Sefer Ḥasidim (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 scholars 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-Ḥasid (“the Pious,” 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 Ḥasidim 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 argue on methodological and conceptual grounds that “authorship” is a problematic category in medieval Ashkenazic culture and suggest that in the case of Sefer Ḥasidim there are textual reasons to doubt that a single individual (Judah he-Ḥasid or anyone else) was solely responsible for “authoring” the text in its entirety.

之书 的ḥasidim（虔诚的书）曾长期担任中世纪犹太史学一个重要来源。然而，中世纪的阿什肯纳兹学者对谁构成匿名文本以及它的不同版本如何出现这一双重问题一直是一个有争议的问题。特别是，关于该书的作者身份问题，人们意见分歧。自从1538年princeps编辑出版以来，犹大·何塞德（《虔诚》，卒于1217年）被认为是该作品的奇异“作者”，但是在随后的几年中，也提出了许多综合作者理论。 。本文重新评估了中世纪阿什肯纳兹（Ashkenaz）的“作者身份”概念，并与伊万·马库斯（Ivan Marcus）最近塞弗·阿西迪姆（SeferḤasidim）和《中世纪欧洲的阿什肯纳齐书》（2018年），该作品旨在解构中世纪的阿什肯纳兹一元化的“书籍”的还原性类别，但同时又重新赋予了犹大的自我意识“权威性”。相比之下，我在方法论和概念论据上争论说，“作者身份”是中世纪阿什肯纳兹文化中的一个有问题的类别，并建议以塞弗·阿西迪姆为例，有文字上的原因怀疑一个人（犹大·他·阿西德或其他任何人）全权负责整个文本的“创作”。