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  • "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe by Ivan G. Marcus
  • Rella Kushelevsky
Ivan G. Marcus. "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xiii + 202 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000680

Ivan Marcus's groundbreaking work goes right to the heart of issues central to the study of Ashkenaz both currently and in the past, through the fascinating prism of the writing and composition processes of Sefer Ḥasidim. Diving deep into twenty manuscripts and sixty printed editions of the text, Marcus presents Sefer Ḥasidim as an "open book," by which he means that there is no one single, complete, homogenous work or Ur-text. Marcus writes:

The meaning I am giving to "open book" in the case of Sefer Hasidim … refers to an author:

  • • Composing a work in short text units that he sometimes rewrites;

  • • Combining them disjunctively (without linear coherence); and

  • • Producing more than one parallel edition. … The term "open book" here refers to writing parallel editions of a book so that there never was only one original edition from which the others are derived.

(5)

He likens the composition process of Sefer Ḥasidim to an inverted pyramid (4) at whose broad base are thousands of small units of text that the author channeled into a number of parallel versions at the bottom tip (as opposed to numerous variants derived from a single Ur-text at the top of a pyramid). Marcus further determines that all fourteen extant versions of Sefer Ḥasidim are of equal value and that it is not possible to reduce one or the other by sublimating them within any particular hierarchy. That is because "most of the Sefer Hasidim manuscripts contain some paragraph passages that are not found in either SHB [Sefer Ḥasidim Bologna] or SHP [Sefer Ḥasidim Parma], and each edition or small set of editions is independent of SHB and SHP even when one or more blocks of passages appear in more than one of them. The editions differ with respect to the order of the paragraphs as well as the contents" (17). It is this thesis that underlies the book with its accompanying catalog.

The first chapter, following the introduction, lays out the theory of Sefer Ḥasidim as an open book; it presents detailed and convincing evidence for this argument based on the work's entire corpus of manuscripts and printed editions, which attest to the independence of the small textual units within the work's [End Page 468] composition processes. Marcus contrasts this open book format to an author's reediting of his own text or to changes made by scribes in the course of the book's transmission. The second chapter examines the "open book" thesis in relation to other texts written by Judah he-Ḥasid and his students, such as Eleazar of Worms, and shows the fluidity and overlapping attached to the concept of text in their writings. A large section of this chapter is devoted to Sefer ha-Ḥasidut, also known as "the French Sefer Ḥasidim," and examines its structure, historical context, and impact. The chapter ends with a reconsideration of penitential practices in German Pietist writings and in Ashkenaz in general. In the third chapter Marcus presents a biographical profile of Judah he-Ḥasid, compiled by comparing traditions written by his sons and students, hagiographic stories written after his lifetime, and stories from the Sefer Ḥasidim corpus itself. Using a historic-anthropological approach, with all its inherent advantages and disadvantages, Marcus recreates a "tale of four cities" (10)—Speyer, Regensburg, Worms, and Mainz—as a cultural geography related to the biographies of R. Samuel, R. Judah, and R. Eleazar. The chapter concludes with a discussion on what is often a contentious issue for Ashkenaz scholars: whether Hasidei Ashkenaz can best be understood as a movement or as a circle of individuals; and the extent to which depictions of Ashkenazic society in various versions of Sefer Ḥasidim actually have a basis in reality. The fourth chapter sets Sefer Ḥasidim within the broader context of books in Ashkenaz that, according to Marcus, appear to have, "to one degree or another," an "open book" format, pointing out how the...

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