As people who were born in the in latter half of the 20th century, the way we see the Holocaust as like a thing that requires an entire reorganization of
Schwab: Jewish identity and practice and theology and where Jews even live, that’s what 1096 represented to German Jews.
From unpacked, this is Jewish history nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: And I’m Yael Steiner. I have had a really long week and I’m wondering what it is that you can tell me today, Schwab that will get me excited to go into my weekend.
Schwab: I don’t know about excited. I’m very excited to talk about it. This is, I think, a really interesting topic that will take us in a lot of different directions. I have had a long week, and part of my long week is I’ve stayed up late many nights reading more and more about this topic because I have found it very, very fascinating.
Yael: I’ve totally been there. It’s like you open one thing, one article, and it has a footnote to a different book or a different article, and you just go down the rabbit hole. And that’s part of what makes us super nerds.
Schwab: Yes.
Yael: I have approximately one, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine tabs open right now in my browser for next week’s show.
Schwab: I don’t want to say how many tabs I have opened in my browser.
Schwab: What we’re gonna talk about today is I feel fairly confident that you have not heard of this, but a movement from the 12th, 13th century called the ei Ashkenaz. And right, and you might be thinking, I feel like I have heard of this.
Yael: I feel like that term has at least once entered my brain in the past 25 years, So please enlighten me.
Schwab: Right, so im is probably a term that you’ve heard of and Ashkenaz certainly, but this movement is more fringe and more obscure. This is not the popular im. What it is is a somewhat small radical movement of pietism, of focusing on a life of extreme pietism.
Yael: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use that word before.
Schwab: man, is an article, one of the articles that discusses the difference between piety, pietism, and German pietism, which is the English term for -e Ashkenaz.
Yael: I was just gonna ask. Okay. Ooh. German pietism sounds very severe.
Schwab: Yes, well, severe is a great way to describe this group. They are severe. So, Piety.
Yael: Okay, amazing. Because usually when I think of im, I think of the original as being very joyous and not severe, but it doesn’t sound, it sounds like maybe this isn’t that.
Schwab: Yes.
Yes. Okay, so yeah, I think we need to clarify the most confusing part of this topic, which is you said the original ut. This is a movement that uses the same terms that predates what we would now recognize as ut as like the origins of the ic movement in Europe that still exists to this day. The ic Ashkenaz are from the 12th and 13th century. So it’s like several hundred years before that later ic movement.
They’re not the same thing they just happen to have the same name but they’re they’re very different and that certainly these these the ic Ashkenaz were not joyous they they rejected joy
Yael: Which is, at least to my understanding, not a Jewish.We’re not meant to be ascetic.
Schwab: Yeah, go on. yeah. So they are extremely ascetic. Ascetic is like the main thing. So ascetic, do you want to define that term for our SAT studying listeners?
Yael: Ascetic is, sort of, would describe it as self-denialistic and very, sparse and, you know, being, living without cel- celibacy, but not only sexual celibacy, like celibacy from all types of enjoyment, including, you know, excessive intake of food and wine and partying.
Schwab: Right. Right.
Right.
Schwab: Enjoyment
Yes, and asceticism does not, to our mind, seem compatible with Judaism. Judaism does not preach asceticism. We’re not, I don’t know, monks who take vows of celibacy and poverty. But the ic Ashkenaz came pretty close to a lot of those things, and they did very much value that.
Schwab: There’s so so many directions that this goes in and there’s so much to talk about within this movement. But I also want to talk about how do we understand and contextualize it and how do we make sense of it and what relevance is it for us today? So at some point, you’re probably gonna have to cut me off and say, well, like get to that part. Yeah, okay, broadly this starts.
Yael: So how, where and when does it start? And what is it a deviation from?
Schwab: Okay, it’s gonna take a long time to answer all of those questions, but this predominates in Germany in what that’s what the term Ashkenaz usually is associated with in Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries. We know quite a bit about it from the extensive writings of the people involved in this movement. The ic Ashkenaz wrote a lot about their beliefs
Yael: Amazing. I’ve got all day.
Schwab: There’s not a ton written about them. So I think we can read into that a little bit like this probably was not a major, major movement.
This was somewhat small, and we’ll get to what was their influence and legacy, and that’s debated
Yael: Is this one of those things where there is a lot of writing about it and therefore we assume it’s important, similarly to the demon bowls, where the bowls survived, so we assume they’re important, but they may have just survived because of their physical makeup from clay as opposed to something less long-lasting.
Schwab: Interesting. I’m really glad you brought up the demon bowls because the Hasiri Ashkenaz also wrote a lot about demons and they were very, very superstitious and mystical. So their writings survive. So I think we can actually say, okay, we know these manuscripts were deliberately preserved.
Yael: Whirling dervishes come to mind.
Schwab: and these things were rewritten or re-scribed. So we know people were preserving this for some reason. The biggest text that we’re gonna talk about is a book called the Sefer im, right? The book of the im. And there are, like the older versions, manuscripts we have, there are at least seven different partial manuscripts, which were rewritten by hand.
And at some point then there was a sort of more standardized version of it that was printed. And we have lots of versions of this. And this is not a tremendously obscure book. This is mainstream enough that the text is on Sefaria.
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: But some of the big names associated also with this movement, starts, is a family that is prominent in Western Germany, which the location in Germany actually is important, we’ll come back to that in a little bit, called the Kolonomides. They start out in Italy. They move to Western Germany. They eventually emigrate in in the like 11 late thousands early 1100s at some point to to eastern Germany to specifically an area called Regensburg. And that’s where the scion of this family, Judah, Rabbi Yehuda He Hasid.
Schwab: Also known as Judah of Regensburg, becomes very prominent, is sort of seen as the leader of this movement, purportedly writes the Sefer im, we’ll come back to that. And he, yeah.
Yael: and he starts this out of nowhere.
Schwab: No, he would say he’s inheriting a family tradition and there were esoteric secrets that were revealed to him directly by his father, but he is sort of the crux of this.
Yael: It sounds almost like Jesus
Schwab: Jesus will come up again, I think, in this episode. I keep there’s so much that’s going to come up. I keep teasing and promising that. But Rabbi Yehuda ha Levi is is like this central figure. He’s in Regensburg. He’s born.
Schwab: Oh, now I can’t remember the exact year, but it’s something like 1140, or thereabouts, and he dies in 1217. he dies in the year 1217 on the day before Purim. So depending on when this episode comes out or when you’re watching it, it might be the Yartzeit, the memorial day of Rabbi Yehuda He Hasid.
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: Whatever, the 809th anniversary of his death. I think I did that math right. But so, he’s sort of like the central figure. He has a bunch of important students, some of whom then go on to prominence as well. And it, like, not just for their involvement in ic Ashkenaz, but also as mainstream writers. One of his students is the author of book called The Orzaruah, which
Yael: Math’s not my thing.
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: I was like, yeah, that’s a book I’ve heard.Yael (14:51.934)
Was he, you might have said this, was he from a rabbinic dynastic family?
Schwab: Yes, so he’s part of this like, Kalanomides, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, like this lineage of respected rabbis who again, in his telling, passed on generation to generation, were not just, not just they were respected as nobles, but passed on esoteric mystical secrets, father to son, for like a good number of generations.
Yael: So he comes to Regensburg and I guess he starts preaching or teaching these ideas and what happens?
Schwab: Yeah, I’m not sure if he was preaching or he was definitely doing a lot and he was revered as a miracle worker and he was writing and he was also spending a lot of his time being very pious himself. So, like a lot is written about that. I’m like, he spent a lot of his time in Torah study in prayer. They are, like here. I’m just going to start inserting some of the like practices. Their prayers were I will say this and I will try in general not to be not to come off as irreverent.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: But I would describe what they’re saying they did in terms of length of prayer as interminable, like a prayer service that I would never go to. They focused on, and like as a value, spending an extraordinary amount of time on prayer.but to illustrate one of the…
Yael: Got it.
Schwab: One of the examples that’s given is in reciting Psalms as part of morning prayers, one of the Hasireh Ashkenaz said, I stopped going to this other prayer service because they went way too quickly. Instead, I went to this Hasireh Ashkenaz proper way of doing it, where in reciting the Psalms, I was able to count in each Psalm how many times each letter appears while we were saying it. How slowly could you
Possibly be saying it so you could do that and I can’t figure it out, but it’s it’s very very slowly
Yael: If you are going to pray for such a long time, hopefully piously, it doesn’t leave that much time during the rest of the day to do anything else.
Schwab: What are the anything else that you think you should be doing with your time?
Yeah. Yes, yeah.
Yael: They’re not going to birthday parties. They’re not going to the gym.
Schwab: No. I’ll go even further. Not only were they not going to birthday parties or the gym, you might be wondering, when did they fit in time to eat? Don’t worry about it. They didn’t. They were not out of, not every, but there is a very strong emphasis on a practice of fasting. According to some sources, Rabbi Yehuda fasted every day during all daylight hours, only eight after he finished the evening prayers at night and was so used to doing that. This was so much his regular routine that he did this even on Shabbat.
Schwab: right, so, and you might be wondering, like, aren’t you supposed to be eating on Shabbat? And like, he might not have.
And that’s a theme. The practices often go so far as to be at odds in some cases with normative Jewish practice.
Yael: right.
Schwab: They restrict lots of things. First of all, all foods at many different points, in Sefer HaChazidim, one of the sections says, it’s something like, righteous man should not let eight days pass without fasting. Like you should definitely be fasting,once a week. No question. That’s like a baseline.
Yael: Okay.
And are you breaking your fast with like a saltine cracker and some water?
Schwab: Probably, right? Like we’re just, yeah, like very, very, very simple living. Yeah. so yeah, yeah. Like this presents a major challenge then because obviously we’re sort of like dancing around, but obviously there’s, there is some connection, influence, similarity to like Christian practices of the time, especially people like.
Yael: Basic. Are these people married?
Mm-hmm.
Schwab: monks, right? And like definitely this was; there were Christians who were living in self-induced poverty, celibacy. So the celibacy thing is a huge problem, I guess, in the worldview of the ic Ashkenaz because the most critical scholar of them, I think, is Chaim Saloveitchik. We’ll talk more about him soon. But the way he describes it is like celibacy presents a major challenge to their worldview because it
It seems like the type of thing that they should be practicing, but that’s like way too far. Like you cannot say, abide by the Torah and I’m celibate
Yael: I’m thinking of a scene in Friends where they ask Joey if he had to give up either food or sex, which would he choose? And he gets very confused, but it seems like the ic Ashkenaz are firmly on the side of they would give up food. But they’re not gonna go as far as the other thing.
Schwab: Right, you can give up food. Yes, they’re very clear that sexual desire and sex should be in the context only of marriage. Like they’re very, very focused on that. But they do not encourage celibacy. They encourage men to get married,
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: So that there is an outlet for sexual desire.
Yael: Just gonna go out on a limb here and I’m not married. But I do think that marital relations, within the context of marriage, would engender some of the joy that they seem to be going without. So it’s not limited to procreation.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think it’s complicated. I think they had, like I said, some of the scholars say they seem to have ambivalent attitudes towards women in general. I’m gonna skip ahead.
Yael: Do they dress differently than other people?
Schwab: They did have a distinctive style. I don’t remember the details of it, but the tallit that they would wear was just like, very different than everybody else’s.
Schwab: So they also, I think, very much focus on, they are focused on the immanence of God, I-M-M-A-N-E-N-C-E, a word that I learned, which is, I think, like the presence of God in everything.
I’m always in front of God and therefore I must always act with tremendous humility.
Yael: This is sounding very, and I mean this in not at all a derogatory way, this is sounding very Christian.
Schwab: So yeah, there are a lot of people who note that, that it seems like there is a lot of influence in that way. So let’s get to that
Schwab: They do, they talk a lot about suffering and and sort of the value of suffering, why suffering is important. And a phrase that came up that I immediately just like it stopped me in my tracks was a suffering servant. And I was like, suffering servant. Like I know that that is like, I think it comes up in, I to say Isaiah.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: But like that, like suffering servant is very much the way that Christians talk about Jesus. And like for a person to say like, I am suffering so that the sins of the community can be expiated through my suffering sounds very much like Christian theology and like not like the way that people usually frame Jewish theology.
Yael: And they believe that suffering is the way to get closest to God?
Schwab: Closest to God, also, and because we haven’t talked about this yet, penance, like is the expiation of sin. So they are very, they live in a world dominated by sin, and are constantly aware of sins and shortcomings and like wickedness and evil deeds. They have a concept called commensurate repentance. That’s not what they called it, certainly.
Yael: And how do you atone?
Schwab: Like if someone were to eat non-kosher intentionally or unintentionally, the weight of that sin can be calculated as like, okay, what was the weight of the food that you ate that was non-kosher? So obviously you need to fast to remove that amount of weight from your body, but also that food gave you energy.
And with that energy, you did something perhaps even good with that energy you prayed in an otherwise completely righteous way. That prayer now is contaminated with the sin, right? Like it came about for the wrong reasons. So now you need to atone for that thing that was also wrong. And as you can imagine, this sort of to me seems like it could be endless.
Schwab: So using that sort of calculation, like everything can be weighted with sin, you need to do a tremendous amount of penance for that.
Yael: When do these people have time to sin? They’re always at shul and not eating.
Schwab: If every, if you understand the worldview of the ic Ashkenaz, so much can be sinful, right? If you do the right thing but with the wrong intention, that’s a sin. If you do the wrong thing unintentionally, that’s a sin. you can.
Yael: I’m just gonna say, this is Christianity. like man is born of sin, is Christianity.
Schwab: Like, yeah. the looming presence of sin, yes, does not feel like the way I think now. And we have a lot of laws and we focus on all the things that we can do wrong, but this feels like a different thing than.
Yael: Did they live isolated from other Jews?
Schwab: No, not really. They were definitely interactions between them and their community. I’m laughing because they were not widely accepted. And in fact, it’s from their right, they talk about the value of suffering in humility and sort of just accepting the ridicule that others might cast upon you. And almost everybody who writes about them is like, Okay, so what was going on is everyone was making fun of them, right? So they lived in a mainstream community where they were not widely accepted.
Yael: That’s part of it. And did their community grow? Like, this a movement that gets exported?
Schwab: It moves around a little bit, like it has different centers and ideas. And I think that gets to this question of what was their legacy and influence? And if you read different historians on it, it’s really hard to understand how people could have such different views of it. Because there really are historians who know what they’re talking about, who are real scholars, who say, basically, their legacy of influence was zero. They existed. We know they existed. But like, they are fascinating to us in the rejection of them. Like, this did not become mainstream in any way. And then there are other historians who will say there are so many things that they introduced that clearly influenced and became part of the mainstream.
So I will give you one example, although, boy, I will need to do pennants for this.
Yael: Like what?
Schwab: Rabbi Yehuda He Hasid, in addition to purportedly being the author of Sefer HaChassidimhe also, before he dies, leaves an ethical will which is a very large book, very large in scope, has a lot in it, like just a lot of instructions about a lot of different things. One of them is children should not marry somebody who has the name of their parent. It’s possible that he meant this, like specifically for his kids, but also possible that he meant like, this is a law that children should not marry somebody with the name of their parent. After that, yeah, after that time, that becomes a very
Yael: I have heard this before.
Schwab: here is no record of it anytime before. There’s no basis for it for anything before. Like it, it seems by, by all accounts, this is a novel rule introduced by Rabbi Yohurah that becomes incredibly widely kept to the point where the Kutzker Rebbe in the 1900s, this is courtesy, courtesy of Henry Abramson or educationally, the Kutzker Rebbe says,
If only Rabbi Yehuda HaChassid had put in his ethical will that people should follow the Ten Commandments, it would be as widely accepted as people not marrying someone by their parents’ name. Because, like, people are so concerned about following this thing.
Yael: Bye. So just to show you the way that my mind works, my immediate thought was there was a ne’er-do-well in town named Yehuda, and he just really didn’t want his daughter to marry that guy.
Schwab: And this is where I’m just like, okay, if he’s making this joke, think we can, Henry is like, maybe, maybe Yehuda did not get along with his wife. And he was kind of like telling his kids like, don’t marry someone like your mother. But I will.
Yael: Or there was a girl with the same name as his mother and he really didn’t want to marry her either. Mommy issues.
Schwab: Uh, yeah. Oh, okay. So, I don’t know if you know this about me, but do you know that my wife and my mother are both named Esty?
Yael: I do know that. I do know that we’ve discussed that before, but I do, want to tell you that at least Estie is a, at least Estie is a very common name, certainly in.
Schwab: That it’s okay? They have different middle names? They spell Estie differently in English?
Schwab: Mm-hmm. It does seem limiting given that there are some frequent Jewish names. Mm.
Yael: It happens more than you think. Right, not everyone is keeping this, also like with a name like Esther or Jonathan, you know,
Schwab: So not everyone is keeping this.
Yael: It could be limiting. Does he say so?
Schwab: Nope, just says, he just says, is a, and there are a lot of other things like this. If you can’t, if two people die in a town on the same day, you can’t bury them on the same day. There’s like a whole thing around that You’re not allowed to visit a grave twice in the same day. There’s a lot of focus on the dead and things that seem maybe even like superstition, you know, around that.
Schwab: That is a rule that was introduced that absolutely becomes practiced in the mainstream.
Yael: And people read Safer HaCim, right? It’s out there.
Schwab: Yes.
So I want to sort of go back a little bit and talk more about the worldview that’s presented.
Schwab: because we didn’t get to this yet, but If God is all knowing and all powerful and all present,how can there possibly be a set of commandments, however long it is, that truly encompasses what God wants from people? Rather, it must be that the divine will is infinite, it expands in scope to every area of life that is not covered already by these laws. Sort of. I think they would say, so there’s so much more you need to do. Like the halacha that we know, the Jewish law that is established in the Torah and in the Talmud, that’s the very baseline, but obviously, like,
Yael: You can never be pious enough.
Schwab: Proper pious behavior goes so much beyond that and extends so much into areas of life that aren’t covered or aren’t discussed and practices that go beyond what is prescribed. And this is not entirely a novel concept going beyond the letter of the law. Like to give one example, the Torah says, you probably know the Torah says, do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. Do not take a child of a goat and cook that goat in the milk of its mother. That’s not what Jews practice. Like that we extrapolate, there’s like several different processes of just like we extrapolate and understand wider applications. Like this isn’t just goats, this is any type of dairy product. And like it doesn’t just mean cooking, but.
Yael: Right. We extrapolate from that.
Schwab: And then in addition to extrapolating, also have stringencies like this is maybe a better way to do it. there’s a, like in Hebrew, it’s called siag, like a boundary of like, you should do this so that you never come, you know, even close to violating the actual commandment. So don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk becomes like waiting several hours between the consumption of meat and dairy, having separate sets of dishes in your home.
Very very very far from that and like expanded widely. So yeah. So they take it like in that example but in many many examples like they take stringencies and and like fences boundaries like two existing laws that go much much further.
Schwab: They would not be the first ones, and they would not be the only ones who say, we practice. Right. We practice this very stringently. There are plenty of Jews for plenty of Jewish history who have been very stringent in practices far beyond what the letter of the law requires, and sometimes even create additional laws as boundaries or expansions of that. But they also expand this into areas that are not covered.
Yael: Certainly not today.
Schwab: They place a huge amount of emphasis on the holiness of holy written works, books, Mizu Zo, scrolls to fill in these take on a Torah scroll, obviously, like these take on a tremendous amount of holiness and there’s and they have a lot of laws that they seem some of them seem like they are written about for the first time in their context like surrounding those one of them that again I think like has influence on today they say you should not write your name in a holy book like in a in a sefer
Yael: because.
Schwab: I think because it never truly belongs to you.
Yael: It’s funny because I work in data licensing. so sometimes like when we’re having conversations.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Sometimes you get data reports and it says, la shema are atum lo’o on it.
Yael: No, like sometimes we’ll be talking about, you we’ll be talking about customers and saying, well, they’re not buying that data like they don’t own that data. And then somebody will correct me and be like, we don’t own it either. We just license it. We only we just have the right to use it. And, you know, it’s obviously. Right, right. So it’s it’s. Right, so got every every holy word belongs to God, but he’s
Schwab: Hmm.
Mmm.
Schwab: Because the data doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s like a revelation of the infinite presence of God.
Schwab: There are definitely practices, I think, that do infiltrate the mainstream.
Yael: Yeah, it definitely seems that way. so what becomes of them? Because we obviously, know, German Jewry doesn’t go away.
Schwab: OK, we talk about the Holocaust all the time. We have to talk about the Holocaust. Very important, not like as as a metaphor or as a comparison, because the short answer to your question is they die out or morph into other things like the parts that get incorporated into the mainstream get incorporated into the mainstream and the parts that don’t get mainstreamed,
Schwab: whittle away into like they’re but they’re not a movement that lasts. But what I do want to talk about is how we understand where they came from, because we’ve been talking about them as like this radical movement that’s focused on asceticism and fasting and prayer and penance and humility and honesty and intention. And we we haven’t mentioned but another huge deal to them is martyrdom like dying as a martyr dying Al-Qiddu Shasham is the ultimate act that a human can do. Right? The ultimate thing that, that a can do is die in the name of God.
Yael: to the extent that you would bring martyrdom upon yourself by putting yourself in a situation where
Schwab: You know, this is gonna be a dark joke, but they didn’t have to try very hard. Because the context in which they are living, Yudah , like I said, is born in the mid-1100s, so he’s born like 45 years after 1096. I don’t know if that’s, if you’re like, that’s a year that’s important. Yes, so let’s talk about the Crusades.
Yael: that crusades.
Schwab: Because I think for us, it’s very easy and probably for a lot of it, it’s very easy to be like the Crusade. The Crusades is a horrible and a chapter in the history of anti-Semitism. But how people thought about the Crusades in the 1100s is not the way we think about the Crusades in 2026, because we have have the great benefit of the next thousand years of pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks in which to say like the Crusades is just a chapter of that.
Yael: Right, like they didn’t have Indiana Jones to tell them that something was the last crusade.
Schwab: Bye.
Yeah. But the… yes. 1096 is the first crusade, which at the time wasn’t called the First Crusade, right? You know? But like, but this was a… it was the Great Crusade, yeah. Was a huge deal, because it did seem like it was a break in history because nothing like it…
Yael: Right. It was the great it was the great crusade.
Schwab: To someone living in the 1100s, the crusades were what we as people born in latter half of the 20th century, the way we see the Holocaust as like a thing that requires an entire reorganization of
Schwab: Jewish identity and practice and theology and where Jews even live, that’s what 1096 represented to German Jews. was the Crusades, just as a background for refresher for people. Maybe it starts off with millennial, maybe that’s the right word for it. For around the year 1000, people get very excited. It’s the thousandth year since Jesus’s birth. Maybe something big is going to happen.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Y1K.
Schwab: Yeah, why 1K? Yeah, that’s a great term for it. And saying the Holy Land is in the hands of Muslims, non-believers. So all the Christians in Europe, like, hey, the roots of Christianity are in the Middle East, in the Holy Land. Why don’t we go retake the Holy Land from the Muslims? And the popes get very into this and a lot of Christians get excited about this idea. And…arm themselves and go on a crusade. That was the point of the crusade was to go recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. They need to borrow money to do as a side point, but it will become important. They need to borrow money to arm themselves because they need weapons. They need provisions for this long journey. At that time, and it continues to be the case for a while, Christians are not allowed to lend money at interest to each other. Very conveniently, there happens to be a group of non-Christians in Europe, in various European communities at the time, who also are open to other sorts of business ventures and ideas, especially things that aren’t agriculture, because they sometimes get kicked off of their land with little warning. And these people happen to be relatively literate and numerate. So they’re allowed to lend money at interest, and they would be decently good at it, which just sounds anti-Semitic to say, like, Jews are good at lending money with interest, but for whatever reason they were. So Jews become money lenders because that was like the place that their Christian dominated society dictated to them. But then they become good at it and some Jews become very wealthy from it. But a lot of Christians borrow money from Jews at interest for a lot of things, but especially for arming themselves for the Crusades.
Yael: If the Crusades are about liberating the Holy Land from Muslims, how did they become about killing a lot of Jews?
Schwab: How does it come? Yeah, Yes, we’re about to get there. in these various Crusades, some Christians put two ideas together and say, first of all, we owe a lot of money to Jews and that’s kind of really inconvenient for us. Second, why are we going all the way to the Middle East to kill non-believers? We have non-believers at home. Let’s kill those.
Yael: It’s never inconvenient to kill the Jews.
Schwab: Especially if you owe them money, right? Like if your goal is kill non-believers and you happen to owe people money and either is a great way to wipe away that debt or you’re just pretty annoyed about it, why not kill some Jews at home?
So in 1096 they do and there are three very large Jewish communities in Western Germany, Speyer, Worms and Mines that are basically wiped out. Like again, there had been plenty of anti-Semitism before this and plenty of like smaller individual cases. But now you’re talking about tragedy on a mass communal scale that leads, I think, to a Jewish sense of even more so than was the case before, of discomfort and fear and knowing that anything can happen at any time and with little explanation. Right. Like we OK, the temple.was destroyed.
But we have in the thousand years since then, like made sense of that. And like the temple was destroyed because of our sins, because Jews didn’t practice in this way properly. But like, why, why did the crusades happen? So part of ic Ashkenaz as a reaction to that, I think is trying to make some sense of like, why did this happen? This happened because of widespread sin. And we need to become very very very pious in our practice as a response to that.
Yael: That makes sense.
Schwab: Right, again, thinking about it compared to like, that’s not dissimilar from some post Holocaust theology that like tries to make some sense of like, why did this happen? And how can pious Jews correct for that?
Yael: Right, and they’re in the thick of it. They are in Western Germany.
Schwab: Right, they’re in the… Yehuda He Hasid is born closer to the Crusades than we are to the Holocaust. you think the Holocaust looms large in our lives, he is like born only 40 years after the Crusades. We’re born farther than that.
Yael: Right, so he, thank you for clarifying, I appreciate that. He is in the thick of it. wow.
Schwab: Yeah. And his family was from Speyer, I think, and moves to Regensburg. Like his family relocated in Germany because of this.
Yael: Right, he is living this, as you say, it’s ancient history to us, but he is living this right now. And he doesn’t know if the next crusade is coming or not.
Yael: When we’re living it, we don’t know when a page is turned in history. And he obviously didn’t know that the next crusade wasn’t around the corner.
Schwab: Exactly. Right.
Yael: I know that was kind of a downer.
Schwab: And it’s not like it wasn’t not around the corner. It’s not like there wasn’t looming tragedy. They’re not wrong.Jews are in Germany. Jews are in France. They come to be expelled from a lot of these countries over the next hundreds of years. They were not wrong to say tragedy is looming.
Schwab: And they, but they also part of it is like the turning inward and saying like, okay, so let’s think about how we can maintain a connection with God because God is the one who decides all of these things. And that’s a way I think of like making sense of it, of just like, this is part of some plan. nd I think of finding meaning and value in it. Like the people who died and that’s like, I mentioned this before, the martyrdom, like the people who died, they died.
Al-Khidrush Hashem, like in sanctification of God’s name and like they therefore their death was a penance for something like there is there is like some meaning then to this tragedy.
Yael: Right, there’s some sort of commensurate action.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: It sounds like they lived a very hard existence, but part of it self-imposed and part of it not self-imposed.
Schwab: Part of itself imposed, yes, like I said, like their focus on penance, we didn’t even talk about the self-flagellation, they, which is like whipping yourself, but like they would, it seems like in some parts or in some ways, but they would deliberately inflict pain on themselves as a sort of penance for their sins
Yael: I was going to ask when we talked about the penance, I was going to say, was there self-flagellation?
Yael: That feels so alien to me. understand.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Even more alien than thatThey have a lot of focus on the dead, like I said, but one requests, in his will, he requests that after he dies, his body be dropped on the floor and before burial his body be dragged through the town. As like…
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Yael:
Oy.
Schwab: A humility and self-flagellation and like a penance thing, right, but like disturbing. And also it seems so opposite, we, the way, so, right, and we respect this tremendous accord. Like we are extremely careful with the handling of dead bodies and handle them with tremendous respect and honor. And it seems like they,
Yael: Ugh. So far into the respect we accord dead bodies in current Jewish tradition. Right.
Schwab: They agree with that idea, but for themselves want this to be another opportunity, you know, for penance, for a chance to suffer in this world, which is interesting because this is after death, but like to suffer in this world so as to…
Yael: Do they talk a lot about the afterlife?
Schwab: There’s little discussion of what the afterlife looks like, but a lot of confidence of just what results in a good result there
And I think like part of it then is putting it in the context. I think it was Rabbi Elazar of Worms one of Yehuda ‘s students, who writes quite extensively, and he writes a lot about Kiddush Hashem, like dying and martyrdom. His wife and children were killed in front of him.
Yael: Okay. I won’t know the difference.
Schwab: By Christians who attack their home. How could you not be obsessed with how you can die in God’s name if that’s the life you live? And I think that’s drawing the comparison to the Holocaust and thinking about how much people born in the generation or generations after the Holocaust.
Yael: Right. Right.
Schwab: have to incorporate that into their worldview, except for the i Ashkenaz. It’s not just this thing that happened, know, and like, and then we moved to America and now are not in constant fear for our safety. Like, no, this thing happened and is still ongoing throughout the 1100s. So like that, that is a huge shaping force in their worldview.
Yael: It’s ongoing.
Yael: How many generations approximately did this movement last?
Schwab: From R’ Yehudah He by like within the next hundred, like by the end of the 1200s, I think it’s no longer really recognized, you know, as yeah. Yeah. And that comes back, I think I mentioned this a couple times before, but the Seferah im, which is this huge book, which is very expansive and not particularly well organized, I will say.
Yael: I mean, how clearly can you be thinking if you don’t eat or eat all day?
Schwab: And I think it’s not controversial to say this because most historians agree it’s not written by one person
I mentioned a scholar named Chaim Saloveitchik before who is the son of the very famous Rabbi Joseph Saloveitchik. So he’s a Jewish historian, Jewish philosopher, like who has written a lot about a number of things, but has written a lot about Sefer Hasidim and the Hasidei Ashkenaz. He states, he’s pretty confident that this first part, like the first 150 chapters is probably
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: A later edit and someone made like the shorter version that took out a lot of the superstition and mysticism parts and then they came to just be combined and both reproduced as the same book.
Schwab (01:11:01.188)
Yeah.
Yael: I’m glad you brought up the superstition and mysticism parts because I don’t want to allow us to end this episode without you telling me how they’re connected to demons.
Schwab: Yeah. They talk about vampires?
A lot. Yeah,. There’s a lot of demons, a lot about what you need to do to practice demons. Yeah, no, but they literally have to, yeah. In their worldview, I think this is important to know, and this is very different from their Christian surroundings and Christian influence. So in talking about like, how related was this to Christianity at the time? There are clear lines that they draw. They don’t endorse celibacy. They’re very clear that the evil forces in the world, demons, things like this,
Yael: I mean, we all have a lot of demons.
Schwab: are do not have their own power. They cannot be opposed to God’s will. And I think that is different from at least a contemporary Christian perspective on it, which is like there is some sort of power that actually opposes God. They don’t claim that and in fact claim the opposite.
So there are a lot of recommendations around that like if you do construction on your home, you can never close up an existing door or window. Like you can’t, you can add another door, but you remove a door or like close off a door or a window in your home because that is where demons need to be able to go out of. And I’m just like, well. If there’s like another door but like I guess that’s that’s like the exit through which they are accustomed to leaving if they are leaving the home and you don’t you don’t want to trap them inside your home you want to make sure that they always all of your home demons you want them to know where the exits are at all times yeah but they also talk about they also talk about things which like they’re vampires right like they’re they’re they’re like these women like sort of women
Yael: like a doggy door. That’s fascinating.
Schwab: They’re not human women, they’re like this other force and they suck the lifeblood from people and everyone’s like, that’s vampires. They’re talking about like German folk superstition of the time, which is vampires. Not the way we know vampires today because it’s been so changed by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and like where our modern conception of vampires is not the historically accurate vampires.they’re true to the like German tradition of vampires.
Yael: Wow.
Yael: This is not Transylvania. This is a different geographic area.
Schwab: not. Real, real… the Transylvanian vampires are like a later misunderstanding of it. Like vampires don’t come from there. Bram Stoker was like this is one place where they might be. One vampire was from there. I grew up… yeah. I grew up thinking, by the way, that Transylvania is a made-up place.
Yael: Alright, it’s a total like history has bastardized vampires.
Like Fredonia.
Schwab: Yeah, but it’s not. My grandmother’s grandfather was from Transylvania and the first time she told me that I was like, like he was a vampire?
Yeah, I think
Schwab: There’s like so much I wanted, I wanted to talk about that we haven’t even gotten to, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to open up broad new topics at this point. Yeah, yes, yeah, yes.
Yael: You don’t want to open up any windows that a demon could get in or out of.
Credits:
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.