THIS PAPER, written in 1982, summed up my views consequent on my researches in usury, martyrdom, yein nesekh, and the laws regulating Jewish–Gentile relationships. I emphasized, I believe rightly so, the lengths to which the Tosafists went to justify communal practice. I equally pointed out that this relentless defense of common practice went hand in hand with, indeed, was sustained by, the ongoing acceptance of the new halakhic demands created by the tosafist dialectic. I did not then perceive the contradiction between these two phenomena. Every new demand was an implicit criticism of past practice. How could the Tosafists have defended to the death, as it were, the religious practices of the Ashkenazic community in the realm of usury, martyrdom, yein nesekh, and the like, yet massively reform the religious practice of the same community in other areas of Jewish law? I address this problem in the next essay, ‘“Religious Law and Change” Revisited’.

My overall understanding of the relationship between the Ashkenazic self-image and the communal reality has been the subject of an extensive critique by David Malkiel in his Refashioning Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000–1250 (Stanford, 2009), 148–99. My reply is found in Chapter 12, ‘On Deviance’, below.

IF LAW IS CONCEIVED, as religious law must be, as a revelation of the Divine will, then any attempt to align that will with human wants, any attempt to have reality control, rather than be itself controlled by, the Divine norm, is an act of blasphemy and is inconceivable to a God-fearing man. As the Middle Ages was a time of faith among Jews no less than among Christians and Muslims, the unalignability, the non-adaptability if you wish, of religious law is a premise that must underlie all our investigations |205| and our understanding of the history of halakhah in the Middle Ages. Yet the contention of this paper is that at times the very intensity of religious conviction and observance can be conducive to a radical transformation of religious law, and that the very depth of religious attachment can play a supportive role in deflecting the Divine norm from the path of its immanent development, bringing it into line with the needs and practices of the time.