Scholars have long thought that during the Middle Ages, the Jewish minority in northern Europe lived in virtual isolation from the Catholic majority. Not so, says historian Ivan Marcus in his new book "Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe."
The Jews knew how the Christians lived and worshipped, and they borrowed -- and transformed -- elements of the dominant culture for their own ritual use, contends Professor Marcus, the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History.
In "Rituals of Childhood," just published by Yale University Press, the Yale historian analyzes cultural elements that medieval scholars once considered inconsequential: folk customs, hand gestures, traditional stories, firsthand accounts and pictorial images -- as opposed to high art. By broadening his study beyond the written texts of the rabbis, Professor Marcus has been able to reconstruct details of everyday life during the 12th and 13th centuries. And those details point to far more interaction between religious communities than was thought to exist, he explains.
"This was there all the time," Professor Marcus says. "I was asking the wrong questions."
In "Rituals of Childhood," Professor Marcus writes, "Living apart and yet together in Latin Christendom, Jews and Christians celebrated their religious cultures in public ceremonies which the members of the other saw and which helped shape their own way of making sense of the world."
His anthropological historical investigation reveals that "In Latin Christendom ... Jews adapted Christian themes and iconography, which they saw all round them every day, and fused them -- often in inverted and parodic ways -- with ancient Jewish customs and traditions," says Professor Marcus. The Jews did not assimilate into Christian culture, but "reworked aspects of Christian culture ... into their Judaism," he contends, adding that this acculturation helped the Jewish community make sense of living in an intensely Christian culture while reaffirming its own way of life.
Professor Marcus focuses in his study on the initiation ceremony that evolved in the 12th century for Jewish boys of five or six to mark the beginning of their formal education.
The ceremony was held early in the morning of the spring festival of Shavuot, corresponding to Pentecost in the Church calendar. The child, wrapped in a coat or prayer shawl, was carried to the home of his teacher and seated on the teacher's lap. Instruction in the Hebrew alphabet would begin, interspersed with the eating of special foods: honey, cakes and eggs inscribed with biblical verses. The mystical Prince of Forgetfulness, a demon called Potah, was summoned and banished by incantation. Then teacher and student went down to the river's edge, where the boy was told that the study of Torah, like the water of the river, would never end.
Some elements of the initiation ritual reflect ancient customs derived from Greco-Roman pagan practices, but others distinctly echo medieval Catholicism, argues Professor Marcus. For example, book illustrations of the student in his teacher's lap echo pictures of Mary holding baby Jesus, he notes. Also, instructions for the ceremony compare the child to a "pure sacrifice whose efforts bring vicarious atonement for the rest of the Jewish community," reflecting the image of Christ as redeemer, says the historian, and sanctified bread -- actually, specially prepared honey cake -- is symbolically ingested, mirroring the eating of the Eucharist.
Professor Marcus analyzes the symbolism of the ceremony as well as its connection to contemporary Christian rituals of initiation and other Jewish rites of passage. This approach enables him to explain how the educational ritual emerged and why it eventually yielded its place to the bar mitzvah ceremony as the central initiation of a boy to religious responsibility.
A 1964 graduate of Yale College, Professor Marcus is an expert in the history and religious culture of the Jews in the Middle Ages, Jewish- Christian relations, and the history of childhood and education. His book, "Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany," originally published in 1981, will soon appear in Hebrew and French translations, and he is currently working on "Jews and Christians: Imagining Others, Imagining Ourselves," a study of Jewish and Christian representations of the other and of the self from antiquity through the Reformation.