41, 55–56; on excretory experience, 181– 82; on God’s all-pervasiveness/ existence/immanence/omniscience, 21, 27– 29, 178– 79; on influence of Christians, 13; on metamorphosis/ monstrosity/werewolves, 138– 40, 154; naturalistic worldview/ on miracles, 30– 32; on numerical properties, 60; on the rainbow and managing anger, 108– 9, 111; on resurrection, 183– 87

Ibn Adret (Rashba), Solomon, 52, 212 Ibn Ezra, Abraham: on astrology, 50; on magnetism, 53–54; on metamorphosis, 138; Pietists and, 206– 7, 252n18; on the soul, 116 Ibn Shueb, Joshua, 52, 212 Ibn Tibbon, Samuel, 24 Ibn Tsadik of Cordoba, Joseph, 85, 243n51 Ibn Yahya, Gedalyah, 158 Idel, Moshe, 17, 96, 223n78, 224n86, 247n141 Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u- Penimiyot, 21, 227– 28n24 incantations, 39–40 Incarnation/incarnational theology, 105, 112–13, 117; Christian view, 4, 19, 73, 75– 76; metamorphosis and, 149, 160; visual representations of, 106, 109, 110; see also divine corporeality; Jesus Inglis, David, 176 Isaac of Acre, 7 Isidore of Seville, 146

Kabbalah/kabbalists, 13–14, 17, 73– 74, 86– 87, 223– 24n81 Kalonymide Circle, 6– 7, 16 Kalonymus of Speyer, 197 Kanarfogel, Ephraim, 5 Kieckhefer, Richard, 234n156 Kristeva, Julia, 174 Kupfer, Ephraim, 210

Jellinek, Adolph, 83 Jesus, 149, 190, 196– 98; see also Incarnation/incarnational theology Jewish- Christian dynamics: Ashkenaz, 2–4; Italy, 212–13; representations of Jews, 131, 256–57n2; see also anti-Jewish attacks/violence; Christianity/Christian thinkers; Pietism/Pietists: parallels

lactation, physiology of, 80– 81 Langermann, Y. Tzvi, 58 lapidaries, 49, 55, 235– 36nn178– 79, 236nn182– 83 Laporte, Dominique, 175 Le Goff, Jacques, 233– 34n144 Leivick, H., 159 letter-number equivalency: see gematriyah

Index Levi b. Gershon: see Gersonides Liber divinorum operum (Universal Man), 106 Lieberman, Philip Ackerman: see Ackerman-Lieberman, Philip Liebes, Yehudah, 96, 243–44n52 Lifshitz, Yosef Yitzhak, 226– 27n15 limbs: see bodies/embodiment lodestone: see magnetism/magnets; stones Lombard, Peter, 191– 92, 194 Lot’s wife, 26– 27, 31 Luther, Martin, 192 lycanthropy/lycanthropic theologies: see werewolves/lycanthropy Lyvermann family, 202–4 ma’aseh bereishit: see creation ma’aseh merkavah/merkavah texts, 13– 14, 34, 37, 123 magic/mysticism, 2– 3, 48–50, 234n156; natural causality and, 56–58; science and, 13–14, 49–50, 52–53, 211, 213, 223n74 magnetism/magnets, 41, 45, 51–55 Maharil: see Molin (of Mainz), Jacob Maimonides/Maimonidean controversies, 53, 212; on divine corporeality, 240n1; on Hebrew language, 161– 62; on love of God, 78; on olam katan, 85– 86; on resurrection, 187– 89 Marcus, Ivan, 5, 12, 218n27 mares: see striya/mares Marie de France, 147, 152 martyrdom, 2, 216n9, 225n4; see also Beitar martyrs marvels: see wonders Matthew of Paris, 199, 202 mechanical knowledge: see artisanal/ technical knowledge melothesia: see astrology; olam katan metamorphoses, 137–40, 149–50; human to angel, 86, 140; human to animal, 133– 34, 138– 39, 146– 48, 151 (see also Benjamin (son of Jacob and Rachel)); see also Lot’s wife; werewolves/lycanthropy meteorology, 36, 89– 90; see also rainfall microcosmism, 88– 89, 96– 97, 101– 4; Pietists’ attention to, 112; theological, 104, 248n153; see also cosmos/cosmology microcosm-macrocosm analogies/motif: see olam katan Midrash Konen, 136– 37

329 Milstäter Genesis, 111 mirabilia: see wonders miracles, 25– 27, 45; metamorphosis and, 149; as part of natural order, 65– 66, 226n11, 227n23, 229n42; Pietistic view, 30– 32; see also the supernatural; wonders Molin (of Mainz), Jacob, 26, 268n63 monsters/monstrosity, 145, 153–55, 261n67; human embodiment and, 134, 145; Jewish texts and, 131– 33, 135– 37, 257n7; link with Jews, 132, 153, 159– 60, 263– 64n116, 265nn144–45; theological implications, 133– 34, 137, 146– 47; see also demons; werewolves/ lycanthropy monster theory, 135– 36, 257–58n21 Moses ben Maimon: see Maimonides/ Maimonidean controversies Moses b. Jacob of Coucy, 78– 80 Moses b. Nahman of Barcelona: see Nahmanides Munk, Salomon, 7 mysticism/mystics, 14–16, 223n77; see also esotericism/esoteric teachings; Kabbalah/kabbalists; magic/ mysticism; occultists/philosophers Nahmanides, 212, 276n40 natural order/causality, 53–58, 67; see also Pietism/Pietists: on natural order/natural world natural vs. supernatural, 45–49, 232n122; see also miracles; the supernatural nature/natural world, 18–19, 22– 24, 225n4; approaches to/definitions of, 30– 32, 43–51; constancy and immutability/deviations from, 30, 229n42 (see also bodies/ embodiment); God and, 227n23 (see also God); kabbalists and, 13– 14; laws of, 23– 24 (see also natural order/causality); spiritual and theological meanings, 3–4, 71– 72, 205; see also Pietism/Pietists: on natural order/natural world necromancy: see magic/mysticism Nehemiah, 116 Nemesius, 248n151 neshamah: see body-soul connection; soul and ensoulment Nishmat Kol Hai, 78, 87– 91 nitsok, 166, 267n30 Noah’s ark, 27 Noah Window, 111

Index

330 notarikon, 144, 247n137 nut motif, 37, 105 occultists/philosophers, 57–59; see also mysticism/mystics the occult/occult qualities and properties: see magic/mysticism; miracles; segulot olam katan, 75– 76, 81– 93, 243n40, 243n51; epistemological aspects, 94– 95; visual representations, 106, 109–10 Orhot Tsadikim, 211–12 the Other: see alterity Otia Imperialia, 151–52 panentheism, 176, 179 paradoxographic texts/paradoxography, 46–47 penances: see asceticism/ascetic practices; sin and penance Perush ha- Milot ha-Zarot, 24 Pesikta Rabati, 82 Petahiyah/Petahiyah’s travel narrative, 67– 71 philosophy, rationalist: see rationalism physical mortification, 126– 29; see also asceticism/ascetic practices physiognomy: see divination/divinatory practices Pietism/Pietists, 5– 8, 14, 91, 218n26, 223– 24n81; ascetic practices (see asceticism/ascetic practices); on eschatology, 192– 94; on excessive piety, 180– 81; exegesis/theological views, 24– 34, 211 (see also parallels with Christianity in this entry); influence on Ashkenazic Jews, 211–12; influences (other than Christian), 17, 57–59, 205– 6, 230n71; on microcosmism, 112; on natural order/natural world, 22– 26, 30– 34, 51, 221n57, 225– 26n7, 226n11; parallels with Christianity, 10–11, 19, 52–54, 60– 66, 112, 134, 145, 152–53, 163, 194– 95, 221n54, 222n68, 263n109; remembrances doctrine, 51, 226– 27n15 Pietistic ideas/texts, 5– 6, 16–18, 217n20, 224n90; esoteric, 18 (see also Sodei Razya); on excrement and theological significance, 162– 68; exoteric, 18, 33 (see also Sefer Hasidim); groups/circles, 6– 7; on human embodiment and disembodied spirits, 154– 55; influences on, 230n71 (see

also Pietism/Pietists); see also bestiaries/bestiary texts; monsters/ monstrosity; Sefer Gematriyot; Sefer Hasidim; Sefer Tagin; yihud texts and exoteric works Pliny, 145 polemics, 19– 20, 113, 132; intercultural, 2, 72; interreligious, 4, 153, 194– 99; see also anti-Jewish polemics preternatural objects/phenomena: see natural vs. supernatural Psalms 35:10, 88 Psalms 111:4, 23– 27, 33– 34, 227n23; see also zekher asah le- nifla’otav Pure Utterances Revealed and Hidden: see Imrot Tehorot Hitsoniyot u- Penimiyot rabbinic literature/traditions, 182– 85; anatomical allusions, 77, 79– 80; on asceticism/ascetic practices, 126; on body/soul, 115, 121; on demons, 154, 264n128; on divine corporeality, 112–13; on excrement and bodily fluids, 162, 164– 66, 169– 74, 266nn5– 6, 268n54, 268n63; on impure animals, 238– 39n231; on link between world and human body, 83, 108; on monsters and monstrosity, 136– 37 rabbits, 66– 67, 238n229, 238– 39n231 the rainbow, 90, 105, 108– 9, 111 rainfall, 36, 88– 89, 209–10 Rambam: see Maimonides/ Maimonidean controversies Rashba: see Ibn Adret (Rashba), Solomon Rashi, 26, 170 rationalism, 7; see also Maimonides/ Maimonidean controversies; science Reed, Annette, 15 Regino of Prüm, 147 remembrances/remembrances doctrine, 23– 30, 211; God’s immanence as, 178– 79; Pietists and, 51, 226– 27n15; subcategories of, 39–40; see also God: role in human history; stones; wonders resurrection: see dead bodies/death/ resurrection Reynolds, Philip Lyndon, 248n153 ritual impurity, 164, 266n7 Rokem, Galit Hasan: see Hasan-Rokem, Galit Rubin, Miri, 199– 200 Saadia Gaon, 176– 78

Index the Sabbath, 128, 182 the sacred, 176, 181; defining, 161– 62; protecting, 162, 164– 67, 173, 183, 203–4; respecting, 200– 201 salamanders: see bestiaries/bestiary texts Samuel b. Judah he- Hasid, 6, 76– 77 Samuelson, Hava Tirosh: see TiroshSamuelson, Hava sanitation and hygiene, 176 sarei kos u- bohen: see divination/ divinatory practices Satan: see the devil/Satan scatology, 193– 94, 197– 99, 201– 2 scent of the body, 127, 256n74; see also even tekumah Schäfer, Peter, 12, 15–16, 96, 222n60 Scholem, Gershom, 16–17, 96 science, 7– 8; history of, 9–10, 223n74; magic/mysticism and, 13–14, 49–50, 52–53, 211, 213, 223n74; nature/natural order/causality and (see natural order/causality); see also Aristotle/Aristotelian philosophy and science; Ashkenaz/ Ashkenazic Jews; magnetism/ magnets; rationalism Secretum secretorum, 50, 58–59 Sefer Gematriyot, 60, 80, 94 Sefer Hakhmoni, 80, 84, 90– 91 Sefer ha- Roke’ah, 168– 69 Sefer ha- Shem, 143–44 Sefer Hasidim, 5, 95; on ascetic practices, 126– 29; on corporeal mutability and demons, 156; on eschatology, 181– 87; as evidence of Christian contact/influence, 61, 237n206; on excrement, 162, 165– 72, 176, 179– 81; on human embodiment, 76– 77; on miracles, 30, 32– 34 Sefer Ketav Tamim, 112–13 Sefer Kushiyot, 208– 9 Sefer Nitsahon Yashan, 197– 98 Sefer Tagin, 154 Sefer Yetsirah, 35, 83– 84, 92– 93, 96– 99, 243–44nn52–53 Sefer Ziyoni, 140, 211, 264– 65n137 sefirot, 86, 92– 93 segulot, 50, 52, 54 Sekhel Tov, 26 semen, 80, 89, 92– 93, 120–22, 172– 74; excrement and, 268n73, 268n79 (see also Sefer Hasidim); see also ejaculation; sexual desire/intercourse Sephardic Jews, 2, 8, 75– 76; GrecoArabic tradition/scientific discourse

331 and, 8– 9, 220n44; on occult properties, 212; on olam katan, 84– 87; see also Ashkenaz/Ashkenazic Jews serpents, 138, 151 sexual desire/intercourse, 89, 173– 74; see also semen Shemaiah of Soissons, 82, 243n44 Shir ha-Yihud, 177– 78, 269n97 Shi’ur Komah, 73– 74, 241n6 Silvester, Bernard, 103 Simeon b. Samuel, 210–11 sin and penance, 127– 29, 193, 256n84 Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi- Ratisbon, 67– 71, 240n254 skepticism/skeptics, 33– 34 Sodei Razya, 34– 35, 39 sod ha- egoz: see nut motif Sod ha-Yirah: see Sefer Hasidim Sod Ma’aseh Bereishit, 120– 23 Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes: see Rashi Solomon Simhah of Troyes, 206– 7, 230– 31n82 Soloveitchik, Haym, 8; on Dan’s view of Pietistic ideology, 225n4; on Hokhmat ha- Nefesh, 252n18; on Pietists’ views, 23, 100, 225– 26n7; on reflection of the Divinity, 23– 24, 226n10 somatomorphism, 125– 26, 130 soul and ensoulment, 19, 114–15, 118– 25, 251n1, 251n4; see also bodysoul connection Stal, Ya’akov Yisra’el, 227– 28n23 stones, 40–41, 55–56 Stoudt, Debra L., 220n50 striya/mares, 153–54 Stroumsa, Sarah, 12 suffering, post-mortem, 127– 28 suicide, 126 Summa Philosophica, 58 sun/sunlight, 177– 79, 182 the supernatural, 3, 25; see also miracles; natural vs. supernatural Taku, Moses b. Hisdai, 112–13, 155, 179, 250n186, 251n190 Ta- Shma, Israel M., 227– 28n23 technical knowledge: see artisanal/ technical knowledge teeth, 142–43 the Temple, 81– 82, 87, 141–43, 197 teratology: see monsters/monstrosity; monster theory teva (nature), 24; see also nature/natural world Tevel, 136– 37, 258n34

Index

332 theology, 10–11, 25; see also Christianity/Christian thinkers; Pietism/Pietists; Pietistic ideas/ texts; truth/truths Thorndike, Lynn, 48 Tirosh- Samuelson, Hava, 14, 226n11 Topographia Hibernica, 148–50, 153 Tosafists, 5, 137, 139, 220n52 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 21– 22, 221n57 transformations: see Eucharist; metamorphoses transubstantiation: see Eucharist travel narratives, 67– 71, 136; see also Alexander the Great/Alexander Romance truth/truths, 27– 28, 52, 99–100 Tsarfat: see Ashkenaz/Ashkenazic Jews Unique Cherub Circle, 6, 99, 206 Urbach, Ephraim E., 11

262n79; mental illness and, 157– 59; metamorphosis and, 142–44, 147–51; sympathetic approach, 147–49, 152, 157; theological implications, 134– 35, 144–52; see also Jewish werewolf motif; monsters/monstrosity William of Auvergne, 53 William of Conches, 58 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 7 Wolfson, Elliot, 11, 13–14, 16, 86– 87, 223n77 wonders, 24– 30, 46–48, 227n23, 234n150; see also miracles; remembrances/remembrances doctrine world to come, 181– 83, 198; see also dead bodies/death/resurrection

viriditas: see greenness Visi, Tamas, 219– 20n43, 250n186 vomiting, 172– 73

Yates, Frances, 213, 223n74 Yesod Mora, 116 yihud texts and exoteric works, 18, 33– 34, 210–12; see also Shir ha-Yihud Yorkmi, 38

Wasserstrom, Steven, 12 water/role of water, 35– 36, 249–50n174 werewolves/lycanthropy, 19, 133– 34, 138; exegesis and, 140–44, 151– 52; literary aspects, 147, 158–59,

zekher asah le- nifla’otav, 23, 30, 226n10, 227– 28n24; see also Psalms 111:4 Ziyoni, Menahem, 140, 260n49 Zohar, 117

Ack now l edgm e n ts

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the many debts, both professional and personal, that I have accrued in the course of researching and writing this book. The initial research for this project was generously supported by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and by the Wexner Foundation; I am particularly grateful to Rabbi Elka Abrahamson, Or Mars, and Robert Chazan for their mentorship during my tenure as a Wexner Fellow. A grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture afforded me the chance to broaden and deepen my research, and I completed the initial draft of the book manuscript in Jerusalem while serving as a Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation Visiting Fellow in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. My thanks to Isaiah Gafni, Natania Isaak, and especially Yisrael Yuval for their assistance and mentorship during that wonderful experience. Over the course of writing this book, I have benefited from the advice, guidance, and collegiality of Avriel Bar-Levav, Elisheva Baumgarten, Dean Bell, Adam Cohen, Rachel Furst, Yehuda Galinsky, Elisabeth Hollender, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Ruth Mazo Karras, Daniel Lasker, Yair Lorberbaum, Katelyn Mesler, Micha Perry, Pinchas Roth, Dudu Rotman, Ephraim Shoham- Steiner, and the members of the Judaic Electronic Working Group, organized by the indefatigable Phil Ackerman-Lieberman. The idea of working on Pietistic conceptions of the natural world was first inspired by conversations with Gad Freudenthal, who has continued to offer guidance and encouragement in the intervening years. Ben Nathans played an early and instrumental role in my decision to pursue a career as a Jewish historian, and was unusually generous with both scholarly and pragmatic guidance. Talya Fishman’s

334

Acknowledgments

exacting standards helped mold me as a scholar, and she offered substantive and insightful feedback at various stages of this book project. Thanks are due especially to David Ruderman, who has been an intellectual guide and trusted mentor at many different stages of my academic life. I am particularly gratified to be publishing this book in the Jewish Cultures and Contexts series that he long edited for the University of Pennsylvania Press. My thanks as well to series editor Steven Weitzman for his encouragement, and to Jerry Singerman, Hannah Blake, Tim Roberts, Erica Ginsburg, Eric Schramm, and the staff of Penn Press for a smooth and professional publication process. In recent years I have had the great fortune to be a member of the History Department at Northwestern University, surrounded by supportive and generous colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, who has helped me in innumerable ways with his wise counsel and polymathic knowledge, and to Dyan Elliott, who was an important intellectual influence even before she warmly welcomed me into the medievalist wing of our department. Both Yohanan and Dyan read an entire draft of this book and offered enormously helpful comments, critiques, and suggestions; I appreciate their interest and assistance in strengthening this finished product (though any remaining errors are of course mine alone). Ken Alder, the current chair of the History Department, has been consistently kind and generous, and I am grateful for his guidance and support. My colleagues in the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, in the Jewish Studies Graduate Cluster, and in the Medieval Studies Graduate Cluster have all ensured that Northwestern is an enviable setting in which to teach and research. I would also like to acknowledge my students at Northwestern, who have witnessed my research interests invade my lectures and class discussions, and have been subjected to more medieval monsters, ascetic penances, and excremental theology than they could possibly have foreseen. Particular thanks to Nathan Bennet, who assisted in formatting the notes and bibliography toward the end of the publication process. I presented sections of this project as lectures at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, at the Leo Baeck Institute in London, at the Finnish Institute in Rome, at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, and at the University of South Florida. I am grateful to the organizers and audiences of those events for their helpful feedback and suggestions.

Acknowledgments

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An abridged version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Christians and Jews in the Twelfth Century Werewolf Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 4 (2014): 521–43, and some of the contents of Chapter 2 were included in “Beauty and the Bestiary: Animals, Wonder, and Polemic in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in The Jewish- Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching, edited by Jonathan Adams and Jussi Hanska (London: Routledge, 2015), 215–39. For permission to reproduce images and illustrations, I would like to express my gratitude to the Bodleian Library, the Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Médiathèques Strasbourg, Dr. Stuart Whatling, Manuel Cohen, Sr. Philippa Rath OSB, and Gary White and Marcus Trier of the Köln Archäologische Zone/ Jüdisches Museum. The personal debts accrued over the course of writing this book have been no less substantial than my professional and academic ones. Many of the ideas contained in this book were first tested out on a captive audience of friends in Riverdale, New York; others were presented to audiences at numerous “syna-gigs,” chaburot, and shi’urim. I thank Rabbi Michael Balinsky, Rabbi Reuven Brand, Rabbi Shaanan Gelman, Rabbi Yechiel Poupko, and Helene Rosenberg for the many opportunities to teach Torah they have provided over the past several years. My parents, Shlomo Shyovitz and Marcy Shyovitz Lieber, instilled in my brothers and me a love of books and learning and always encouraged me to pursue my intellectual passions. My parents-in-law, Michele and Dr. Irving Zoltan, have been the source of unflagging support, encouragement, and good humor, and have contributed to the completion of this project in innumerable ways. I have spent many happy hours discussing Jewish scholarship with my mother-in-law, a scholar of Jewish history who has generously shared her prodigious learning and library. Dani and Ayala Zoltan Rockoff have been loyal and supportive cheerleaders who have always expressed interest in my research. My children, Aliza Rivka, Aryeh Shachar, Keren Tair, and Ya’ara Carmel, have made sure I never forget where this project falls on my list of priorities. They are truly “worlds in miniature,” remembrances of God’s wondrous goodness and generosity. I could not be prouder of them or more grateful for them.

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Finally, it is impossible for me to express my gratitude to my wife, Adina Zoltan, who daily sets an example as a partner, parent, and friend that I can only hope to emulate. Were it not for her faith and support, neither this book nor its author would ever have been completed. The book is dedicated to her, with love.