This well-researched, well-written book seeks to revise and reinterpret the legacy of medieval German Pietists (in Hebrew, Hasidei Ashkenaz). Flourishing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this small group of religious philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and mystics left to posterity a vast literature of exoteric, ethical, and legal texts designed to shape the ethos of German Jewry as well as esoteric, speculative literature intended for the religious virtuosi. By focusing on the Pietists’ conception of nature, this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Pietists’ worldview, theology, ethics, relationship to Jewish philosophy, and relations with the surrounding Christian culture. Commonly alluding to the biblical verse, “He has created a remembrance of His wonders” (Psalms 111:4), the Pietists articulated a worldview that can be best described as the enchantment of nature. Without mentioning the word “enchantment” or Max Weber's reflections on the “disenchantment of the world” by modern science, Shyovitz demonstrates that medieval Jews and their Christian neighbors shared the same worldview of enchanted nature, even though “nature” was employed polemically to diminish the spiritual worth of the competing religious community.

Contrary to modern scholars who presented the German Pietists as mystics who felt disdain toward the natural world because of its inherent corporeality, Chapter 1 argues that “they prized and saw theological meaning in the working of the natural world, both the marvelous and the mundane” (19). And contrary to viewing the Pietists as obscurantists who rejected the empirical study of the natural world, Shyovitz presents them as empiricists who believed that “the spiritual resonance of the world can be uncovered via careful observation” (33). In Shyovitz's analysis, the Pietists were no less “naturalists” than their co-religionists in Spain, even though they did not have access to Aristotelian natural philosophy. Since they privileged the regularity and orderliness of nature (i.e., the “customary course” of the world), how did the Pietists account for miracles or wonders (i.e., the super-natural involvement of God in nature and history)? Shyovitz argues that the Pietists were panentheists for whom God is all-pervasive and ever-present, so that the “wonders” of God are not deviations from the natural order but the very divine presence in the “mundane components of the physical world” (27). The Pietists were not interested in explaining biblical miracles and did not counsel publicizing of miracles (30)—instead, they highlighted “the regularity, and even constraints, imposed by consistency and predictability over a worldview in which miracles play a destabilizing role” (32). Psalm 111:4 was employed as a pedagogical device to inculcate appreciation for the orderliness and consistency of the natural world created by divine Wisdom.

The remaining chapters illustrate the enchantment of nature by focusing on specific topics. Chapter 2 focuses on the human body, which the Pietists took to be a microcosm of the macrocosm. Chapter 3 explores the role of the soul within this microcosmic view—the Pietists believed that the soul itself had corporeal qualities. The embodiedness of the soul and the spiritualization of the physical body were two sides of the same microcosmic worldview. Chapter 4 focuses on Pietistic reflection on monsters, especially werewolves, since monstrosity tests the outer limits and eventual breakdown of the physical human body, and Chapter 5 examines Pietist anxieties about the resurrection of the body by looking at the surprisingly copious statements about excrement in Pietistic writings. Even bodily waste was invested with theological significance, because it was used in the polemics between Judaism and Christianity. Throughout these chapters, we are introduced to many Christian texts, literary genres, and authors whose relevance to German Pietism has not been previously noted. Shyovitz is not the first to interpret German Pietism in the context of medieval Christianity, but his study documents the connections well.

The German Pietists have been studied primarily by specialists in Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. To them, Shyovitz offers a counterargument that German Pietism should be understood in the context of the symbolic mentality of the twelfth and thirteenth century, and not only as an elaboration of rabbinic textual traditions. Indebted primarily to M.D. Chenu, Carolyn Bynum, and Jeffrey J. Cohen, Shyovitz shows that Jews in medieval Germany shared the symbolic mentality of their society, while insisting on Jewish spiritual superiority. To Jewish intellectual historians, Shyovitz suggests that German Pietists should not be contrasted with their Iberian cohorts but viewed as theologians who perpetuated the Neoplatonic worldview, which was displaced by Aristotelianism. The Neoplatonic worldview endowed the natural world with spiritual or theological meaning, precisely because it highlighted the divine presence in the created world. To historians of science, the book argues that the Middle Ages illustrate the blurring of the boundary between science and magic. In medieval society, the discourse on nature was much broader than Aristotelian natural philosophy and closely aligned with “natural magic” (67) as well as with mechanical, technological, and commercial knowledge. Therefore, Shyovitz argues, speculations on human embodiment, monsters, bodily waste, or the decomposition of bodies after death are no less “scientific” or “philosophical” than the Aristotelian discourses on motion or materiality. And to Jewish environmentalists who mine the Jewish tradition for non-exploitative attitudes toward nature, Shyovitz offers German Pietism as a rich source of inspiration about enchanted nature.

A particular strength of the book is how it captures the ambiguous place of Jews in medieval Christian society. Jews were “dehumanized,” “accused of ritual murder and cannibalism, equated with demons and animals, attacked and eventually expelled en masse, while also being invested with ever increasing symbolic significance” (131). As a hermeneutical category, “the Jew” “pointed beyond himself to a broader complex of interwoven theological interests and anxieties: the relationship between faith and works, between soul and body, between the spirit and the letter of the biblical texts. Jews were simultaneously marginalized and made central, shunted aside and obsessively scrutinized, rejected by and given pride of place in an array of sermons, exegetical tracts, and theological writings” (131). Shyovitz's discussion of Jews within the context of the medieval preoccupation with monstrosity and the comparisons of Christian and Jewish reflections on the decomposition of the body and the resurrection of the body in the eschatological end are novel precisely because they show how Jewish thinkers transposed the themes of majority culture into their own, distinctively Jewish, minor key.