Historian Ivan Marcus, Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History at Yale University, has made some surprising discoveries about Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages. Conventional wisdom has it that the Jewish minority in northern Europe lived in virtual isolation from the Catholic majority.
Not so, Professor Marcus says. The Jews knew how the Christians lived and worshipped, and they borrowed — and transformed — elements of the dominant culture for their own ritual use. Professor Marcus breaks new ground in establishing this close connection between medieval Jews and Christians.
“Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe” — just published by Yale University Press — 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. Broadening his study beyond the written texts of the rabbis, Mr. Marcus is able to reconstruct details of everyday life during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And those details point to far more interaction between religious communities than was thought to exist.
“This was there all the time,” Professor Marcus says. “I was asking the wrong questions.” So was everybody else in the field.
In “Rituals of Childhood,” Professor Marcus reasons, “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.” The Catholic Mass and other rites of the Church had a powerful influence on customs adopted by the Jewish community. “Jewish culture in Ashkenaz [northern Europe] was deeply embedded in a Christian milieu,” he argues in his book. 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 twelfth 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 — and to May 24-25 this year. 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.
As Professor Marcus’s anthropological historical investigation reveals, “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.” The Jews did not assimilate into Christian culture, but “reworked aspects of Christian culture…into their Judaism.” Some elements of the initiation ritual reflect ancient customs derived from Greco-Roman pagan practices, but others distinctly echo medieval Catholicism. Some examples:
o Book illustrations of the student in his teacher’s lap echo pictures of Mary holding baby Jesus.
o 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.
o Sanctified bread actually, specially prepared honey cake is symbolically ingested, mirroring the eating of the Eucharist.
Mr. 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.
Professor Marcus graduated from Yale with a major in history in 1964. He earned the M.A. from Columbia University and the Master of Hebrew Letters from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America JTS. He received rabbinical ordination in 1970 from JTS and earned his doctorate from its Graduate School in 1975. His areas of scholarly expertise include the history and religious culture of the Jews in the Middle Ages, Jewish-Christian relations, and the history of childhood and education.
Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 1994, Mr. Marcus was professor of Jewish history at JTS and served as its provost from 1991-94. He has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Princeton University.
Professor Marcus’s book, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany originally published in 1981, will soon appear in Hebrew and French translations. In addition to writing over 50 articles, book chapters, and reviews, he has edited numerous works. He is 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. He co- edits Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism.
