The Humble Sage and the Wandering Madman: Madness and Madmen in an Exemplum from Sefer Hasidim

Notwithstanding its, at times, notably pietistic nature, Sefer Hasidim (henceforth SH)¹ provides modern scholars with a glimpse of the mindset, mentality, and culture of medieval Ashkenazi Jewry. In his insightful and fundamental study of this work, Ivan Marcus characterizes its role as follows:

Like Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus Miraculorum, Sefer Hasidim is a speculum of the society in which it originated. It contains allusions to knights and demons, princes and prices, grain profiteering, monastic practices, tensions in communal politics, Jewish-Christian debates, conversion in both directions, coin clipping, sexual promiscuity, local customs, women's occupations in weaving and money lending, and a variety of other facts of medieval culture and life in medieval Germany.²

Missing from this cogent observation is SH's treatment of madness. Bearing in mind its role as a source for social attitudes, I wish to take a fresh look at one of the more than four hundred exempla found in SH. This exemplum is pertinent to the study of madness in medieval European Jewish society. Its story illumines questions of madness, marginality, insanity's social aspects, and how madmen were perceived and treated by medieval European society at large and by its Jewish minority.³

Before proceeding to the exemplum itself, some preliminary remarks about madness and the insane in the European Middle Ages are in order. From antiquity through the Early Modern period, abnormal or insane behavior was often linked to demonic possession. Demons were thought to torment the possessed, thus relieving these individuals of legal responsibility for their actions. Some medieval cures for possession and madness utilized physical violence, seeking to discomfort and thereby "drive out" the demons. These "cures" legitimized abuse and torture. The English mystic Margery Kempe—herself at first thought to be mad—speaks of a madwoman she was asked to heal. Confined in chains to a small chamber on the outskirts of the English town of Kings Lynn because of her unbearable yelling, this woman was pushed to the margins because "most people would not suffer her to dwell among them."⁴ In late medieval Germany there was even a specific term for chambers used for locking up madmen: Tollkisten (cages for the mad).⁵

Insane individuals were classified according to two distinct categories: harmless and raving.⁶ The harmless, peaceable, though at times boisterously merry fools were left to wander about the public sphere in relative freedom, collecting alms and charity. Judith Neaman described the common medieval nonviolent variety as "barefoot and breadless beggars."⁷ Recently, James Brodman noted in his study of sick care in medieval Iberia that "people whose behavior we would now characterize as disturbed were not differentiated from the run of beggars until the 14^th century, when society began to sort the poor into various categories."⁸ The American cultural historian Sander Gilman points out that harmless madmen were represented both in literature and in the visual arts as part of the world of children, as being of "lesser mind" than normal adults.⁹ The raving mad, on the other hand, were considered a menace, a threat both to themselves and to society. Physical as well as textual evidence points to the segregation and imprisonment of these individuals, and even to their grave mistreatment.¹⁰ That a "code of mad behavior" existed both in antiquity and in medieval Europe is evident from the fact that the sane could in extreme cases adopt this code and convincingly impersonate madness.¹¹

With these observations in mind let us now turn to the exemplum from SH about "The Humble Sage."

A man was captive in a far away land. He said to himself, "How shall I set about¹² observing the Sabbath," and he decided to feign madness. Children jested with him and gave him bread. On the Sabbath he...