An earlier version of this paper, “Images of Women in Sefer Hasidim,” was delivered at Mystik, Magie und Kabbala im Aschkenasischen Judentum, a conference held at Frankfurt am Main, December 1991, and was published with the conference proceedings in Mysticism and Magic in Judaism: An International Symposium Held in Frankfurt, 1991, ed. Grozinger, K. E. and Dan, J., Judaica, Studia 13 (Berlin, 1993).Google Scholar

1. A classic exploration of this phenomenon is Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” reprinted in idem, Women, History and Theory(Chicago, 1984), pp. 19–50Google Scholar. Explorations of the varying effects of historical events on Jewish men and Jewish women include Paula Hyman, “Gender and Jewish History,” Tikkun3, no. 1 (January-February 1988);Google Scholar idem, “Gender and the Immigrant Experience in America,” and Kaplan, Marion, “Tradition and Transition: Jewish Women in Imperial Germany,” both in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Baskin, Judith R. (Detroit, 1991), pp. 222–242, 202–221.Google Scholar

2. On medieval Jewish women'S activities, see Judith Baskin, R., “Jewish Women in the Middle Ages,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, pp. 101–102, 104–107.Google Scholar See Sered, Susan Starr, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem(New York, 1992) for an anthropological analysis of the alternative religious lives of a contemporary community of Jewish women.Google Scholar

3. Concerning the importance of marrying within the pietistic circle, see Samuel, Judah b. the Pious, Sefer Hasidim, ed. Judah, Wistinetzki, with an introduction by Jacob Freimann (Frankfurt am Main., 1924), Parma version (hereafter cited as SHP), pars. 1094, 1097, 1100, 1112, 1113, 1132, 1879–1881Google Scholar; and Marcus, Ivan, Piety and Sociery: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden, 1981), pp. 95.Google Scholar

4. Disputes between husband and wife over giving charity must have been frequent. For several examples, see SHP, pars. 669,670, and 1715. These are translated in Abraham Cronbach, “Social Thinking in the Sefer Hasidim,” Hebrew Union College Annual 22 (1949): 59. 135.Google Scholar

5. Dolce, the wife of Eleazar of Worms, was attacked with the rest of her household by two armed intruders in December 1196. The Roqeah wrote a prose account of the murder of his wife as well as a poetic eulogy for her and his two murdered daughters, Bellette and Hannah. The Hebrew texts are printed in Haberman, A. M., Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Zarfat(Jerusalem, 1945), pp. 164–167. I have translated and analyzed the prose account in an unpublished paper, “Tragedy at Worms, 1196: The Murder of the Roqeah'S Family Revisited,” delivered at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting, December 1992.Google Scholar

6. Pious, Judah ben Samuel the, Sefer Hasidism, ed. Reuven, Magoliot (Jerusalem, 1964)Google Scholar Bologna version (hereafter cited as SHB), par. 29; also see SHP, pars. 984, 989. The precept that one should refrain as much as possible from converse with one'S wife except during sexual intercourse is based on B. Hagigah 5b.Google Scholar

7. Eleazar of Worms, Sefer Ha-Roqeah Ha-Gadol(Jerusalem, 1968)Google Scholar, Teshuvah, Hilkhot, no. 20, p. 30, and no. 14, p. 27; both translated in David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America(New York, 1992), p. 78.Google Scholar

8. See SHB, par. 509, which advocates a male superior position for sexual intercourse when conception is desired, since this is most pleasurable for the woman (should she achieve orgasm first she is likely to conceive a son), but rules that at other times the man may conduct their sex life as he wishes in order to prevent fantasies about other women.

9. Marcus, Piety and Society, p. 15.

10. See Ibid, pp. 41–52.

11. On women in rabbinic Judaism, see Biale, Rachel, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Womens Issues in Halakhic Sources(New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Wegner, Judith Romney, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah(New York and Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, and idem, “The Image and Status of Women in Classical Rabbinic Judaism,” in Baskin, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, pp. 68–93.Google Scholar

12. Harris, Monford, “The Concept of Love in Sepher Hassidim,” Jewish Quarterly Review 50(1959): 14.Google Scholar

13. SHB, par. 9 (some of this passage is also found in SHP, par. 978); translation is from Sholom Alchanan Singer, Medieval Jewish Mysticism: Book of the Pious(Northbrook, 111., 1971), p. 9. As David Biale, Eros and the Jews, notes about other passages from Sefer Hasidimand related writings, such narratives also function, albeit unconsciously, to arouse erotic excitement: “In the process of resisting the erotic temptations of his culture, Judah the Hasid ended up unwittingly reinforcing it” (p. 73).Google Scholar

14. Marcus, Ivan, “Narrative Fantasies from Sefer Hasidim,” in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David, Stern and Mark, Jay Mirsky (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), p. 236, n. 37.Google Scholar

15. Passage in Hebrew, M. S. 1566, Bodleian Library Oxford, p. 178a, published in Joseph Dan, lyunim B'Sifrut Hasidut Ashkenaz(Ramat-Gan, 1975), p. 140.Google Scholar

16. For medieval Jewish thinking on the education of women, see Judith R. Baskin, “Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Jewish History5, no.l (Spring 1991): 41–52.

17. SHP, pars. 52–53; the entire passage is translated by Marcus in Rabbinic Fantasies, pp. 220–223.Google Scholar

18. , Harris, “Concept of Love,” pp. 24–27, is convinced that there is no doubt of the story'S authenticity (p. 24), and views it as “a behavior typical of courtly love in which the ‘furtive embrace’ [intended to enflame desire while resisting consummation] can take place only outside wedlock” (p. 26). Recently, Eli Yassif, “The Exemplary Story in Sefer Hasidim,” Tarbiz57 (1987–88), has pointed out that this story is related to a folktale tradition found in Arabic literature, and suggests that R. Judah the Pious transformed it for his own didactic purposes (p. 224, n. 20). While Biale, Eros and the Jews, does not believe that this is a true story, he does note that regardless of its authenticity, “the text subverts its stated intent by telling a highly erotic story” (p. 73).Google Scholar

19. SHP, par. 2, translated by Marcus, Piety and Society, p. 28.Google Scholar

20. See , Marcus, Piety and Society, pp. 42, 46, for examples of women who importune men to sin (from Sefer Ha-Roqeah, Hilkhot Teshuvah, par. 1; and SHP, par. 15).Google Scholar

21. Abraham Yagel, Eshet Hayyil(Venice, 1605–1606), 18b–19a; cited in Adelman, Howard, “Finding Women'S Voices in Italian Jewish Literature,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Baskin, Judith R. (Detroit, 1994).Google Scholar

22. Marcus, Piety and Society, pp. 130–131Google Scholar. Stow, Kenneth R. “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland in the High Middle Ages: Form and Function,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), on the other hand, attributes many of Sefer Hasidim'S accounts of sexual promiscuity to Judah'S “vivid imagination,” commenting, “More important than whether Judah believed such things occurred is his ability to imagine them. Neither he nor his contemporaries suffered from underdeveloped” (p. 1105).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. , Harris, “Concept of Love,” writes that Sefer Hasidim“pictures the German community as it really was, a febrile community, full of contradictions, concerns, and unsolved problems” (p. 13).Google Scholar

24. Biale, , Eros and the Jews, p. 69Google Scholar; Kanarfogel, Ephraim, “Rabbinic Attitudes Towards Nonobservance in the Medieval Period,” in Jewish Tradition and the Nontraditional Jew, ed. Schacter, Jacob J. (Northvale, N.J., 1992), pp. 3–35, provides considerable evidence of rabbinic concern about sexual promiscuity in medieval Ashkenaz (see pp. 17–26).Google Scholar

25. Duby, Georges, “The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges, Duby (Cambridge, 1988), p. 780.Google Scholar

26. Ibid, p. 80.

27. Ibid, p. 82.

28. Sefer Ha-Pardes(Budapest, 1924), no. 149, trans, in Irving Agus, Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe(New York, 1965), 2:728–729; and see Biale, Eros and the Jews, p. 68, and n. 28.Google Scholar

29. For Eleazar of Mainz, see Hebrew Ethical Wills, ed. Abrahams, Israel (Philadelphia, 1926; reprint ed., 1976), p. 211.Google Scholar

30. Abrahams, Israel, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages(London, 1896; reprint ed., New York, 1969), pp. 380–381.Google Scholar

31. See SHP, par. 19, on penance for sexual intercourse with a Christian maidservant. For a study of similar extended urban families in which father, mother, brothers, sisters, daughters-in-law, and domestic servants lived under the same roof, see Ronciere, Charles de La, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance,” in A History of Private Life, 2:157–309. De La Ronciere notes that in this crowded urban setting, “Servants and slaves, many of them radiant young girls, offered the men of the house a distraction that discouraged outside escapades. Bourgeois memoirs are filled with the names of bastard offspring” (p. 294); and goes on to say that “the presence of cousins and nieces could also be disturbing, particularly when they shared the same bedroom.”Google Scholar

32. Prostitutes were a medieval social reality. The suggestion of a surplus of women in German cities as a contributory factor to the prevalence of prostitution was first made by Bilcher, Karl, Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter(Tubingen, 1910)Google Scholar, cited and discussed in Howell, Martha, “A Documented Presence: Medieval Women in Germanic Historiography,” in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, ed. Susan, Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 116–119.Google Scholar

33. SHP, par. 1301.

34. , Biale, Eros and the Jews, p. 73; Kanarfogel, “Rabbinic Attitudes,” takes a more cautious approach, suggesting that “illicit sexual encounters were considered in Ashkenazic rabbinic literature as lapses on the part of individuals rather than as a larger societal problem” (p. 24).Google Scholar

35. As Stow, Kenneth, “Jewish Family in the Rhineland,” p. 1110, has suggested, Jewish scholarship has tended to extrapolate backwards from our knowledge of the ideals governing the institutions and leadership of Eastern European Jewish society in the early modern period to the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland. It may be, as he says, that the medieval Jewish family, and, I would add, its social setting, was something quite distinct.Google Scholar

36. Chazan, Robert, European Jewry and the First Crusade(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 195–196.Google Scholar

37. Baer, Yitzhak, “The Religious-Social Tendency of Sefer Hasidim” (Hebrew), Zion 3 (1937–1938): 12.Google Scholar

38. Singer, Medieval Jewish Mysticism, p. xix.Google Scholar

39. Dan, Joseph, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics(Seattle, 1986), p. 75.Google Scholar

40. Ibid.

41. SHB, par. 14.

42. SHP, par. 179; translated by Ivan Marcus in Rabbinic Fantasies, pp. 226–227.

43. See, for example, B. Ketubot 62b for several such accounts.

44. See 2Biale, David, “Ejaculatory Prayer: The Displacement of Sexuality in Chasidism,” Tikkun 6, no. 4 (July-August 1991): 21–25Google Scholar, 87–89; and Rapaport-Albert, Ada, “On Women in Hasidism, S. A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludmir Tradition,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada, Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein, J. (London, 1988), pp. 495–525. Biale writes that “the Chasidic movement introduced the most extreme anti-erotic values ever to appear in any Jewish texts, values that resemble, in some respects, the renunciations of sexuality preached by Christian monastics. Still more paradoxically, we find on the threshold of modernity one of the most widespread movements of sexual asceticism in Jewish history” (p. 21).Google Scholar

45. Biale, “Ejaculatory Prayer, p. 24.

46. , Rappaport-Albert. ”On Women in Hasidim,“ p. 523, n. 80.Google Scholar

47. See Trachtenberg, Joshua, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion(New York, 1939; reprint ed., 1970) on the connection of women with witchcraft in Jewish tradition in general and in Sefer Hasidimin particular. The passage on sorceresses who regularly attend synagogue services is found in SHP, par. 1369.Google Scholar