Bar Mitzvah, a History

8. The Evidence Assessed

192 Chapter Eight The Evidence Assessed • The first attempts to document the history of bar mitzvah and confirmation appeared in 1875. • Isaac Rivkind collected all the sources for the history of bar mitzvah then available, in New York in 1942, and published them in Hebrew. • Bar mitzvah is a rite of passage that can be compared to those in other cultures; the Jewish rite was very unusual in having at first no alternative for girls. • My approach registers the early evidence by the date we know it to have been recorded, and this narrows down the origin of bar mitzvah to northern France in the second half of the thirteenth century. Many Jewish boys married at the age of thirteen, and others left home for further study, so the age marked a real transition in their lives. • Of the many possible cultural influences that could have led to the popularity of bar mitzvah in Germany in the sixteenth century, the only likely parallel is the new Protestant approach to Christian confirmation , which linked it to tests of knowledge. • Bar mitzvah was in decline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this trend was halted by synagogues and communities insisting on compulsory educational standards. • Oral testimony, novels, and movies provide invaluable evidence to supplement written records from modern times. • Ethnicity of ritual exists because families need to demonstrate or invent roots and a shared history to give themselves meaning and purpose. The Historiography of Bar Mitzvah Assessing evidence from history can never be totally objective: it depends on who you are and the era and culture in which you happen to live. This concluding chapter gives an academic assessment of the evidence the evidence assessed 193 so far presented and the reasoning behind my conclusions. Like every researcher, I have built on the work of those who have studied the subject before. Previous studies of the history of bar/bat mitzvah and confirmation have reached very different conclusions, even when they were looking at the same evidence. In some cases it is possible to see how and why a particular bias has come into the work. A little information on the background of previous researchers can help in understanding not only why they became interested in the subject but also why they reached the conclusions they did and in some cases why they got it wrong. Leopold Löw The first academic study of the history of bar mitzvah and confirmation was made by Leopold Löw (1811–75), a Hungarian congregational rabbi. Löw attended the Leipzig synod of Reform rabbis and leaders in 1868 and the Augsburg synod of 1871. At the Pest congress of Hungarian Jewry of 1868, a Reform majority emerged, and Löw became the leading rabbi of the moderately Reform “Neolog” movement.1 Early Reformers had introduced the new rite of “confirmation” into their day schools in the first decade of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the century more radical Reform communities argued that confirmation should completely replace bar mitzvah everywhere.2 Löw’s own ideas of religious reform were based on his understanding of history and halakhah; from a detailed historical study, for example, he argued that it should be acceptable for men to pray in synagogue bareheaded.3 Löw approved of bar mitzvah, and in writing the history of bar mitzvah, he set out to defend it against its more radical critics. Not that he was against confirmation; his eight pages on “Die Bar-Mizwah Institution” are followed by a further five pages in praise of confirmation as a Jewish rite.4 Löw discovered many of the crucial references that are part of the history of bar mitzvah, including the key text, Maharshal’s reference to the bar mitzvah meal as an established Ashkenazic custom. He argues that it was the inclusion of Pirkei Avot in the prayer book that helped to popularize the custom, with its well-known saying “at thirteen for the commandments .” The concluding part of his study is a polemic against the pilpul often then used in the derashah delivered by the boy at the celebration meal, which Löw thought nonsensical. But what is most striking is his opening paragraph, in which he describes bar mitzvah as “an anti-Talmudic Reform.” By this Löw meant, first, that the new celebration 194 the evidence assessed allowed the marking of...