Collected Essays

Continuing his contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, Haym Soloveitchik focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Ḥasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provençal commentator Ravad of Posquières. In both areas Soloveitchik challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published and some are entirely new, but in all of them Soloveitchik challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought.

The section on Sefer Ḥasidim brings together over half a century of Soloveitchik’s writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad’s oeuvre, Soloveitchik questions the widespread notion that Ravad’s chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquières, and R. Zerahyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

'Like all of Professor Soloveitchik’s studies, the book is distinguished by the thoroughness of its scholarship and attention to even the smallest details... reading Professor Soloveitchik’s three volumes of magisterial essays will certainly engage and educate the reader, and one can only hope that we will merit to see a fourth volume in the not too distant future.'
Alan Jotkowitz, Lehrhaus

'In presenting new perspectives on medieval Jewish thought, these collected essays further underline Soloveitchik’s well deserved reputation as an adept, learned and gifted intellectual historian. Highly recommended for all libraries.' David B Levy, Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews

Haym Soloveitchik is the Merkin Family Research Professor at Yeshiva University, New York, and the former director of the School of Jewish Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also taught at the Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has published books in Hebrew on pawnbroking and usury, Jewish involvement in the medieval wine trade, and the use of responsa as a historical source. Three volumes of his Collected Essays have been published by the Littman Library.