Ashkenazi pietist
Eleazar of Worms
אלעזר מוורמסEleazar of Wormseditorial spelling
Active
twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Cousin of Judah the Pious, he turned the sectarian idea into a personal piety attractive to Ashkenazi society at large; he recorded the Abu Aaron tradition and the protection won from Barbarossa during the Third Crusade.
What the sources say
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5 statements
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.
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.
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.
In the Second and Third Crusades (1140s and late 1180s) the violent attacks were not repeated. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Second Crusade's spiritual leader, actively protected the Rhineland Jews, and Ephraim of Bonn, author of a chronicle of that campaign, described nothing resembling the sweeping violence of the first. Eleazar of Worms related in memoirs of the Third that the Jews won from Emperor Frederick Barbarossa a decree that anyone who killed a Jew would be killed and that joining the Crusade was no excuse.
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.