344 A History of Judaism
It was characteristic of the Hasidei Ashkenaz to emphasize exceptional
care and precision in prayer, down to amassing great quantities of eso-
teric numerological lore as a way to focus on the petitions, which they
preferred to learn by heart rather than read so that they could focus
solely on the worship itself.^43
Among the different mystical notions developed by other mystics in
the same region at this time, foremost was speculation on the role of the
term ‘Unique Cherub’ as an anthropomorphic designation of the divine
Being. This notion was found in a number of anonymous or pseudepi-
graphic texts and had been cited by R. Elhanan b. Yaakov of London in
the early thirteenth century. By the end of this century these ideas were
being attributed to Judah the Pious, a cousin and contemporary of
Eleazar of Worms. But they are hardly compatible with the mystical
teachings espoused by Eleazar and others of the Kalonymus family and
must in fact have originated in other groups, perhaps in northern France
rather than the Rhineland. It is possible that the asceticism of the
Hasidei Ashkenaz, in particular their practice of mortification of the
flesh, owes something to Christian influence, especially from the Fran-
ciscans, although such asceticism was known in earlier Jewish tradition
both in the Second Temple period and in rabbinic culture in talmudic
times, and the parallels with Christian asceticism, which are never
acknowledged in our sources, may simply reflect an age in which such
types of religious self- expression seemed natural.^44
Christian influence of a very different kind may also explain in part
the dualist elements of the distinctive mystical doctrines espoused by an
unknown author in northern Spain or Provence who composed, prob-
ably at the end of the twelfth century, Sefer haBahir, the ‘Book of
Brightness’. Sefer haBahir may well have been shaped by the influence
of the Cathars, who espoused a strong dualism involving a God of
goodness opposed to a God of evil. Catharism became so prevalent in
these years in Languedoc that in 1209 it provoked the Albigensian Cru-
sade in which Christians from northern France endeavoured to instil the
true faith into Cathar heretics in the south – through slaughter, if neces-
sary. Written in the form of a midrash attributed to rabbis of the time of
the Mishnah, with many teachings presented in the form of parables,
Sefer haBahir discusses the nature of the divine in a series of images,
including that of an upside- down tree. The author claimed to record a
sequence of utterances by God and assigned a major role (for the first
time in Jewish mystical speculation) to a feminine aspect of the divine in
the form of the Shekhinah (the ‘divine presence’). The noun Shekhinah