Historical scholarship of the past few decades has sought to liberate the image of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry from the grip of Wissenschaft thinking, which portrayed it as xenophobic and ignorant. David Shyovitz's A Remembrance of His Wonders takes this scholarly movement in a new direction. Shyovitz argues that far from shunning the natural order, the German Pietists reflected deeply on natural phenomena that inspire marvel because they appear to defy explanation. The Pietists, chiefly Judah the Pious, collected these wonders in texts that often begin with “a remembrance of His wonders” (Psalm 111:4), in order to derive theological conclusions from seemingly aberrant forces of nature.
The theological import derived from remembrances revolves around God's existence and omnipotence, and typically is learned a minore ad maius, from the physical order to the recondite divine realm. Shyovitz interprets these lessons propounded by the Pietists as implying a powerful current of skepticism among the rank and file of medieval Ashkenaz, which also challenges the traditional historiographical image. Indeed, Jeremy Cohen and Avraham Grossman have put forward similar arguments in different contexts, and yet I can imagine the Pietists propagating material of this sort for the edification and spiritual well-being of their audience without conjuring an atmosphere involving a crisis of faith.
The interrogation of nature through its wonders is a familiar trope from the travel writing of Gerald of Wales and others, which treats home-bound readers to descriptions of bizarre creatures encountered at the geographical limits of the world, liminal phenomena in liminal locales. Thinking about events and behaviors that lie at the edge of the natural realm offered a way to conceptualize the natural order and where its boundaries fall. Thus, the interest the Pietists show in the workings of nature situates them squarely in the context of medieval science, which, as Lynn Thorndike has shown, did not distinguish between science and magic, the natural and occult. More startling is the Pietists’ methodology, which combines observation and experimentation. They instruct readers how to produce certain results, and their thinking is refreshingly modern for not being rooted in the classical tomes of Aristotle, Galen, and others. Judah the Pious takes his place among Albert the Great and other medieval thinkers whose empiricism anticipated the scientific revolution.
A Remembrance of His Wonders also posits a high degree of cultural integration, with knowledge of the natural order—including the occult—derived not only from rabbinic tradition (e.g., sources about magnets, salamanders, etc.), but also from contemporary Christian writings, including bestiaries, lapidaries, encyclopedias, and “books of secrets.” Once again, the book confounds the image of Ashkenazic Jewry as insular, although Yitzhak Baer, Joseph Dan, and others have suggested possible connections to Berthold of Regensburg or Caesarius of Heisterbach and acknowledged the presence of Germanic folklore in the Pietists’ writings.
Remembrances from the natural world are the subject of the first chapter; the remaining four focus on the human being, especially the body. We are thus cautioned that the Pietists’ well-known asceticism does not imply disdain for the body; rather, the idea of man as microcosm stimulates intense scrutiny of the body's form and processes, from which the Pietists derive practical advantage, such as for divination or to fashion a golem. This fascination with the human form seems to sit well with the Ashkenazic tradition of divine corporealism, a tradition closely associated with Moses Taku, though true also for Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières. Shyovitz's overall thesis of intense Ashkenazic acculturation is supported here by evidence that the microcosm idea circulated widely in twelfth-century Europe, at the cathedral school of Chartres or, closer to home, in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. We are also treated to sources from visual art, including the Noah Window of the Chartres Cathedral (fig. 8).
The Pietists’ theory of the soul supports Shyovitz's argument about their interest in the body, because, as chapter 3 explains, they believed that a person's soul is tailored to fit the physical contours of the body it is designed to inhabit. Doctrine never strays far from the body, such that in Pietist thought, each person's soul has a physical copy in the heavens to match its state on earth, and penance requires mortification of the body to forestall physical punishment in the afterlife. Analogous ideas are cited from the writings of William of Conches and other twelfth-century thinkers, and of course Dante's description of the physical torments of hell resounds.
Folklorists have noted the presence of the werewolf in the literature of medieval Ashkenaz, and chapter 4 situates this motif in the broader context of the Pietists’ view of embodiment, emphasizing that they focus on creatures that transform from human to monster. Because the notion that the human form is mutable and unstable was seen as threatening, the Pietists either insist that the werewolf preserves an element of its humanity, or else they deny its humanity from the outset. As always, analogous thinking is brought from ancient rabbinic writings, but the Pietists go beyond traditional ideas, and their thinking about werewolves clearly resembles that of contemporaries such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Tilbury, for whom, as Christians, concern about corporeal stability was rooted in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Eucharist.
The discussion segues from monsters to excrement, as chapter 5 addresses the Pietists’ bewildering obsession with bodily functions and waste products, seen as part and parcel of the centrality of the human body. Significantly, the Pietists amplify the rabbinic rules that establish distance between human waste and sacred spaces and objects, such as one's clothing and speech, or the synagogue and its ritual appurtenances. This seems to presage the early modern “civilizing process,” but for Judah the Pious the crucial point is that excrement represents decay and death, which is seen as antithetical to the pure resurrected body of the end of days. I wonder about the relationship between the Pietists’ thinking and the Zohar's notion that the production of waste within the sefirotic organism was the mechanism responsible for the original generation of evil into the world. For Christians, the human digestive process raised questions about purity in relation to the Eucharist as well as the resurrected body of the eschaton, and Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and others are cited for their views that human waste products will not be resurrected and that the resurrected body will not excrete. In short, both religions evince scatological anxiety with regard to the holiness and immutability of the human body, and an abundance of polemical exchanges between the two faiths attest to this concern.
A Remembrance of His Wonders synthesizes a remarkably broad range of motifs, which tends to bolster its explanatory power while also threatening to obscure other perspectives. For instance, there is probably more to the apparent similarity between the mortification of the flesh as articulated by Judah the Pious and Francis of Assisi than the ground covered in this book. And while I applaud Shyovitz's contextualization of Pietist thought in the intellectual history of twelfth-century Europe, this waters down the significance for Ashkenazic Jewry of elements derived from Teutonic lore. I also sense a tendency to reduce multiple schools of thought to the single category of the Pietists: Moses Taku was certainly not Judah's supporter, and the “Unique Cherub” school is not necessarily a subset of Judah's pietism. These cautionary notes detract not a whit from the impressive achievement of the book before us, which I found immensely erudite, enlightening, and stimulating, thoroughly researched and lucidly written, a landmark contribution to our understanding of the intellectual and spiritual currents of medieval Ashkenaz.
