ABSTRACT
In the Middle Ages, one of the indicators of the coming of age of a regional culture was the emergence of different versions of a narrative that described a transition from the East to the West. In addition to the German-Jewish polemical traces against northern French Judaism, the German-Jewish Charlemagne legend corresponds to a Christian polemical use of the legend of Charlemagne for similar political leverage. And yet, despite the Pietist authors’ insistence, as Ta-Shema points out, that most Jews who seek to be among the Pietists should avoid the lure of logic and dialectic characteristic of the Tosafist method and simply learn over and over again the norms of Jewish law and practice, it is clear from many passages in Sefer Hasidim that it is perfectly all right for some Jews to engage in Tosafist dialectic.
