Jewish History © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-021-09374-7 Was Judah he-H . asid the “Author” of Sefer H . asidim? DAVID I. SHYOVITZ Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA E-mail: davidshy@northwestern.edu Accepted: 4 October 2019 Abstract Sefer H . asidim (The Book of the Pious) has long served as a crucial source for medieval Jewish historiography. Yet the dual question of who composed the anonymous text and how its varying recensions came into existence has been a contentious one among schol- ars of medieval Ashkenaz. In particular, opinions have been split on the issue of the book’s authorship. Ever since the 1538 publication of the editio princeps, Judah he-H . asid (“the Pi- ous,” d. 1217) has been credited as the work’s singular “author,” but in the intervening years numerous theories of composite authorship have been proposed as well. The present article reassesses notions of “authorship” in medieval Ashkenaz and does so in dialogue with Ivan Marcus’s recent Sefer H . asidim and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (2018), a work that seeks to deconstruct the reductive category of unitary “books” in medieval Ashkenaz, but which simultaneously reifies Judah’s self-conscious “authorial identity.” In contrast, I ar- gue on methodological and conceptual grounds that “authorship” is a problematic category in medieval Ashkenazic culture and suggest that in the case of Sefer H . asidim there are textual reasons to doubt that a single individual (Judah he-H . asid or anyone else) was solely responsi- ble for “authoring” the text in its entirety. Keywords Judah he-H . asid · Sefer H . asidim · German Pietism · Authorship · Medieval Ashkenaz To whom can one ascribe authorship of a work that forthrightly condemns the ascription of authorship? This is a question that publishers, readers, and scholars of Sefer H . asidim (“The Book of the Pious”) have grappled with for nearly eight hundred years. Originally composed or compiled around the turn of the thirteenth century, the work contains an eclectic array of moralistic ex- hortations, halakhic injunctions, theological reflections, magical adjurations, narrative exempla, and much else besides. Because its prescriptive moral and religious guidelines are frequently leavened by seemingly straightforward de- scriptions of medieval Jewish social and cultural mores, Sefer H . asidim has long been considered an invaluable repository of historical data about me- dieval Jewish life. And yet, for all its centrality to medieval Jewish historiog- raphy, the precise provenance of the work has remained frustratingly obscure. For although overlapping recensions of and selections from Sefer H . asidim circulated widely in manuscript over the course of the high and later Middle Ages, their contents were never attributed to a specific named individual. In