Introduction
The bar mitzvah ceremony is commonly seen as the Jewish equivalent of the rites of passage or initiation familiar from many cultures around the world, in which a child becomes part of the adult community through the dramatic and exaggerated performance of a routine activity that is typical of the adults of the community.Footnote 1 But does the bar mitzvah really function as a rite of passage in the modern Jewish world? The decline in the importance of religious observance means that the obligation to begin fulfilling the precepts is no longer a significant change of status in the adolescent's life, even among the observant. Further, childhood has been lengthened in the industrial era, so that age thirteen is no longer a watershed on the brink of adulthood, the onset of which has been delayed to the end of the second or start of the third decade of life. Nonetheless, the bar mitzvah ceremony, which developed among Ashkenazic Jews in the late Middle Ages, is celebrated today by more Jews than ever. The same holds for the bat mitzvah, whose current form is a twentieth-century innovation. The bar/bat mitzvah is an unusual ceremony for the industrialized world, which has a relatively loose structure of ritualized transitions in social status and knows almost no rites of passage from childhood to adolescence,Footnote 2 instead marking temporal milestones through the birthday party as the ultimate life-cycle ritual.
Scholarship on the rising popularity of the bar mitzvah ceremony in the modern era has noted that the bar mitzvah has played a central role in the Jews’ acculturation, bourgeoisification, and adaptation to Western consumer culture in various historical contexts.Footnote 3 But the history of the ceremony in the late modern era has been studied mainly in the Western Diaspora (Europe and North America), while its annals in the Yishuv and Israel have been overlooked.Footnote 4 Neither has its connection to the rise of the birthday as the central life-cycle ritual of modern industrial culture been explored. Scholars who looked at this context of the bar/bat mitzvah treated the birthday as a problem rather than an interpretive key for the modern meanings of the Jewish ceremony.Footnote 5
To gain an understanding of the birthday as carrying and conveying meanings of its own, which may help us interpret the bar/bat mitzvah, I take an anthropological approach to consumer culture, understood as an autonomous form of culture—a source of meaning for people's lives, created with active consumer participation.Footnote 6 The working assumption is that, like other cultures portrayed in the classics of anthropological literature, consumer culture has rituals that may serve as an interpretive key for understanding it—notably, the birthday ritual.
In the classical anthropological tradition, a ritual is a vehicle of meanings for its participants, observers, and performers, and hence a possible key to understanding a society (although some anthropologists have dissented).Footnote 7 But as Catherine Bell has stated, the meaning of the ritual may vary among its multiple contexts and uses.Footnote 8 To properly analyze the historical process described here, in which a rite of religious initiation was reappropriated into the new context of the urban industrialized culture as a bigger birthday party, we may follow scholars such as Sally Moore and Barbara Meyerhoff, who indicated the possibility of a “secular ritual” whose object of “worship” is not necessarily divine.Footnote 9
Modern industrial society has a relatively loose structure of ritualized transitions in social status, and rites of initiation—the dramatic, extreme, and singular performances of some routine activity typical of adults in the community—have become quite infrequent. In their place, the numerical count of a person's years and the transition between chronological ages have come to define individual identity.Footnote 10 As a result, the birthday party has become an almost obligatory life-cycle ritual in modern industrial culture, combined with the Victorian cult of childhood and the individualism of consumer culture.Footnote 11 It is against this background that we should understand the blossoming of the modern bar and bat mitzvah, which, since the mid-twentieth century, has basically transformed into a birthday extravaganza that spotlights the celebrant, along with lavish presents and fancy clothing—while the element of religious initiation has been shunted to the margins.
A birthday celebrates the very fact of the individual's existence and emphasizes the passage of time by commemorating that another year has gone by. Unlike classic initiation rites, the birthday festivity does not initiate celebrants into anything and normally imposes no task on them. The birthday party has been mainly shaped by modern consumer culture, which affirms the value of the individual's existence through gifts and other purchased items or services, such as food and clothing, that are indicators of the social status of the celebrant and his/her family. But just because the celebrant has no real mission or duty to fulfill as part of the ritual does not mean that the celebration should be criticized on an anticonsumerist basis as empty, narcissistic, and devoid of value. Rejoicing in the celebrant's existence emphasizes each person's individual identity; he or she is not required to perform certain tasks as a condition of membership in the society of adults. As such, the birthday ritual highlights an egalitarian democratic ethos, reflecting that each person is perceived, at least from the ritual perspective, as a member of society from the moment of birth.Footnote 12 On the other hand, it is precisely this ostensible equality that has driven the impulse toward more extravagant parties, as a way of stressing the family's and the celebrant's social status—to some extent on regular birthdays, and on a much more exorbitant scale for the bar and bat mitzvah. Fundamentally, however, the basic birthday party ritual—candles, cake, and so on—is common to everyone, of all genders, classes, and even ages.
I suggest that the meaning of the bar/bat mitzvah lies with its function, in the late modern Jewish world, as a more significant and elaborate birthday. Like the birthday, the modern bat/bar mitzvah incorporates fairly conventional elements—a thank-you speech, a certain kind of music and dancing, fancy dress, elaborate menus. Precisely its conventionality has turned the bat mitzvah into a ceremony that connotes Jewish identity for everyone—in Israel as well as in North America and elsewhere—and, according to sociologist Stuart Schoenfeld, has transformed it from a rite of passage into a rite of identification.Footnote 13 For late modern Jews, the bar/bat mitzvah is perceived as a “Jewish” ceremony, not because of its content, but rather because the temporal indicators the ceremony marks—age twelve for girls and age thirteen for boys—are understood as “traditional” milestones. Like the birthday, the modern bar/bat mitzvah celebration emphasizes the celebrant's individuality as a unique person—but also effects the construction of the celebrant's Jewish identity by means of the party.
The anthropological-historical study of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and in Israel can thus shed light on important aspects of the relationships among religion, consumer culture, and ethnic and national identity, on both the individual and the family levels. More specifically, two insights regarding the formation of Zionist/Israeli culture may be drawn from the history of the bar/bat mitzvah. First, Zionism spawned new popular customs and traditions that articulate a grassroots Israeli Judaism, which formed independently of the law book, government policies, and halakhic precepts. Despite the fissures and differences within Israeli Jewish society, a mainstream Israeli Jewish culture shared by broad strata, with its own life beyond political discourse, formed in the years of the late Mandate and early statehood.Footnote 14 As the history of the bar/bat mitzvah demonstrates, this grassroots culture evolved not thanks to but actually in defiance of the Zionist melting-pot policy. My historical analysis of Israeli Judaism therefore downplays the explanatory power of the secular/religious axis and focuses instead on the pressure exerted by mainstream “traditionist” Israeli culture on its various subgroups, whose response may vary between adaptation and resistance.Footnote 15 This Zionism-as-culture approach is why the present study lumps together Yishuv society with its Jewish Israeli continuation and almost totally disregards the establishment of the state in 1948, inasmuch as that event did not interrupt the processes analyzed here.
Second, Zionism was a path of Jewish integration into Western culture and has been strongly influenced by the consumer culture of the industrialized capitalist West, even if that process did not always accord with Zionism's explicit ethos.Footnote 16 In recent years, the links between modern consumer culture and various Jewish cultures have attracted increasing scholarly attention, with a natural focus on the history of Jewish communities in the West.Footnote 17 Nonetheless, until recently, most scholarship on the Yishuv focused on the pioneer sector in rural settlements and neglected the urban silent majority. The ethos of the “new Hebrew,” who was supposedly attached to the land, rooted, and “productive,” implied a Spartan and antiurban ethos of asceticism for the sake of the nation and felt antipathy for “unproductive” consumer culture, which was seen in Palestine, as elsewhere, as a destructive form of materialism.Footnote 18 Nonetheless, a typical consumer society emerged in the Yishuv in the interwar era, facilitated by the British conquest of the country in World War I, immigration of middle-class Jews, and rapid and unexpected urban development, especially in the Tel Aviv area.Footnote 19 Until recently, scholars tended to confuse the “new Hebrew” ethos with reality. Starting in the early 2000s, historian Anat Helman, who specializes in everyday life in the Yishuv and early Israel, has published an excellent series of studies about its consumer culture. With a natural focus on the emerging metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, but with an eye to other urban and urbanizing areas, she offers a colorful description of a vivid commercial sphere.Footnote 20 Other scholars followed suit.Footnote 21
However, this new research scarcely deals with the Jewish ritual aspects of consumer culture. Zionist culture showed great interest in the ritual elements of traditional Jewish culture, reappropriating and reinterpreting traditional holidays and life-cycle rituals in a new context. Nonetheless, most scholarship about the revamped holidays and family cults has overlooked their blunt commercialization and focused on ideological and political aspects.Footnote 22 My book Carnival in Tel Aviv analyzed commercialization as part of the meaning universe conveyed by ritual and looked at the way consumer culture altered the Jewish holiday of Purim as celebrated in British Mandate Palestine.Footnote 23 The works of Jenna Joselit and Gideon Reuveni on North America and Germany, respectively, demonstrate the ways in which various customs of modern consumer culture—gift giving, hospitality, advertising, public celebrations, and the like—were combined with Jewish rituals to construct a new American Jewish or German Jewish identity.Footnote 24 In a similar vein, looking closely at the bar/bat mitzvah ritual as a case in point, the present article surveys the vernacular Jewish consumer culture of the Yishuv and early Israel.
The following pages track the evolution of the bar/bat mitzvah celebration during the 1940s and the 1950s, when the birthday party was accentuated at the expense of the rite of initiation. This process was propelled from below, almost inadvertently, and was not the result of an organized cultural movement. This illuminates the 1940s and the 1950s as a transitory and formative period in the adoption of Western consumer culture by grassroots Zionist/Israeli culture. The history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony also demonstrates how consumer culture worked as a unifying vector that transcended divergences between the varied ethnic and religious traditions that immigrants brought from their countries of origins. (Although these ethnic and religious differences did not disappear, of course.)
Methodologically, this study engages in anthropological history, interpreting the meanings embedded in historical changes in the prosaic aspects of the ritual—who celebrates, when, how, and with whom—as reflecting broader transformations in society. To reconstruct a chronological account of the small ethnographic details, I draw on primary sources, mainly contemporary press accounts from those years, memoirs, educational journals, personal and community archives, and literary sources.Footnote 25
The History of the Bar Mitzvah: Birthday and Initiation
The bar mitzvah ceremony first appeared in France and Germany during the Middle Ages. It was not originally a general rite of passage, but a ceremony marking a specific transformation—the newly acquired eligibility to be called up to the Torah reading in the synagogue—and was an optional custom that did not gain widespread popularity. In fourteenth-century Ashkenaz we encounter the earliest use of the term “bar mitzvah” to designate the boy's new obligation to observe all the precepts and, by extension, a rite of passage.Footnote 26 Thirteen came to be considered the age when this obligation took effect. The ceremony focused on the synagogue and took place there: the boy read from the Torah, served as the cantor, delivered a speech to the best of his ability, and thereby demonstrated his prowess in the Jewish “bear hunt.” The ritual was a Jewish male rite of initiation in every sense.
During the early modern era, the ceremony spread to ever-larger sections of the European continent, and the time, space, and resources devoted to the celebration expanded as well. We find extensive descriptions not only of the synagogue initiation ritual, but also of a festive meal and new garments, and sometimes a speech delivered by the lad outside the synagogue, in the family's home. The limits on the number of guests and number of dishes served at the banquet, prescribed by the sumptuary bylaws of numerous European communities, indicate the increasing importance of the festivities outside the synagogue for families, and not just those of the upper class.Footnote 27 Curiously, as Jews grew more distant from the observance of Jewish law in general, and from the synagogue in particular (a phenomenon noticeable as early as the eighteenth century), many actually felt more motivated to hold a bar mitzvah for their son.Footnote 28 The popularization of the ceremony in the Jewish world was related to new mechanisms of temporal synchronization that were a byproduct of the printing press, which brought the printed calendar into many homes as a domestic artifact starting in the sixteenth century. It was only then that the nonelites began keeping records of a child's date of birth, which enabled the norm of celebrating the bar mitzvah on the first Sabbath or special day after his thirteenth birthday.Footnote 29
Through the nineteenth century, there was no serious thought about a parallel rite of initiation for girls, who were excluded from the main ritual aspects of reading from the Torah or acting as prayer leaders. Before the nineteenth century, we hear nothing about a bat mitzvah ceremony or any other rite of passage in which a girl, having reached a specific age at which she is obligated to observe the precepts, becomes an adult. Despite the increasing importance of the party component of the event, the format of a male rite of initiation was preserved through the middle of the twentieth century.
The Jewish version of confirmation especially influenced the development of the bat mitzvah ceremony. Girls were included in group confirmation ceremonies almost from the outset of the rite (the earliest known confirmation took place in 1803; the earliest including girls in 1814)—long before the term “bat mitzvah” was coined. They were usually confirmed at age thirteen, or even fourteen or fifteen, and not at age twelve.Footnote 30 Confirmation was a group rite of initiation, in which a number of boys and/or girls (and sometimes both) of the same age stood up in front of the congregation during the course of the synagogue service, usually on the Shavuot festival, and answered formal questions about the principles of faith and the practice of worship.Footnote 31 By contrast, the bar/bat mitzvah was always an individual celebration linked to the boy's or girl's own birthday, which involves striking a balance between a birthday celebration and a rite of initiation. Many proponents of confirmation highlighted the element of initiation, which they saw as lacking in the bar mitzvah ceremonies that, in their eyes, gave most prominence to the social event, with its conspicuous consumption.
In the twentieth century, the bar mitzvah's balance between the initiation in the synagogue and the celebration outside it began to weigh towards the party, which became the focus of the event for celebrants and their families. Linguistically, too, the term “bar mitzvah” began to refer mainly to the party and not (or not only) to the adolescent's new status, as had been its sense in rabbinic language. In the words of a contemporary American Reform rabbi: “[The] bar and bat mitzvah is an event [an augmented birthday party informed by consumer culture]. It must become more of a process [a rite of initiation].”Footnote 32 In practice, the bar mitzvah was incorporated into the system of the main life-cycle ceremony of the industrialized world: the birthday party. While this process has been studied in relative depth with regard to the Western Diaspora, particularly the United States, the same processes affected the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, although the ceremony followed a different cultural path there.
The Interwar Yishuv: Domestic Parties
As noted above, the new Hebrew culture evinced great interest in the ritual aspects of traditional Jewish culture. Some holidays and life-cycle ceremonies were comprehensively revised and reimagined with new content; others were invented from scratch. Several rituals were overtly and intentionally abandoned; others were preserved more or less in their original form. Most family ceremonies, including the bar mitzvah, were among the latter. As historian Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman points out in her study of weddings in the Yishuv, that society generally took a conservative approach towards the family and family ceremonies.Footnote 33 Among the family-related life-cycle ceremonies, the Zionist shapers of the new Hebrew culture in Europe and Palestine initially tended to ignore the bar mitzvah.
In eastern Europe, the birthplace of most immigrants to Palestine, the bar mitzvah was ordinarily celebrated by the combination of the ritual of being called up to the Torah and a modest party at home or in the synagogue. Of course, various communities and religious streams celebrated differently when it came to specific customs, but most communities generally preserved a balance between the rite of initiation and the social event.Footnote 34 Zionist circles rarely discussed new ways of celebrating the bar mitzvah. At most, their members beamed when the boy delivered his speech in Hebrew and channeled the expression of his commitment to Jewish continuity into a national commitment in the Zionist spirit.Footnote 35 However, such instances were rare and had little public significance. Orations by girls coming of age were even less common.Footnote 36 One practice that was highlighted in the contemporary press was a monetary contribution by the parents, in honor of the occasion, to promote the settlement of the Land of Israel, which was a variation on a trend that gained popularity in those years, a donation to a philanthropic organization to mark a family event, such as a wedding, birth, or even a birthday or a wedding anniversary. Indeed, a financial contribution to a charity or a worthy goal, as a supplement to a social event, became a hallmark of festive culture in the industrialized world, including the Jewish world, as early as the nineteenth century.Footnote 37
In Ottoman Palestine the bar mitzvah had been usually a male rite of passage marked mainly in the synagogue, in the presence of family and friends, with a modest reception after the service.Footnote 38 For Sephardic communities in Palestine, like elsewhere, there was not even a set age for the boy to don phylacteries for the first time.Footnote 39 In Sephardic communities the celebration focused on the phylacteries, and the main event took place on a weekday after the morning synagogue service. In contrast, in most Ashkenazic families, including the less traditional, in both rural settlements and the cities, the focus of the bar mitzvah was the boy's assumption of leadership roles in the Sabbath synagogue service; the main social event took place later that day.Footnote 40
In the Mandate period the influence of Western consumer culture on the urban population of Palestine increased as a result of accelerated industrialization and urbanization under British rule. Among other changes to the Yishuv's cultural landscape effected by these processes was the greater popularity of birthday parties, a ritual tied to a middle-class embrace of sentimentalized and sheltered childhood, individuality, and modern temporality. Growing strata of Yishuv society, of diverse ethnic origins and religious affiliations, adopted modern age consciousness and the bourgeois birthday ritual.Footnote 41
The bar mitzvah was modified accordingly, if slowly, to suit new individualistic sensibilities. For the upper crust, the party gradually became more important and was sometimes held in the middle of the week, rather than after Sabbath services. For example, a family named Gutt celebrated their son's bar mitzvah in the auditorium of the Zion Cinema in Jerusalem in 1927, an event reported by the press because of the family's social prominence.Footnote 42 Even in ultra-Orthodox circles, people of note held a bar mitzvah banquet in the middle of the week, in addition to the event at the synagogue on the Sabbath.Footnote 43 It is likely that Western influence that led to a greater emphasis on the party was augmented by the custom of Jews from Muslim countries, many of whom conducted the entire bar mitzvah celebration on a weekday.Footnote 44
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it seems, most families in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Petaḥ Tikvah, and other cities and towns still invited their friends and acquaintances, along with the boy's peers, to a reception after the Sabbath synagogue service or in the middle of the week at home and not in a hall.Footnote 45 In a semiautobiographic story by Yaakov Shabtai set in the Mandate era, tables were set for a bar mitzvah party in the family's apartment, and the women of the neighborhood brought cakes.Footnote 46 The children invited as guests might bring their friend colorful postcards, toys, and “manly” tools, such as pliers. Adult relatives and friends brought a book, a globe, or a toy; the more affluent could afford to give musical instruments, such as a harmonica.Footnote 47 The party resembled the domestic birthday parties that began to be held in the Yishuv during those years. The children played party games; if there was enough space in the home, they might dance the hora and other contemporary dances.Footnote 48 Other families still held a reception in the synagogue after the service—Sephardic families midweek, and Ashkenazic ones on the Sabbath.Footnote 49 At the same time, the bar mitzvah continued to be an opportunity for donations to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), for planting trees or general goals. Bar mitzvah boys could be inscribed in the JNF's Golden Book when a donation was made in their honor.Footnote 50
While the synagogue lost its centrality to the rite as the midweek party was held elsewhere, many boys were still called up to the Torah in a synagogue near their home, even if they never set foot there before or after that day. In urban neighborhoods, the local synagogue invited boys to attend the morning service and perform the religious ceremony, and many did so, but it is not clear whether their parents attended the ceremony, let alone other friends and extended family members.Footnote 51 The Torah ritual was not considered to be worthy of note, which explains the paucity of newspaper reports about such ceremonies. Generally, the Yishuv retained the traditional ceremony, although its function as a religious initiation rite was becoming more tenuous.
Some of the frontier settlements added aspects of male initiation into the world of self-defense and security as an alternative bar mitzvah rite. One person who had this kind of bar mitzvah was Yigal Paicovitch (later Allon, 1918–80), who was set a test of courage by his father when he turned thirteen. Paicovitch senior “summoned the boy to the silo and said, ‘by putting on phylacteries you still do not satisfy all the main commandments; today, you are a man and, from now on, you will have your own weapon.’ With these words, he handed the boy a semi-automatic Browning.” The test included standing guard at night and chasing thieves from a field that was located at some distance from the family's village of Mes'ha (Kefar Tavor).Footnote 52 The frontier settlement of Kefar Giladi conducted analogous rituals for several decades and inducted its girls, too, into the community's ethos and praxis of self-defense.Footnote 53 Because the British severely restricted the bearing of arms by Jews, such ceremonies in frontier settlements were kept quiet and became public knowledge only years later, when the children grew up and recorded their memories. Hence, we do not know the extent of similar tests among other frontier settlements during the Mandate period. Some contemporaries wrote in a critical vein about the “bar-mitzvah ceremonies at which the boy is handed a Bible, a hoe, and a rifle on the day he becomes a man, as symbols of the life of the pioneer.”Footnote 54 Indeed, starting in the mid-1930s, more frontier settlements conducted public ceremonies in which boys and girls received a Bible in the settlement's main hall (but no gun).Footnote 55
Most cultural entrepreneurs in the agricultural settlements, like their urban counterparts, did not propose a real alternative to the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony. Some boys were called up to the Torah and some were not; the bulk of the evidence is that most of the boys participated in a synagogue rite, but in a fairly casual way and without their families emphasizing it.Footnote 56 Surprisingly, perhaps, the topic was rarely addressed in the writings of kibbutz movement ideologues and in the intense debates that were the movement's trademark, in contrast to other holidays and life-cycle ceremonies.Footnote 57 Note that even young Yigal Allon, whose father was fiercely anticlerical, was called up to the Torah like all his friends and put on phylacteries; the private test of courage was not a replacement for the traditional ceremony, but only a supplement to it. More importantly, these new Zionist initiations, to the extent that they took place, did not replace the individual thirteenth birthday party, which involved gifts from urban relatives as well as from friends.Footnote 58 The kibbutzim and other rural settlements adopted the birthday ritual as celebrating protected childhood and individuality no less than did middle-class urbanites. Kibbutz and moshav boys celebrated their thirteenth birthdays somewhat more elaborately, with or without an accompanying military initiation or religious ceremony, and their bar mitzvah parties largely resembled their urban counterparts.
The bat mitzvah, by contrast, was unknown in the Yishuv, whether as a ceremony or as a term in the vernacular; the few military initiation rites for girls described above were also designated “bar mitzvah,” despite the inappropriate gender word, and were mostly celebrated at age thirteen.Footnote 59 Even if a handful of girls received weapons for their thirteenth birthday, only boys received presents to mark their attainment of adulthood. In the public culture of the Yishuv, the most we find is an occasional observation that girls do not have anything like the bar mitzvah ceremonies of their male counterparts.Footnote 60
Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s the bar mitzvah retained the format of a rite of initiation, but with no great importance attached to it. Most social circles in the Yishuv had relatively modest celebrations. In 1934, Meir Dizengoff (the mayor of Tel Aviv) was invited to a bar mitzvah at the home of friends, and was quite bored: “The bar mitzvah celebration—I thought to myself at the time—should be completely different, a decisive event in the life of a person making the transition from childhood to adulthood.” The fact that there was no test for the young boy at the bar mitzvah party, Dizengoff thought, minimized the drama and reduced the event to little more than a “celebration of promotion to the next grade in school.”Footnote 61 The irrelevant party caused Dizengoff to nostalgically recall his own bar mitzvah, which he felt had instilled him with love for his people and a desire to perpetuate its glorious heritage. Such an effect could be achieved only by meaningful initiation rites, and not by ceremonies that simply mark chronological transitions, like the end of the school year. There is no doubt that the slow migration of the venue of the celebration outside of the synagogue—at this stage mainly to the family home—blurred the element of initiation and made the bar mitzvah look more and more like a birthday party. But that process did not fully mature until the 1940s, when the party left the domestic space for the marketplace.
The 1940s: Parties Go Public
The 1940s began with several years of a war economy, marked by full employment and maximum production in Mandatory Palestine, but also by elements of austerity. The relative prosperity continued after the war, and according to economic historians, had a long-term impact on the country.Footnote 62 Consumption patterns changed in both the Yishuv and the Arab sector. Accordingly, the decade saw a sharp change in how the bar mitzvah was celebrated, and in the balance between its status as a rite of temporality versus a rite of initiation. Because this change took place at the grassroots level, and not at the direction of an organized cultural movement, it was not easy to discern.
The most noticeable indication of this shift was growing criticism from various directions about the extravagance and waste of bar mitzvah parties, their conspicuous consumption, the children's inappropriate behavior, and the absence of any educational and cultural content. The new rhetoric reflects a gradual change in the nature of the event, as the focus of the celebration moved from the family home and the synagogue into the public arena, to function halls or schools (and similar venues), and the number of guests, along with the associated financial outlay, skyrocketed. At the same time, though it would seem quite independently, people began to celebrate bat mitzvahs for their daughters—with no religious meaning or significance as a rite of initiation, but only as a more important birthday. These three innovations—criticism of consumer culture, greater expenditures, and the emergence of the bat mitzvah—mark an inversion in the hierarchy between the two components of the event: the rite of initiation at the synagogue, even if still performed, became marginal and at best exotic, while the party, shaped by consumer culture, moved to center stage.
The first signs of the new stage of consumerism appeared in the format of the religious ceremony itself, which also became a display of conspicuous consumption and demonstration of social status. In 1941, one boy's family hired a famous cantor to lead services in a hall it rented for Sabbath prayers and announced that “in honor of the bar mitzvah, admission is free.”Footnote 63 A few years later, another family brought the same cantor into the synagogue.Footnote 64 Consider the complaint sent to the religious daily Ha-ẓofeh in 1942 about a prominent Tel Aviv synagogue that hosted the bar mitzvah of the son of “a well-known butcher who sells nonkosher meat,” to whom the synagogue wardens gave a royal reception.Footnote 65 In other words, the religious ceremony had become an opportunity for showing off, even for the nonobservant.
The main change was in the venue of the party, as an increasing number of bar mitzvah receptions were held in event halls. By the late 1940s there were newspaper advertisements of “modern halls for rent, for weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, and balls.”Footnote 66 It is important to emphasize that renting halls for balls and parties, including family events such as weddings, had been a common practice in the Yishuv, going back to Ottoman times—but not, until the 1940s, for bar mitzvah receptions. Here the specification “modern” referred, among other things, to catering services that were now provided by the hall, rather than by the family with the help of the neighbors, as in the past.Footnote 67
As before, public figures of note held extravagant bar mitzvah parties midweek, with hundreds of guests, to demonstrate their social standing.Footnote 68 Even those who could not afford the expense, or who lived in remote places that did not have a function hall, like Hadera, and held their celebrations in more modest places such as the local school, made sure to have “many guests in attendance.”Footnote 69 Of course many still celebrated at home; but now, for the first time, celebrating outside the home and synagogue was an option that not only the rich could afford.Footnote 70 A beggar in Tel Aviv reported that most of his income came from weddings and weekday bar mitzvahs.Footnote 71 The midweek event became the focus of the bar mitzvah, not only in the mind of the partygoers, but also in the spoken language; it was during the 1940s that “bar mitzvah” came to mean the party rather than the initiation ceremony in the synagogue.Footnote 72 As part of this process, some families seem to have dispensed with the synagogue service—at least according to Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. In 1941, he proclaimed that “there is no bar mitzvah without the boy's being called up to read from the Torah”—in apparent rebuke of an expanding group that thought otherwise.Footnote 73
In the 1940s, advertisements began appearing specifically for bar mitzvah gifts—such as a fountain pen engraved with the celebrant's name.Footnote 74 Another new phenomenon of that decade, which reflected the changes in the value of the gifts and in the social obligation to give them, was the publication of bar mitzvah anthologies. Books were still a very popular gift among adults who wanted to give the child an “educational” gift, and the market responded to the demand. In 1943, mainstream authors of the Zionist elite published a bar mitzvah reader that contained classic texts from modern Jewish and world literature that the editors thought adolescents should be familiar with.Footnote 75 Of course the popularity of this gift among adult relatives and friends of the parents may not testify to its popularity among the boys themselves. For them, the ultimate present in the 1940s was a wristwatch.Footnote 76 Interestingly, the bar mitzvah gifts of the 1940s onward resembled those of the interwar era in North America and Europe.Footnote 77
The gradual transfer of the crux of the bar mitzvah from the synagogue and the home to the public arena was reflected in another new phenomenon of the 1940s—the growing criticism of the extreme wastefulness of bar mitzvah parties. During the Second World War there had been harsh censure of the Yishuv for its “numerous celebrations, banquets, and festive occasions,” enabled by the community's relative affluence, while the Jews in Europe were groaning under the yoke of a bitter oppressor.Footnote 78 Criticism of extravagance was nothing new in the Yishuv, but this was the first time that the bar mitzvah was included as a prominent example of such excess. Right-wing Revisionist circles, which had always delighted in castigating the fundraising methods employed by the Jewish National Fund, could now add to their list that “every bar mitzvah boy whose parents have rich friends can easily ‘perpetuate’ his name.”Footnote 79 Religious circles attacked the lavish bar mitzvah parties of the nonreligious as empty and meaningless.Footnote 80 But similar disapproval was heard outside religious circles as well. For example, an anonymous columnist in the daily Davar (the organ of the politically dominant Histadrut Labor Federation) wrote in 1947 that
the fine custom of arranging a celebration for the boy who is assuming the “yoke of the precepts” has been accepted by all circles and social strata in the Yishuv. But this custom also has several undesirable side effects: (1) Wealthy parents sometimes overdo the opulence of the celebration, and this occasionally arouses the envy of the boy's friends. … (2) For parents who are not well-to-do, their son's bar mitzvah celebration sometimes incurs expenses beyond their capacity to bear. … (3) There is still no standard formula for bar mitzvah celebrations in this country. The adults bring “presents” and the boy's friends get together, sometimes for a meal and unruly behavior, with no cultural program that would leave behind an agreeable impression.Footnote 81
This source describes the transformation in detail: what used to be a bar mitzvah ritual had become an elaborate birthday party: presents, food, and a get-together with friends and family, with no initiatory or other “educational” meaning. Regular birthday parties were also beginning to get their share of anticonsumerist criticism.Footnote 82 But as is clear from the above quotation (and others), in Israeli society, in sharp contrast to Jewish American society, the discomfort with the conspicuous consumption displayed at the party revolved primarily around the peer group and the status of the boy or girl, and less around the parents’ and family's social position in the adult world. The synagogue was not mentioned, approvingly or disapprovingly, in this source. The solution proposed by the writer to the “problem” was to transfer responsibility for bar mitzvah celebrations to the schools.
The proliferation of ostentatious bar and bat mitzvah parties caused parents, educators, and cultural entrepreneurs to look for ways to make the ceremony meaningful for celebrants and their family. There was of course the long-established option, dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, of making a contribution in the child's name to the JNF. In 1940 that organization launched its “Bar Mitzvah Book,” in which a child (girls too were welcome) could be inscribed by his or her parents, friends, and relatives, for a donation of five Palestine pounds (a significant amount for working-class families), and receive a gift from the JNF: an album with literary and artistic sections.Footnote 83 Towards the end of the Second World War, refugee relief emerged as another appropriate beneficiary.Footnote 84 During Israel's War of Independence, many parties were canceled; some families donated the funds set aside for them to the soldiers’ relief fund.Footnote 85 All these were, of course, rare cases that were given extensive play, and certainly not a change in the ceremony itself. Such donations had nothing to do with the child's initiation, but were rather a well-established way of marking a temporal milestone with an ideological display.
Nevertheless, criticism of waste and conspicuous consumption, children's inappropriate behavior, and a lack of educational and cultural substance grew stronger. While before the 1940s, such grievances were routinely lodged against other life-cycle celebrations in the Yishuv and around the world, in that decade such complaints became a fixture of bar mitzvah celebrations.
The third indication of new emphasis on the bar mitzvah as a rite of temporality is the introduction of bat mitzvah celebrations in Yishuv society, a process that I have discussed elsewhere at length.Footnote 86 As mentioned above, both the practice and the term “bat mitzvah” were unfamiliar in the Yishuv in the 1930s. In 1939, however, an Orthodox rabbi in Tel Aviv published an article entitled “Bar Mitzvah” in the JNF children's annual, in which he informed his young readers that the Hebrew language and Jewish tradition knew nothing of a “bat mitzvah,” perhaps because he already knew people who celebrated it.Footnote 87 Several years later, a hostile article in the religious daily Ha-ẓofeh described how, in addition to the many notices in the press inviting people to vacuous bar mitzvah parties that have neither Torah nor mitzvot, “those who are ‘more meticulous’ [the term is meant sarcastically] also hold bat mitzvah ceremonies for their daughters.” In both cases, the newspaper reported disapprovingly, “some ‘ceremony’ takes place, and they serve a meal and make speeches,” but there is no real content.Footnote 88 Two years later, a notice appeared in the Communist daily Kol ha-ʿam that a girl named Sonka, who was becoming a bat mitzvah, was contributing two Palestine pounds in honor of the occasion to the Kol Ha-ʿAm Foundation (that is, to the Communist Party).Footnote 89 In 1948, young (future writer) Ruth Almog planned to have a bat mitzvah party with classmates on her twelfth birthday, but the War of Independence changed the plans.Footnote 90
Within a few years, the custom of marking a bat mitzvah with a party in the middle of the week, no different from the midweek bar mitzvah party, came to be accepted by broad circles in the Yishuv. As was the custom at bar mitzvahs, the girl, too, usually received gifts, such as fountain pens, pencil cases, or books (but girls, too, preferred a wristwatch).Footnote 91 In 1951, when the young State of Israel was straining under an austerity regime and had imposed strict rationing, the Ministry of Agriculture issued instructions “to allocate additional foods for girls, too, for their bat mitzvah celebration.” “As is known,” the newspaper reporter added, “previously special allocations were made only for bar mitzvah celebrations.”Footnote 92 By the early 1950s, invitations to a bat mitzvah were considered routine.Footnote 93 Naturally adults soon began complaining about the children's inappropriate behavior at bat mitzvah parties, too,Footnote 94 and the standard censure of ostentation was likewise directed at bat mitzvahs.Footnote 95
In other words, at the same time as the bar mitzvah moved from the synagogue and home into the public domain, Yishuv society began to celebrate bat mitzvahs as well. No cultural entrepreneurs, educators, or rabbis, let alone feminist groups, promoted bat mitzvah celebrations and brought them to the masses. Quite the opposite: the initiative came from below, from families, perhaps from the girls themselves, who were often invited to bar mitzvah events in honor of their brothers, cousins, and male peers and wanted their own event with presents and a new outfit. As a result, greater importance came to be attached to a girl's twelfth birthday, with a party that, like for boys, was initially held at home with friends and close family, and in later years sometimes in function halls for a larger group of guests. The bat mitzvah, in this format, had nothing to do with established religion or Zionist ideology, and was wholly a product of Jewish consumer culture.
In the interwar United States, feminist criticism of women's exclusion from religious rituals and the lack of female initiation rites led members of Conservative congregations to devise a new individual ceremony, the “bat mitzvah,” which included, for the first time, substantial ritual acts in the synagogue, even if not identical to those performed by boys. The aspiration for seeming equality with boys was why thirteen became the age for the bat mitzvah in North America, where its celebration at age twelve was hardly known before the 1960s.Footnote 96 In Israel, including among the liberal movements, suggestions that girls be called up to the Torah for a bat mitzvah began popping up occasionally in the 1970s, long after a bat mitzvah party in the spirit of the consumer culture became the obligatory norm.Footnote 97 In other words, whereas the Israeli bar mitzvah, like its American counterpart, developed in the synagogue arena and only later moved out into the world of the consumer culture, the Israeli bat mitzvah, in contrast to the American version, was hatched directly into the consumer culture as a fancy birthday celebration and has remained there. Age twelve as the age of bat mitzvah emerged in the Yishuv, as a home-based custom, during the 1940s, and only later spread to the rest of the Jewish world.Footnote 98 We should emphasize that boys and girls still did not celebrate to the same extent in young Israel. More boys than girls were feted in halls; in the 1960s, bat mitzvah parties frequently were more like school birthday parties, though held in the family's home.Footnote 99 Nonetheless, the bat mitzvah, in this form, appeared just at the time that the emphasis in bar mitzvahs shifted from the initiation ritual to an enhanced birthday party.
The Kibbutzim Respond with a “Bar Mitzvah Year”
The establishment of the state in 1948 and the ensuing mass immigration and austerity regime did not interrupt the process described here. Like Yishuv society, Israeli society following the establishment of the state had to reconcile the increasing influence of consumer culture with the puritan ethos of the pioneers.Footnote 100 Even the austerity regime, as noted earlier, recognized the need to allocate extra rations to bar (and later bat) mitzvah celebrations. During the austerity regime, and more so after it ended, more and more people celebrated their bar mitzvah in halls with professional caterers.Footnote 101 New shops that specialized in birthday and bar mitzvah gifts opened.Footnote 102 Anticonsumerist discourse continued to fuel the debate against bar, and now bat mitzvahs.Footnote 103 The processes of the 1940s continued, but on a larger scale.
After 1948, it became more common to celebrate children's bar and bat mitzvahs, like their birthdays, according to the Gregorian calendar rather than the Hebrew one.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, some children (or their parents) continued to donate their bar mitzvah expenditure to a national cause, especially towards the Sinai campaign of 1956.Footnote 105 The mass immigration from Europe and the Muslim world further diversified the cultural landscape of Israel, but again, consumer culture functioned as a unifying vector or species of “melting pot.” Most immigrants from Muslim countries celebrated the bar mitzvah in their countries of origin, and many of them, at least those who came from urban centers, were already familiar with the birthday ritual; others learned about it in Israel (although the details of this process merit a separate discussion).Footnote 106 There seems to have been no resistance to birthday or bar mitzvah celebrations among immigrants who came from countries that lacked age consciousness; some of them celebrated a belated bar mitzvah in the transit camp where they were sent when they first arrived in the country.Footnote 107 The bar and bat mitzvah became an obligatory party for the Israeli mainstream in the 1950s, along with the birthday.Footnote 108 Since the party was not understood as carrying a particular ethnic or religious tradition, the pace of socialization into the consumer culture depended mainly on the family's economic status rather than on those particular traditions.
The character of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony as a special birthday party made it surprisingly exportable to non-Jews. In 1955, the son of a Western diplomat posted in Israel, who had made Jewish friends at school, asked his parents whether he, too, could have a bar mitzvah. His parents were surprised by the request—but even more surprised to discover, after looking into the matter, that, as the newspaper reported, “the bar mitzvah ceremony is not an Israeli celebration, but a purely Jewish one.” In a manner befitting their profession, however, the parents understood why it was important for the teenager to reciprocate to his new friends and invite them to his own event, and allowed him to hold an unusually large thirteenth birthday party.Footnote 109
Critics of consumer culture—who have never made themselves scarce—freely scolded bar and bat mitzvah parties as empty and valueless, celebrating nothing but the individual's own existence. But this was not the case when the birthday celebrated the existence of the collective. For example, in 1960, Haim Shorer, a prominent journalist who had been castigating excessive celebrations since Mandate times,Footnote 110 wrote that he and his wife had received an invitation to “a family celebration, to what people around here call a ‘bat mitzvah,’ and something that we usually disparage.” This time, however, Shorer felt an unaccustomed sense of spiritual inspiration when he received the invitation, because the girl had been born to Holocaust survivors in the detention camp on Cyprus and was the same age as the state. Since Eichmann's capture had just been announced, the party was defined as a celebration of the victory over the enemies of the Jewish people in every generation.Footnote 111
The consumer culture's increasing influence on bar and bat mitzvah parties troubled parents and educators. As mentioned above, some proposed transferring responsibility for bar mitzvah celebrations to the schools and holding group ceremonies there. The idea of a group bar mitzvah was not new: in the Yishuv, as elsewhere, they had always been held for the poor and/or immigrants (some of the latter came from countries with no bar mitzvah custom); during the Mandate period, these events were usually held in educational institutions that enrolled the disadvantaged.Footnote 112 In the 1950s, in response to the ostentation that had increasingly characterized bar and bat mitzvahs, the idea was floated of group ceremonies for all children—not only for their bar mitzvah but also for birthdays in general.Footnote 113 City dwellers did not take the idea seriously, but the kibbutzim rose to the challenge.
Until the 1940s, the kibbutz bar mitzvah had been an individual ceremony that resembled its urban counterpart, perhaps with the addition of the militaristic initiation rites described above.Footnote 114 Most kibbutzim adopted the birthday celebration, which was organized by the parents and took place in their room,Footnote 115 and boys celebrated a somewhat grander thirteenth birthday with family and friends. In 1941, Moshe Smilansky reported that on Kibbutz Deganya the custom was for all the children to go up to the bar mitzvah boy and congratulate him in person.Footnote 116 A member of Kibbutz Ein Harod noted in 1946 that “the bar mitzvah event is the celebration of individuals.”Footnote 117 The boy received gifts from his peers and sometimes from his urban relatives.Footnote 118 As noted above, in many cases the boy performed the religious ritual; but sometimes even his parents were not present, let alone family and friends.
The custom of group bar mitzvahs emerged gradually during the 1940s on a few kibbutzim as part of their experiments in education. At first, the bar mitzvah was suggested as a transition from primary school to middle school, which in the rural settlements meant joining the labor force.Footnote 119 In Kevutzat Kinneret, when twelve children (apparently both boys and girls) reached the age of bar mitzvah in 1942, the kibbutz organized a group ceremony.Footnote 120 Several kibbutzim turned the event into an annual community celebration, with a group ceremony in the kibbutz dining hall, at which the bar mitzvah children received a Bible and other “educational” gifts and listened to endless speeches, in the best Labor Movement tradition.Footnote 121 The idea of assigning the children tasks developed gradually. On Kibbutz Hulda, eleven children celebrated their group bar mitzvah at Hanukkah of 1948 by staging a play with a biblical theme.Footnote 122 By the late 1950s, the group bar mitzvah had spread to most kibbutzim in the form of a year of special tasks that culminated in a group ceremony. During the bar mitzvah year, the children were initiated into adult life and took responsibility for matters relevant to the kibbutz and the nation, in areas such as immigrant absorption (working with immigrants from adjacent towns), society (learning about other social sectors), education (teaching a first-grade class), security (becoming skilled with firearms and standing guard duty), and especially agricultural labor.Footnote 123 These ceremonies were conducted en masse for all thirteen year olds, both boys and girls (the latter having to wait a year after the age at which their urban counterparts celebrated, for the sake of gender equality).Footnote 124
The conspicuous contrast between this form of celebration and the passivity of the urban bar mitzvah boy or bat mitzvah girl, who usually did nothing more than smile politely and thank the guests for coming, won it general esteem among urbanites. In 1966, there was even a radio broadcast about “Bar Mitzvah in the Kibbutz.”Footnote 125 Nevertheless, some of its admirers criticized the lack of “a link between Jewish tradition and the expression the kibbutzim intend to give to their lives.” Considering the kibbutz version of the Passover seder, the festival of the first fruits, and other customs, critics asked, “Haven't the kibbutzim always followed this path of incorporating tradition into their specific world view?”Footnote 126
However, in most kibbutzim, if not all, the group bar mitzvah did not replace the individual bar or bat mitzvah party. Rachel Bar, of Kibbutz Kabri, encouraged her fellow educators in vain to make sure that the celebration was a “[kibbutz] movement holiday and not a family holiday.”Footnote 127 Although it was not given wide publicity in kibbutz bulletins and educational texts, external sources testify that “the parents are not willing to give up the party itself.”Footnote 128 Even during the heyday of the group ceremonies, in the 1950s and the 1960s, most parents organized individual events for their children. Even when there were group bar mitzvah celebrations, guests from town brought presents for the children of their relatives or friends, which prompted ideological misgivings about whether the boy or girl should be allowed to keep these gifts. During the 1950s and the 1960s, kibbutz bar mitzvah children often received transistors, bicycles, and even cash, and kibbutz educators could do nothing to stop the trend.Footnote 129 On the contrary: in the 1960s, bar mitzvah children on most kibbutzim received a wristwatch from the kibbutz itself as a bar mitzvah gift—sometimes with a Bible, but most often without.Footnote 130
The kibbutz bar mitzvah ceremonies endeavored to take what had become a mere birthday party and restore its original character as a rite of initiation, by initiating the children into community and national tasks. The similarity to the group confirmation ceremonies, which also emerged from schools, is not coincidental. This was why the kibbutz celebration was still called a “bar mitzvah,” even though it included both boys and girls; retaining that term preserved the connotation of an initiation rite.Footnote 131 By contrast, “bat mitzvah” connoted merely a birthday party influenced by consumer culture, which encompassed no elements of an initiation rite.
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The bar mitzvah emerged in medieval Europe as a rite of initiation. In the early modern era, the ritual took on some components of temporality and was popularized as such in most of the Jewish world until the middle of the twentieth century, while still retaining aspects of a rite of initiation. Midcentury, in both Israel and North America, it became mainly a larger and fancier birthday party, and was soon joined by the bat mitzvah, with both ceremonies highlighting the celebrant's having arrived at an arbitrary temporal milestone derived from “tradition.” Since the 1950s, some have tried to remake the ritual as more than an exclusively temporal rite and reclaim it as a rite of initiation, by assigning the twelve and thirteen year old age-appropriate educational tasks that instill intellectual, Zionist, religious, and/or socially conscious values.Footnote 132 In North America, the bar/bat mitzvah became the main trigger of Jewish education in various degrees for many boys and girls.Footnote 133 Although this was not the case in Israel, interestingly, most Israeli bar mitzvah boys (and a tiny number of girls) still perform the synagogue ritual. What the synagogue ritual means for the boy and family, what exactly this ritual initiates them into if the family does not regularly attend synagogue, and why mainstream Israeli culture has not developed parallel rites for girls, are questions that deserve separate discussion.Footnote 134 Because there is no change of social or legal status at age twelve or thirteen, the initiation component remains an epiphenomenon; the ceremony is still essentially a marker of an arbitrary temporal milestone. Undoubtedly most boys, girls, and their families are mainly interested in the party as a social event, with the focus on the clothes, hairdo, food, music, and social standing.
It was in the Yishuv of the 1940s and Israel of the 1950s that the bar/bat mitzvah emerged from the grassroots as a lavish birthday party that nonetheless conveys Jewish identity to the celebrant (even if they are not always sure what this identity means). In this period, the various traditions of immigrants, even during the mass immigration wave of the 1950s, were amalgamated into the melting pot—not of Zionist ideology, but rather of modern individualism shaped by consumer culture. Jews of all ethnic origins and religious affiliations began celebrating the bar/bat mitzvah in more or less the same way, with differences in cultural tastes, but with the enduring influence of consumer culture as a unifying vector.
What happened in Palestine during the 1940s that prompted this makeover? A similar transformation took place in North America at around the same time. There it could perhaps be explained as a result of suburbanization.Footnote 135 It is more difficult to explain why it happened when it did in the Yishuv and the young state of Israel, particularly because the change trickled up from below and had nothing to do with the Zionist or religious establishments. The change of the 1940s corroborates previous findings that identify this decade as a period of transition in the consumer culture of Palestine, for both the Arab and Jewish sectors, but further research is required to confirm this periodization.Footnote 136 Part of the story was the war economy of 1940–1945, but as shown above, the bar mitzvah continued along the same track later, in the early 1950s, which were years of relative scarcity.
What can be proposed is that this periodization accords with the notion, advanced by historian Moshe Rosman, that the 1940s were a watershed in Jewish history, separating the modern era, with its traumas of migration and socioeconomic instability, from the postmodern era of the emergence of two main demographic centers, relative political stability, and economic ease.Footnote 137 This hypothesis is supported, with due caution, by the evolution of the bar mitzvah celebration, which precisely during that transitionary period was integrated into modern life-cycle rituals of temporality informed by consumer culture, both in Israel and North America. Such changes can be detected, of course, only with the appropriate historical perspective, and only through the perspective of the longue durée rather than through the lens of the dramatic events that took place at that period.
The bat/bar mitzvah emerged from the grassroots, fertilized by consumer culture, as a more elaborate birthday, despite criticism voiced by rabbis and the Orthodox on the one hand, and by secular intellectuals and educators on the other. The history of these ceremonies shows that the 1940s and 1950s were the formative years of a new grassroots Israeli Judaism that expressed traditional Jewish identity through the rituals of consumer culture.
