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This chapter discusses the existence of Jewish regional cultures and the prominence of two groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad as biblical toponyms adopted by medieval Jews. It explains that Ashkenaz was adopted by settlers in Carolingian Franco-Germany, while Sepharad was adopted by settlers in Islamic al-Andalus. It also mentions historian Jonathan Ray, who showed that Iberian Jews of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries identified themselves not as Sephardim, but as Jews of a particular town or principality. The chapter considers the Sepharad, which was a catch-all identity first used by the established residents of non-Iberian lands and applied to Jewish newcomers from Spain. It reviews Joseph Davis's study of early modern halakhic codes that demonstrates how Ashkenaz became an umbrella category in the sixteenth century.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the degree of cultural embeddedness that was manifest among the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz with regard to their beliefs and practices surrounding the dead and their world. Medieval Ashkenaz as a cultural milieu included the Jewish communities of Germany (the empire north of the Alps), France north of the Loire, and England. Historians of western Europe have documented major transformations in attitudes and practices related to death and the hereafter which took place in that period. One such transformation consisted of a movement away from the perception of death as a generalized, objective experience and towards a more subjective, individualized notion of it. Belief in personal judgement after the death of the individual similarly became widespread at the time. Historians of medieval Jewry have also pointed to the primacy of the high medieval period in the shaping of Jewish practices and attitudes regarding the dead. Bearing in mind the simultaneous shifts in consciousness and praxis within both the dominant culture of Christian Europe and the subculture of medieval Ashkenaz, the book seeks to discover whether these changes were related or merely coincidental. It assesses how far death-related beliefs and practices that circulated in the Germano-Christian environment of the time penetrated Sefer ḥasidim, the great religious-ethical work of the Pietists.

This concluding chapter discusses the major insights of the previous chapters to present a multifaceted picture of Jewish perceptions of Christianity during the Middle Ages. The Jews held both positive and negative perceptions of the Spanish kingdom and of Christianity in general. Moreover, attraction to and repulsion from Christian culture played an important role in Jewish historical consciousness. The attraction and repulsion can be explained by the Jews' status during the Middle Ages as a minority in a mainly Christian society. Yet the chapter also reveals that the mechanisms of integration and co-operation functioned in Spain and southern France. It was a situation unique to these countries during the Middle Ages, and led to adoption, acceptance, and approval, which furthered acceptance by the majority.

This chapter discusses the Hebrew panegyric corpus as a recognized, yet under-appreciated, resource for studying Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean. It considers the anathema to the tastes of scholars of Jewish literature and ungenerous source for scholars of Jewish history. It also describes Hebrew panegyrics that have largely been discounted as mere sycophantic dedications which occasionally yield titbits of factual data. The chapter looks at surviving Hebrew panegyrics that illuminate medieval Mediterranean Jews' most essential notions of group cohesion, human virtue, leadership, and politics. It includes Hebrew panegyrics that were composed for men who held transregional positions of power for their appointees and supporters in satellite communities.

This chapter discusses how the sinful dead are punished in Pietist sources as opposed to talmudic ones. The notion that the dead return to Earth in order to suffer punishment for sin is rooted in pre-Christian beliefs surrounding the return of the dangerous dead. That such notions appear in high medieval sources testifies to the tenacity of pagan ideas regarding the dead; these beliefs survived for centuries under the veneer of Christianization, especially in the Germanic environment which formed the background to Sefer ḥasidim. The pre-Christian belief in the return of the corporeal dead to Earth, as well as an unabashed belief in the corporeal nature of the post-mortem punishments assigned to sinners, were ones that R. Judah the Pious absorbed from his environment and shared with his contemporary Caesarius of Heisterbach, among other Christian writers. The presence of the same beliefs regarding the dead in the writings of the German Cistercian and the German Pietist reveals a commonality between them. Ancient imaginings of the dead here cross religious boundaries and reflect a world-view that was shared by medieval Jew and Christian alike.