Judah the Pious

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.1

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.2

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.3