324 A History of Judaism
which Jews found themselves in their dispersion, but in some communi-
ties a distinctive ideology underpinned their attitude to halakhah. This
was perhaps most evident among the Hasidei Ashkenaz, circles of pie-
tists in the Rhineland from the mid- twelfth century to the early fourteenth,
led primarily by members of the Kalonymus family in Mainz and Worms
(see Chapter 9). Their asceticism and ethical devotion, encapsulated in
the Sefer Hasidim (‘Book of the Pious’) written in the early thirteenth
century by R. Yehudah b. Shmuel haHasid of Regensburg, was predi-
cated on a mystical theology all of their own. The Sefer Hasidim outlines
the norms of rabbinic life, with sections dedicated to ritual, teaching and
studying Torah, and social and family life, but it also includes many
exemplary stories to demonstrate correct behaviour:
Once there was a man who did not want to release his deceased brother’s
wife from the obligation to marry him, and his foot began to hurt, where-
upon he was told: ‘The very wrong of not removing your shoe is causing your
foot to hurt.’ So he removed his shoe and the foot was cured. A story is told
about a man who used to go from town to town for sustenance. He was poor
but rich in knowledge and good deeds, and he did not want to tell his name
or how much he knew. People would give him a pittance. He would then
converse about the Law with the town’s wise scholars, and when they saw
how much he knew, people came to add to what they had given him, but he
refused to take it. He said, ‘You already gave me the alms of a poor man, but
what you want to give me now for my knowledge I shall not accept.’Many other narratives describe miracles and demons, reflecting popular
beliefs in Germany in the twelfth century. It was among the Hasidei
Ashkenaz in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the notion of the
creation of a golem (an artificial living being) by magic through the
employment of holy names, a popular myth in the folk tradition of Jews
in eastern Europe in later centuries (see Chapter 15 on legends about the
Maharal of Prague), is first found as the culmination of a ritual study of
mystical texts. Underlying the whole approach of the Hasidei Ashkenaz
to the halakhah was the notion that ‘the root of saintliness is for a man to
go beyond the letter of the Law’, and that this should lead to asceticism.
We have seen (Chapter 10) that, a century earlier, in Muslim Spain,
Bahya ibn Pakuda relied on a different tradition, based in Islamic myst-
icism or Sufism, in his Duties of the Heart, which preached the duty of
showing gratitude to God at all times and adopting a moderate attitude
to ascetism. Bahya taught that withdrawal from society would be wrong
for any human, not least for a Jew who has been chosen by God: