Rituals of childhood : Jewish acculturation in Medieval Europe

Resource Information

The work Rituals of childhood : Jewish acculturation in Medieval Europe represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of San Diego Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Rituals of childhood : Jewish acculturation in Medieval Europe

Title remainder

Jewish acculturation in Medieval Europe

Statement of responsibility

Ivan G. Marcus

Creator

• Marcus, Ivan G

Subject

• Deutschland
• Electronic books
• Germany
• HISTORY / General
• History
• Initiation rites -- Religious aspects | Judaism
• Initiation rites -- Religious aspects | Judaism | History
• Jewish religious education of preschool children
• Jewish religious education of preschool children -- Germany -- History
• 425-1789
• Judaism -- History -- Medieval and early modern period, 425-1789
• Judaism -- Medieval and early modern period
• Judentum
• Jüdische Erziehung
• Kinderen
• Riten
• Jodendom

Genre

• History
• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

In medieval times, when a Jewish boy of five began religious schooling, he was carried from home to a teacher and placed on the teacher's lap. He was then asked to recite the Hebrew alphabet and lick honey from the slate on which it was written, to eat magically inscribed cooked peeled eggs and cakes, to recite an incantation against a demon of forgetfulness, and then to go down to the riverbank with the teacher, where he was told that his future study of the Torah, like the rushing river, would never end. This book - Ivan Marcus's erudite and novel interpretation of this rite of passage - presents a new anthropological historical approach to Jewish culture and acculturation in medieval Christian Europe. Marcus traces ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in the rite and then analyzes it from different perspectives, making use of narrative, legal, poetic, ethnographic, and pictorial sources, as well as firsthand accounts. He then describes contemporary medieval Christian images and initiation rites - including the eucharist and the Madonna and child - as contexts within which to understand the ceremony. He is the first to investigate how medieval Jews were aware of, drew upon, and polemically transformed Christian religious symbols into Jewish counterimages in order to affirm the truth of Judaism and to make sense of living as Jews in an intensely Christian culture

Cataloging source

TEFOD

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography