The Chasidei Ashkenaz חסידי אשכנז

The movement took shape in Speyer, Worms and Regensburg in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after the First and Second Crusades had passed through those communities. It is named after its chief book, Sefer Chasidim.

Their central concept is din shamayim, the judgement of Heaven: beyond what the law requires there is what one answers for before Heaven, and that bar is higher. Hence their minute treatment of everyday matters: how to deal with a debtor, what to do with something found, how to pray when the mind wanders, how not to humiliate a person while helping him.

Authorship of Sefer Chasidim is traditionally assigned to Rabbi Judah the Pious of Regensburg, who died in 1217. Modern scholars regard the text as layered: the earliest parts are linked to his father Samuel the Pious, substantial additions to Eleazar of Worms, and there was apparently never a single authorial original. It is put that way here, rather than "the book of Judah the Pious."

The movement's second side is mystical: a teaching about the divine Glory, about prayer, and about the numerical structure of the prayer texts. Through the Rokeach it passed into later Kabbalah.