Piety, penance and the 'will of the Creator'
Date
1150CE
twelfth and thirteenth centuriesapproximate date
While the tosafists exalted study, the 'pietists of Ashkenaz' developed an ideal of piety beyond the law, with ritualized penance and the martyr ideal of 'sanctifying the Name'.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
10 statements
01The pietists and their book
At about the time the tosafists made Talmud study the cultural ideal of Ashkenaz, a very different religious movement arose in Rhineland towns: the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the 'Ashkenazi pietists', not to be confused with the later Hasidism of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Their teachings are linked above all to three descendants of the Kalonymus family: Samuel, Judah and Eleazar.
The pietists wrote extensively on esoteric themes, but their best-known work gathers roughly 2,000 exempla (moralizing tales) and exegetical vignettes, the Sefer Hasidim ('Book of the Pious'), ascribed to Samuel the Pious together with Judah the Pious, his son (died 1217). It sets out the ideals and virtues of Ashkenazi pietism and also offers a glimpse of ordinary medieval Ashkenazi life.
Tradition or narrative
As Eleazar of Worms told it, the Hasidei Ashkenaz kept an ancient esoteric tradition handed down by a certain 'Abu Aaron', who had learned it in Babylonia and brought 'the secret of the arrangement of prayers, and the remaining secrets' to Italy, whence they passed to the Kalonymus family of Lucca, which later moved to Ashkenaz.
02Piety beyond the law
The pietist ideal sprang from an uncompromising wish to fulfill the 'will of the Creator' (retson ha-bore) beyond what religious law itself required. Invoking the Talmudic maxim 'you shall forever be resourceful in fearing God', they built an ideology of piety with an intense sense of self-sacrifice in service of God's will. The Sefer Hasidim contrasts the readiness of knights, respectable women and even thieves to risk everything for honor or gain with the effort the pietist should make for the Creator's honor.
The pietists drew on the ideal of martyrdom that emerged from the First Crusade's tragedy: if one was willing to give up one's life for the 'sanctification of God's name' (kiddush ha-shem), the righteous person should accept the burden of piety in daily life, going past the letter of Halakhah without contradicting it, with prohibitions and pious acts stricter than the law required. The greater the suffering, the greater the reward, and only by overcoming the urge to sin could one reach true piety.
From this came a highly original view of repentance: the pietists taught that atonement came in different kinds, with ritualized penitential practices matched both to the gravity of the transgression and to its deserved punishment, and also offsetting the pleasure drawn from sinning, through prolonged fasts and abstentions, for instance. Another form, which Eleazar admitted was not found in practice, was to re-enter the situation of the sin and resist temptation.
The thirteenth-century Hasidei Ashkenaz still promoted kiddush ha-shem (of a spiritual kind) as an all-embracing ideal that should steer the conduct of the pious.
03Sect or personal piety?
Judah the Pious, who wrote most of the Sefer Hasidim, hoped to shape the pietists into a socially separate group, a kind of sect apart from the mainstream Jewish community. He separated the 'righteous' (those who followed his ideal) from the 'wicked' (all other Jews), counting even the most learned rabbinic scholars among the wicked if they did not belong to the Hasidei Ashkenaz, and expected the pietist to undertake ever more demanding devotions that would atone for his generation's sins. Judah's sectarian program ultimately failed, and it is unclear how large the Hasidei Ashkenaz were as a movement, if they ever became one. His cousin Eleazar of Worms reshaped Judah's sectarian idea into a personal, individual pietism that could draw in Ashkenazi society broadly and not just a small elite.
Context
The tosafists were aware of the tension between the Talmud's precepts and the actual customs of Ashkenazi Jews, and, treating both as authoritative, they tried to harmonize seemingly incompatible readings of the law. Rashi and the tosafists helped create a distinctly Ashkenazi culture, apart from the Sephardi one, yet their approach to the Talmud shaped, down to today, how Jews elsewhere deal with the text.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1981).
The Hasidei Ashkenaz · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 194inspect
- 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 197inspect
- 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 195; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 195inspect
- 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 195; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 195inspect
- 10Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 193; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 193inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.