(Note: I have officially run out of time and I need to go cook dinner and grade papers. I'll have to come back to this and add links and quotes.)
I love having a block of time to just sit and surf the internet. This afternoon provided me with just such an opportunity. I started off thinking I’d do a quick search to try to determine the origin of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony. I know that Jesus’ parents took him to the temple when he was twelve. I was wondering if there was any evidence of a coming of age ceremony while the Jerusalem temple was still standing.
I found some interesting information in the online
Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) entry for Bar Mitzwah:
Nevertheless there are many indications…, that its origin must be sought in remote antiquity.
Masseket Soferim xviii. 5 is even more explicit: "In Jerusalem they are accustomed to initiate their children to fast on the Atonement Day, a year or two before their maturity; and then, when the age has arrived, to bring the Bar Mitzwah before the priest or elder for blessing, encouragement, and prayer, that he may be granted a portion in the Law and in the doing of good works. Whosoever is of superiority in the town is expected to pray for him as he bows down to him to receive his blessing."
But I became intrigued and distracted from my original quest by this statement at the end of the Jewish Encyclopedia article.
Regarding a strange custom of cutting a boy's hair when he became Bar Mitzwah, see Abrahams' "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," p. 144, note 2.
So I googled Abrahams'
"Jewish Life in the Middle Ages”, and as “luck” would have it I found a good-sized preview of the book at Google Books.
The description of the preview of the book reads as follows:
Jewish Life in the Middle Ages By Israel Abrahams 1911. A study of the life and lives of Jews during the Middle Ages. Contents:
The Centre of Social Life; Life in the Synagogue; Communal Organization; Institution of the Ghetto; Social Morality; The Slave Trade; Monogamy and the Home; Home Life; Love and Courtship; Marriage Customs; Trades and Occupations; The Jews and the Theater; The Purim-Play and the Drama in Hebrew; Costume in Law and Fashion; The Jewish Badge; Private and Communal Charities. The Relief of the Poor; Private and Communal Charities. The Sick and the Captive; The Medieval Schools; The Scope of Education; Medieval Pastimes and Indoor Amusements; Medieval Pastimes. Chess and Cards; Personal Relations between Jews and Christians; and Personal Relations. Literary Friendships.
I spent a good portion of an hour reading the chapters of the book that were online. Then I got to the section on schools and education. There I found some kindred spirits as to book lovers and care of books, and some great book quotes to add to my collection. Since the online version of the book on Google books was only a preview, I couldn’t copy the text as text so I ended up retyping the quotes I liked so I could save them in my book quotes collection:
On Page 253, from the section on “The Care of Books”
But unlike most modern bibliophiles, they were very willing lenders.
‘If A has two sons, one of whom is averse to lending his books, and the other does so willingly, the father should have no doubt in leaving all his library to the second son, even if he be the younger.’
This twelfth-century piece of advice comes from Germany; another, emanating at about the same period from Provence, contains the following directions from Judah Ibn Tibbon to his son:
‘Take particular care of your books; cover your shelves with a fine
covering, guard them against damp and mice. Write a complete catalogue of your books, and examine the Hebrew books once a month, the Arabic every tow months, and the bound volumes once a quarter. When you lend a book to any one, make a memorandum of it before it leaves your house, and when it is returned cancel the entry. Every Passover and Tabernacles call in all your books that are out on
loan.’
There is a note of intense love of external as well as internal
beauty in books in another noble remark of Judah Ibn Tibbon:
‘Avoid bad society,’ he says, ‘but make your books your companions. Let your book-cases and shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If your soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will your desire renew itself, and you soul be satisfied with delight.’
A scheme of study prefixed by the Spanish Jew, Profiat Duran, to the Hebrew Grammar which he wrote before 1403 admonishes:
(vi) Use only books which are beautifully written, on good paper, and well and handsomely bound. Read in a pretty well-furnished room, let your eye rest on beautiful objects so that you may love your work. Beauty must be everywhere, in your books and in your house. ‘The wealthy must honour the Law,’ says the Talmud; let them do this by paying for beautiful copies of the Scripture.
A footnote to the text sent me on another quest to find the source. Footnote (3) on page 352 reads:
Some of the quaint remarks on this subject by the author of the Book of the Pious were translated into English by the Rev. M. Adler in the Bookworm, 1891, pp 251 seq.
It wasn’t as easy to find the
Bookworm from 1891 referenced above, but persistence paid off and several pages into my google search I found a NYT Times article from 1891 in which the translation of Rev. Adler was given. Again I had to retype it:
The Bookworm, An Illustrated Treasury of Old-Time Literature. Third series. New-York: A.C. Armstrong and Son.Of all blessed old book worshippers, but in the broader, higher sense, must have been Rabbi Judah be Samuel Sir Leon, who in 1190 preserved precious manuscripts so as to keep them intact for coming generation. In his “Sefer Chasidim; or, Book for the Pious,” a work popular among orthodox Jews today, he devotes several paragraphs to the treatment of books.
“Do not,” he says, “bind two treatises together, for if you do you will be compelled to lend both, when a man only wants to read one, and somebody else will have to wait.”
“If you sit in the sun with a book, get sunstruck, but do not shield
yourself from the heat with the book. You want to dry a book of which the parchment is damp, and the fire smokes. You must not hold the book before your eyes; rather shed tears than blacken you book. Beware of bending the book on your knee, so as to make the clasps meet. You must never use books for a support for your head when you sleep. If a book and piece of money fall on the ground take the book up first. If there is a fire in the house first rescue the books.”
