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A systematic concern with the life cycle of individuals, as an organizing theme in itself, was not part of the Abrahamic religions during their formative stages.1 The emergence of this focus is a recent development in research. This is not to say that the events surrounding birth, marriage, and death were unimportant or went unnoticed. They were omnipresent and also served as vehicles for central religious ideas and symbols. But the sequential life course of individuals was not a prominent axis along which major religious categorization and discourse took shape.
Brief examples may be given from each religion. The commandments in the Hebrew Bible, addressed to both the collective and to individuals, came to be called miẓvot (sg. miẓvah). This term was also applied to some rituals ordained later in rabbinical culture. Within the life progression of Jews, male circumcision is the only ritual that appears as a commandment in the Pentateuch. Marriage is often mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but a set of prescribed marriage rites does not appear, even though norm-setting rabbinic literature later used the Tanakh as a source of proof texts. The bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony, first emerged only in the late Middle Ages in Europe. Circumcision, bar mitzvah, and marriage, discussed in terms of rabbinic law (halakhah), each appear under a different halakhic subcategory established in the fourteenth-century code called Arbaʿah Ṭurim (Four Columns), which still forms a basic framework for discussing rabbinic law and elaborating it.
Christianity crystallized its central ritual mode in the sacraments. The notion implies an external visible gesture—by a person ordained to do so—that is a sign of divine grace imparted to individuals. Some sacraments are characteristic of different life stages, and Catholicism came to formulate Seven Sacraments. The concept is also central to other forms of ancient Christianity, even with their doctrinal and ritual differences (Markschies 1999). Protestant denominations, however, limited or abandoned the notion of sacrament. It is possible to view the liturgical calendar of Christianity as built around the life-progression of Christ, but this does not provide the historical key to understanding the sacraments. The notion and practice of the first sacrament, baptism—an act of purification by water—was present from the beginning but not inherently linked to childhood. Originally, it was the mode by which people converted to Christianity; more people became Christian in this manner than by being brought up and educated in the religion. Regular infant baptism emerged in the early Middle Ages and its status as a Catholic sacrament was established later in the medieval period. Marriage became a sacrament in the sixteenth century, and other Catholic sacraments—Penance and ordination into a Holy Order—are not formally linked to a stage in life.
In Islam, the foundational text—the Quran—is centred on a single individual, Muhammad, who is the source of authority because of the divine revelations he received. Traditions relating to the pronouncements and deeds of Muhammad emerged in succeeding generations and constitute the ḥadīth. Also appearing after Muhammad’s life was the formulation of Islam and the quranic message as coalescing in five ‘Pillars’ (arkān), the first of which—the shahāda—was declaring belief in a singular Allah and that Muhammad was his prophet. The other arkān form major axes providing direction and guidance for daily life. The range of actions by Muslims that relate to quranic and post-quranic sources are comprehended by another fivefold categorization: deeds that are obligatory (farḍ), recommended, indifferent, reprehensible, or forbidden. The juridical literature discussing these is the fiqh; Frederick Denny notes (1985: 64) that ‘fiqh books always begin with ritual duties by considering the four “Pillars”’ that follow upon the shahāda. One practice universally accepted by Muslims, and discussed in fiqh while not mentioned in the Quran, is male circumcision. Because no canonical source specifies the details of its practice, there exists significant variation within the Muslim world as to when it is carried out, from seven days until close to puberty and even close to marriage. The only obligatory act included in the five Pillars with a loose connection to a life stage is the pilgrimage to Mecca. Often Muslims who attained the economic ability to do so would fulfil this once in their lifetime, during their later years. With the ease of modern travel, ḥajj is now often performed earlier in life, and sometimes more than once.
Given the diffuse nature of the subject, the present chapter outlining an approach to the systematic examination of life-cycle rituals in Abrahamic religions will consist of several dimensions. It first identifies challenges presented by the emergence of the notion of ‘ritual’, in which the observation of actual practice is a significant component in the context of disciplines that have given primacy to the study of texts and to philological methods. A further conceptual dilemma discussed is the conceptual ‘location’ of life-cycle rituals, which frequently are embedded in multidimensional social milieux and include strands of meaning that are relevant both to the individual and the collective. Interaction among the three Abrahamic traditions presents other hurdles to mount in formulating productive conceptual paths. These have to be negotiated both from a historical-diachronic perspective and through comparisons in which historical documentation and the results of more recent ethnography are placed side by side. One part of this chapter considers the former emphasis, with the comparative-analytic perspective highlighted in the subsequent section. A concluding discussion will show how life-cycle events can be critical indicators of contemporary cultural and socio-political processes, even as they reflect an augmented sense and recognition of the single self.
From the point of view of modern academic scholarship, the category of ‘ritual’ in general was not a major theme in the study of Abrahamic religions, and reflected various biases when it was applied. Ritual, as a fairly recent analytic category, did receive emphasis in the disciplines of anthropology, which focused on ‘tribal’ societies that came into European purview beginning in the sixteenth century, and folklore, whose subject originally was the rural members of European society. Various early modern theories linking the newly discovered inhabitants of the New World to the Israelites, or Jews of antiquity, may be connected to the discovery among them of rituals and taboos that brought to mind some of the rules in the Pentateuch. The very concept of ‘ritual’, applied to non-utilitarian symbolic gestures in a variety of societies, may have a Eurocentric bias, anchored in developments such as the Reformation (Asad 1993: 55–79). Before the Reformation, the notion of ritual was more specifically linked to monastic life within Catholicism. Andrew Buckser (2008: 414) has noted that anthropological studies of Christian societies and ritual have mostly been trained on Catholic communities rather than on Protestant ones, as if the latter were more ‘normal’ or ‘rational’, rather than symbolic. Scholarship on Islam relevant to ritual has privileged texts that outline religious obligations rather than accounts of ritual action. Islam’s decentralized structure of authority and its broad geographic spread, often led to the non-productive question of what is ‘really Islamic’. Apart from a few works of elaborate description such as Edward Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1954 [1860]), or Edward Westermarck’s Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926), studies that provide ample accounts of actual ritual behaviour have been relatively rare until recent decades. There still exists an unclear and uneasy relationship between ethnography and textualized approaches to ritual, even when carried out by anthropologists (Hammoudi 2009).
Another set of questions, based on partial similarities in practice and in terminology, enquires into historical precedent and influence. Jewish practice served as a reference point for Christianity, and both these religions were potential background factors for Islam. Also, once they began to flourish, the latter religions could react upon the ideas and praxis of the earlier ones. The identification of Jewish precedents for Islamic ritual behaviour and prayer constitutes one attempt along these lines. While some important historical questions are involved, a focus that only looks at origins, and ignores practice and meaning as they evolve, misses the emergent and dynamic side of rituals in a new religious milieu. Descriptions and discussions of the ritual behaviour of Jews also were coloured by normative notions. Christian Hebraists in early modern Europe, who paid attention to contemporary Jewish communities, at times did not distinguish between what they observed in synagogues and what appeared in Jewish texts (Deutsch 2001). Within Judaism arose a category of religious sanctioned custom, minhag, which incorporated religious practice not strictly derived from earlier halakhic rules. Only recently have there been attempts to formulate halakhah in terms of a general approach to ritual (Gruenwald 2003; Swartz 2011).
The absence of an explicit focus on ritual is also evident with regard to life-cycle transitions and events. These are often interwoven with the major concepts and practices in Abrahamic religions, but the nature of the connection has varied greatly over time and place. The links between textual-based principles and local life-cycle practices are loose, contingent, and at times problematic. Highlighting the individual and his or her whole life trajectory as a systematic locus of discourse on rituals is a feature of modernity and more recently, postmodernity. It has been abetted by the notion of rites de passage introduced by Arnold Van Gennep into scholarly literature in 1909 (Van Gennep 1960), which has passed into popular understanding, but is still a developing topic that presents challenges to both conceptualization and empirical research.
The gap between sanctified texts and actual practices linked to life-cycle events has several types of implications. Some are parallel in the three Abrahamic religions while others reflect variation in structures of authority in the different traditions. A basic source of tension is the historical spread of these religions to new regions and the concomitant encounter with pre-existing customs and beliefs. Where these appeared to run counter to accepted religious ideas and behaviour, the formal reactions to them have reflected a range of positions that include overlooking variance, reinterpreting existing practices in terms of religiously acceptable norms, or direct attempts to extirpate practices that are deemed deviant.
For example, the Jewish custom of breaking a glass as part of a marriage ceremony is first documented in twelfth-century Europe. Jacob Lauterbach (1925) suggested that the practice had existed long before, but rabbis refrained from writing about it because of its link to ideas and gestures regarding demons. It became a matter of explicit discussion once an explanation arose (mourning for the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem) that linked it to normative tradition. Within Catholicism, in the eighteenth century, a debate arose as to how to understand rites of ancestor worship in Chinese culture. Jesuit missionaries argued that they were social ceremonies and hence not at odds with Catholic doctrine and thus did not have to be abandoned. Dominicans took the position that there was a direct clash between the practice and established doctrine. Islamic societies today differ widely in the form of celebration for the same rite according to their relation to the Salafiyya movement. Countries that are less influenced by Salafi ideology, like Indonesia or Morocco, are more characterized by long and elaborate celebrations for circumcision or for naming a child than are the Gulf states, which are strongly affected by Salafism. Within all historical settings, the outcome of preaching and pressure by religious authorities has not always corresponded with their original intentions.
The scholarly study of rites of passage from the perspective of modern disciplines has also suffered from the gap between rites as normative prescriptions and the availability of data on concrete examples of observance. The Abrahamic religions are viewed as growing out of foundational texts, and textual-philological study became the major method of charting their development. This relegated direct observation, or even historical records, of actual practice to a secondary status for several reasons. First, the nineteenth-century paradigm of scholarship that privileged viewing human matters in terms of history and evolution viewed the tracing of origins as a major key to understanding religion. Statements that were normative and formative were assumed to be more significant than evidence or hints of everyday practice. Second, as indicated, the spread of Christianity and Islam to regions far beyond their original settings made the task of comprehending the range of variation in practice so immense, that focusing on the kernel of rituals, as they were discussed in authoritative texts, was an understandable default option. A corollary was the attitude that information gained from ‘ordinary’ followers of a religious tradition was secondary, and might reflect ‘external’ influences, in comparison to the writings and insights of literati. Third, as the scholarly principles that shaped anthropology and folklore studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took shape, a perspective emerged that customs and rituals were better understood through new theoretical lenses, rather than by following explanations offered by ‘native’ practitioners. This was articulated, among others, by William Robertson Smith (1914: 16–18) in his studies of ancient Israel and Islam that drew upon the anthropology of his day, by Franz Boas (1916: 229–30) in his work on native North American groups that left no literary storehouse, and is implicit in the theoretical emphasis of Van Gennep (1960) on the classification of rites in his discussion of rites of passage based mostly on materials from what he calls ‘semi-civilized’ societies. Van Gennep did, however, also relate to rituals within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. More recently, anthropology began consider ‘native exegesis’ as an important source of insights.
Only in the mid-twentieth century did there emerge a cumulative thrust, attempting to link ritual practices observed by anthropologists in agricultural villages or small towns to the central textual-based features of world religions. Robert Redfield, who conducted fieldwork in several locales in Mexico, formulated the notion of a ‘Great Tradition’ in comparison to a ‘Little Tradition’ in order to analyse the way that Catholicism was expressed concretely in specific settings, including communities in which aspects of pre-Columbian culture and religion were still vibrant. One of his studies, in a village where daily communication was in a Mayan language (Redfield and Rojas 1962), describes how the formal name of a child, announced at baptism, was taken from a calendar hanging in a local church, which provided saints’ names corresponding to dates of birth. Often, however, that name was not used in everyday interaction. An analysis of a funeral in Java by Clifford Geertz (1973: 142–69) provided a detailed example of how Islam was interwoven with local traditions in Indonesia. Other researchers in Islamic settings provided analyses that emphasized the distinction between Islamic and non-Islamic traditions. On the other hand, Nadia Abu-Zahra (1997) has argued that often these studies do not grasp the extent to which textually based Islam has penetrated the consciousness and ritual practices of unschooled members of Muslim societies, including women. The demographic upheavals that changed the face of world Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that no parallel ethnographic field studies took place in functioning ‘traditional’ Jewish communities. However, by the end of the twentieth century, anthropological perspectives appeared in research into cultural history (mentalités). Two studies of Ashkenazi Jewry, one relating to the Middle Ages (Marcus 1996) and the second to the early modern period (Goldberg 1996), illustrate this with regard to rituals marking initiation into schooling in the first case, and illness, death, burial, and mourning in the second.
Utilizing the ‘life cycle’ as a criterion for delineating or classifying rites presents challenges in terms of ritual contexts within specific traditions, and also from the perspective of comparative analysis. Taking the biological life trajectory as a starting point provides only partial guidelines. Van Gennep (1960: 3) was aware that ‘man’s life resembles nature’, and that individuals and societies do not ‘stand independent’ from natural periodicity. Yet he highlighted extensive variation within human societies even as he argued that basic structural principles repeated themselves. Van Gennep likewise recognized that certain concrete acts or ritual sequences could be rites of passage from one point of view, while serving other social purposes as well. Therefore strict rubrics and classification are only partially helpful, and a broad horizon of ritual activities must be purveyed in seeking to identify life-cycle rituals.
For example, the Abrahamic religions do not stress birth itself as a focus of ritual activity, while there is every reason to assume that the activities of mothers, attending relatives and neighbours, and midwives were peppered with ritual gestures in historic societies (Patai 1983; Granqvist 1947). The Tanakh dictates the obligatory act of male circumcision eight days after birth. While not appearing in the biblical text as part of the prescription, circumcision also became the occasion for naming a child, and the first historically identifiable incident appears in the New Testament (Luke 1: 59). The baptism of infants (male and female) became widely established in Christianity, but the original kernel of the ritual had to do with the conversion of adults. In Islam, according to some ḥadīths, on the first day after birth, the adhān (call to prayer) is to be whispered into the newborn’s right ear as the first sound it hears and the ṣalat iqāma (a second call that initiates prayer) is recited in the left ear. Local practice of this custom varied in detail, and may have been perceived locally as an act that wards off evil (Lane 1954: 53), but indicates, as in the other religions, a stress on early initiation of the individual into a collective and a tradition, beyond the process of birth itself.
Consequently the cumulative inculcation of a religious culture, in itself, becomes a factor shaping the life cycle. Teaching Jewish male children to master the text of the Hebrew Bible has taken place since antiquity, while the bar mitzvah ceremony, marking the culmination of early education and the adult obligation to fulfil the commandments from the age of 13 (see below), crystallized in the Middle Ages in Europe and consequently has spread elsewhere. Confirmation, in Christianity, became designated as a sacrament in Catholicism, and initially was to follow soon upon baptism. Even though the earlier sacrament was defined as a transformative and irreversible event, with time Confirmation was shifted to later years and associated with a more mature and conscious engagement of the individual with the presence of the Holy Spirit. In some Protestant denominations, where confirmation is not viewed as a sacrament, it may signal adult incorporation into a congregation. In several Islamic settings in Asia there are rituals to accompany a male child when he first begins to learn to recite the Quran, while no precise age is specified. One ḥadīth recommends the age of 7 years for children—both boys and girls—to begin fasting a few days during Ramadan, and extending the number of days until they observe the full fast at adulthood. From a comparative perspective, the emergence of a formal bar mitzvah transition at a precisely defined age represents the coalescence of textual exegesis with a social-historical process that may provide an analytic model for historical developments in other traditions (Weinstein 1994; Marcus 1996: 119–26).
The identification of a ‘life cycle’ may thus emerge through a focus on other aspects of ritual life. A central Jewish prayer sanctifying God—the qaddish—that appears repetitively in the liturgy has become firmly associated with memorializing departed relatives even though there is no mention of death in it. In another realm, the minor festival of Lag Baʿomer—thirty-three days after Passover—is the occasion, for some ultraorthodox Ashkenazim, of giving a 3-year-old boy his first haircut and introducing him to the study of Torah (Bilu 2003). Both the springtime custom of Easter eggs which is assigned formal symbolism linked to Christ’s resurrection, and the autumn celebration of Halloween—the eve of All Saints’ Day, have evolved to shape practices appropriate to children which, in some settings, take on features of a rite of passage (Rogers 2002: 37–8). In Tunisia, community rituals and prayers that are suffused with Islamic content and which are aimed at ending drought, designate specific and distinct roles both to young boys studying in a quranic school and to young girls who engage in gestures of supplication, some of which may pre-date Islam. Along with the main purpose of this cycle of rain-rituals, Abu-Zahra (1997: 27–32) perceives rites of passage embedded within them.
The intertwining of individual experiences and collective symbols, and, indeed, the mobilization of the former to the benefit of the latter, has been discerned in different forms in the three Abrahamic religions. Pardes (2000) has analysed the account of the emergence of the ‘nation’ in ancient Israel, in terms of the growth and maturity of an individual, passing through ritual phases. As noted, it is possible to view the Christian liturgical calendar as built around the life-trajectory of Jesus. The accumulative traditions in ḥadith, adding many details of practice not made explicit in the Quran, may be viewed as comprising an authoritative ritual biography of Muhammad. These long-accepted modes of common practice and shared symbolization mitigate the valorization of individual experience vis-à-vis prescribed authority and received tradition.
For the most part, the modern study of ritual has taken social units as a starting point, but understanding group processes always brings up the place of individuals, and the enquiry into private behaviour and experience inevitably leads to a consideration of shared activities and meaning. While the collective significance and impact of rituals in terms of time and space often appears as a distinct topic from that of ritual and the single body (normally conceived as a ‘private’ realm in western terms), all three factors are co-extant ‘environments’ within which ritual action flows and leaves an imprint, yielding dialogic interfaces between group and individual processes. For example, a focus on the individual human organism cannot be fully separated from mate-selection and reproduction which insert persons into wider social matrices. At the same time, each of these three ‘environments’ has its own rhythm that may have links to the other two, but never thoroughly overlap with them. There thus appear a variety of partial connections within rituals between the individual and the social in terms of both functionality and cultural meaning, in which frameworks of time and space interlock with the progression of individual life events.
In the Book of Exodus (ch. 12), the month in which the events establishing Passover take place is explicitly designated as the beginning of the Hebrew year. In the same textual field, participation in the Paschal sacrifice is made dependent on a male having undergone circumcision. Here, as in the verses ordaining circumcision in Genesis 17, the possibility of ‘outsider’ individual adults joining the Israelite collective is envisioned, even while the overall narrative underlines familial and ‘national’ continuity. The Gospels are deeply sensitive to the significance of Passover, while taking its ritual symbols in new directions (including some opposite to the older ones), and thus provide a performative basis for a religious system that challenged family ties and stressed individual faith (Feeley-Harnik 1994). Some have viewed developments within Christianity in late antiquity as shifting the locus of holiness from place to person (Swartz 2011: 297). This did not fully eliminate elements of place from the schemata of holiness, as seen in the symbolic centrality of ‘Rome’, Crusades to the Holy Land, or pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. The first of Islam’s five Pillars, the confession of faith—shahāda—underlines personal commitment, while two other Pillars—prayer (ṣalāt) and ḥajj to Mecca—are oriented toward, and give shape to, both place and time (Denny 1985: 71–4). The Ramadan fast is calendar dependent as well, and also demands discipline over the body. Talal Asad (1993: 125–57) has stressed discipline in regard to rites of monastic life characterizing medieval Christianity, while mystical ritual regimes in all the Abrahamic religions contribute to the sacralization of individual persons. While imbuing selected persons with special religious virtuosity and sometimes social power, one long-term implication of mystical traditions may be the emergence of models for the valuation of all individuals, as Turner and Turner (1978) have argued with reference to Christian pilgrimage (see Goldberg 1990b regarding Judaism).
The image of a single individual—Abraham—stands at the genealogical apex of the three religions. The narrative surrounding him in the Tanakh feeds into later developments in all of them, both in terms of Abraham’s special relationship with God and with regard to central rituals. Viewing the traditions together does not reveal easily defined lines of influence, but rather overlapping streams of significance including meanings that are at times directly opposed to one another. The figure of Abraham is thus shared and constitutes a platform for continuity, but is also a taking-off point of contention. Genesis 17 ordains circumcision for Abraham and for his descendants while linking this ‘sign’ to a promise of biological continuity. Reproduction within the family became a basic mechanism of continuity within rabbinic Judaism, while early Christianity turned to the incorporation of Gentiles as a major mode of recruitment. The downplaying of circumcision in Paul and subsequent sources goes hand in hand with this emphasis, as exemplified in Galatians 3: 7 and elsewhere, claiming that faith includes a person within the ‘children of Abraham’. The close Tanakhic connection between circumcision and the Passover sacrifice (Exod. 12: 48; Josh. 5) is similarly relegated to a background position within Christianity, in comparison to the foregrounding of the image of Jesus as a Paschal lamb. Another ‘Old Testament’ trope of Jesus’ crucifixion, carried forward with perhaps less emphasis, is Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac insofar as even its non-occurrence may foreshadow a father bringing about the death of his son. When comparing the evolution of Jewish and Christian traditions, it might be noted that Abraham’s ‘binding’ of Isaac is not central to Passover symbolism, but is a repeated theme at the other pole of the Jewish liturgical year: the New Year Convocation and the Day of Atonement in the autumn.
Abraham—Ibrāhīm in Arabic—also may be viewed as the first Muslim. The Quran portrays him as establishing monotheistic worship in connection with the Kaʿba in Mecca and later tradition assigns a significant role to ʾIsmāʿīl in this regard. From this perspective, Muhammad may be perceived as restoring aspects of Allah’s earlier revelation that had waned in impact or had been distorted. As stated, circumcision is taken for granted among Muslims, and considered ‘recommended’ in several schools, even though not mentioned in the Quran, while other aspects of the traditions surrounding Ibrāhīm, in relation to ʾIsmāʿīl, are assigned different highlighting vis-à-vis Judaism. It is has been widely accepted among Muslims that Ibrāhīm’s almost-sacrificed son was ʾIsmāʿīl rather than Isaac (Lane 1954: 95), but early sources are unclear on the matter (Paret 1990). This varying and unclear genealogical perspective notwithstanding, another significant Islamic tradition is Ibrāhīm’s connection to Hagar/Hājar, ʾIsmāʿīl’s mother, in particular the account of her banishment to the desert (Gen. 16; Hagar does not appear in the Quran). Islam views the barren place that the mother and son reached, where divine intervention saved ʾIsmāʿīl from death, as the future location of the ḥajj. This quranic portrayal and later elaboration not only links Ibrāhīm to the Pillar of pilgrimage to Mecca, but provides a narrative matrix for the prime spatial axis of routine rituals: daily prayer, the direction for placing the head of a corpse during burial, and (according to widespread practice), the direction faced when slaughtering a beast. More recently, the attention tradition pays to Hagar has provided a model and stimulus for female participants in the ḥajj (Hammoudi 2009).
The overlapping of traditions, and the effort to mark distinction vis-à-vis the other religion while relating to ancient sources, is not only a matter of the early stages in the Abrahamic religions but may be viewed as an ongoing process, taking myriad shapes in different historical circumstances. A ceremony of childhood initiation into the study of Torah, among Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages, appears in pictorial representation that suggests that the ‘imbibing’ of Torah was viewed in polemic counterpoint to the image of infant Jesus sucking at the breast of Mary (Marcus 1996: 91–4). A more recent instance of interaction is provided by a Muslim in twentieth-century Libya describing the local practice of circumcision and indicating that there are different customs as to when it is performed. Demonstrating some general familiarity with Jewish life but also a lack of precision, he states that some Muslims circumcise on the fortieth day, but that most, in order to be distinguished from the Jews, do so from the second to the seventh year (Goldberg 1990a: 91). His Tripolitan dialect echoes the Islamic principle of khālifūhum—do not act as do the people of the Book (Vajda 1960). One concrete context of mutual contact between groups on ritual occasions is supplied by an account of Jewish weddings in Jerba, Tunisia, in recent times, where Muslim guests might be present at festivities in the course of the preparatory days of celebration, but were absent during the culminating evening in which a rabbi guides the steps of the formal marriage and musicians play traditional hymns (Valensi 1989). There are also occasional references to rural settings where a Jewish circumciser (mohel) might be called upon to carry out the procedure on Muslim children (Marx 1966). The Emancipation of Jews in Europe created new social circumstances and cultural contexts. Historically, Christian baptism, applied to men and women, was a rite that stood in stark contrast to the Jewish circumcision of males. Yet some Jews in modern France adopted the term baptême as a translation of the circumcision. In German-speaking regions, early in the nineteenth century, there was a direct borrowing of the notion of ‘confirmation’ from Catholicism to develop a synagogue ritual attuned to the eve of adulthood, in distinction from the by-then conventional bar mitzvah at the age of 13.
More often than not, we lack precise micro-historical or ethnographic information that demonstrates the processes of cultural interaction, which might entail borrowing, reinterpretation, intentional distancing of practice, or misrecognizing ritual influence. It is therefore frequently a matter of speculation whether similarities, or structured differences, reflect adherence to ancient norms, the impact of the environment, independent cultural innovation, or some combination of these factors. Rather than treating these as firmly distinct categories in each historical instance, the following discussion will identify several issues relevant to the shaping and performance of life-cycle rituals, offering examples from the three Abrahamic religions that may be instructive to compare, and even be mutually illuminating, without seeking to determine historical primacy or direction of influence. The working assumption is that the grasp of process must take an important analytic place alongside attempts to reach definite historical assignation.
Ritual actions, whether brief and low-keyed or prolonged and dramatic, need to be seen in terms of the flow of life as they are experienced in particular cultural matrices. The Babylonian Talmud (Brakhot 58b) mandates a blessing—Blessed be the reviver of the dead—that is appropriate to recite when meeting a person whom one has not seen for over a year. In both Europe and the Middle East, traditional Jews incorporated the blessing into the flow of normal speech. Ethnographic evidence from a Muslim Arab village near Bethlehem in the twentieth century shows a range of standard responses to what Hilma Granqvist calls the ‘glad tidings of return’ (1947: 83–5). These include the invoking of known proverbs and/or the composition of songs of welcome by women. There are also dramatic life situations that engender parallel responses in diverse historical settings. Granqvist (1947: 65–6) describes how in the case of a woman experiencing stalled labour, those assisting her went to the home of a woman who had made the ḥajj and brought back a rosary from Mecca. Borrowing the set of beads, they placed them around the neck of the struggling parturient woman and the gesture had an immediate calming effect. Such an act perhaps is popular, rather than textually based, but also constitutes part of conventional practice, and may be compared with a custom noted among Jews in Italy, of placing a Torah Scroll in the hands of a woman experiencing difficult childbirth (Adelman 1991: 146).
Not only crises, but expected life-transitions within mundane realms may be attached to rituals rooted in religious culture. As noted, the regularization of bar mitzvah ceremonies at the precise age of 13 occurred late in medieval Europe. As its practice began to spread within the Jewish world, the age for marking it at first remained variable; a boy capable of praying publicly and reciting a lesson might celebrate the occasion earlier. In Morocco in recent times, among the verses sung by women on these occasions, some reflected that the young person would now begin working and contribute to the family. This may be placed in the context of Granqvist’s observation in Artas near Bethlehem (1947: 130–2), that when asked about the age of a boy women did not name a year but would state the work activity in which he was engaged at the time. The integration of bar mitzvah into Moroccan practice cannot be separated from prevalent conceptions of life’s course.
This perspective applies to gender as well as to age. Stanley Brandes (1980: 187–8) argues that taken-for-granted notions of masculinity may resist forms of standard ritual expression. In an Andalusian village, he found that men participated in Catholic Communion much less than women, both throughout the year and on life-cycle occasions. He suggests that the act of kneeling, linked to both the raising of the wafer-host by a priest and its ingestion by the individual communicant, was perceived as undergoing feminization, and was avoided by men as much as they could. The history of Jewish circumcision also provides examples of the interaction of gender with ingrained perceptions of public space. The movement of the ceremony from the home to the synagogue in the Middle Ages appears to have squelched the presence of women from certain active roles within it (Baumgarten 2004: 86–9).
Another topic that straddles everyday common-sense notions and ritual perceptions is that of ‘purity’. A strict theological point of view may seek to define it in precise ritual terms, or apply it as a metaphor to an inner condition of a specific organ (like ‘the heart’), while in quotidian reality it commonly overlaps with culturally shared notions of cleanliness and dirt (Douglas 1996). Judaism, based on biblical laws (mainly in Leviticus), developed elaborate categories and rules relating to purity/defilement, in particular with relationship to the Tabernacle in the desert (and by extension, the Temple in Jerusalem) and its paraphernalia. Two sources of biblical impurity relate directly to life-cycle processes, death and features of the reproductive process: menstrual flow, childbirth, and the emission of semen. Many rules, while preserved in rabbinic texts, became ‘dead letters’ in terms of practice after Temple worship ceased, but purity in relation to sexual activity and genital flow continued as a focus of concern. At times popular understanding among Jews exceeded rabbinic requirements (Cohen 1999). In some places, women felt that they should not enter a synagogue while menstruating, or should refrain from preparing unleavened Passover bread, even though rabbis declared that there was no such prohibition (Goldberg 2003: 119). The elaborate rabbinic system was not reproduced in the succeeding Abrahamic cultures, even as another set of detailed rules evolved in Islam. Regarding Christianity, there is evidence of historical continuity on a ‘common-sense’ level. In the third Christian century, Peter Brown notes, a ‘bishop of Alexandria could assume that no Christian women would approach the Eucharist during her period’ (Brown 1988: 146), even though other Christian authors sought to ‘persuade both men and women to pay no attention to the disqualifications contained in the Jewish laws of purity’ (ibid.). Popular notions of impurity due to childbirth may have persisted in the practice of the ‘churching of women’, wherein a new mother visited a church to receive a blessing from a priest about forty days after giving birth (cf. Lev. 12: 2–8). This was not an obligatory act, even though at times explained in terms of biblical texts (including Luke 2: 22), and the details and frequency of its practice have varied considerably. To unravel it historically would require attention to commonly held local notions along with canonical directives.
A picture of detailed rules and distinctions pertaining to purity in daily life emerges in the work of Granqvist among Muslim villagers (1947; 1965). One norm explained to her, for example, was that a woman who is impure may visit a woman who is in labour, but should not be there after the child is born (Granqvist 1947: 87). Another is that an impure woman entering a room where a corpse has been ritually washed, defiles it. The possibility of impurity is ubiquitous, and direct enquiries about it appear routinely. ‘Are you pure or impure?’ is asked of a woman in labour by a midwife entering the room (1947: 61), or of a man about to slaughter an animal or chicken (1965: 33). The practices and beliefs articulated by her female interlocutors, or viewed by Granqvist directly, were not presented on the basis of textual authority but as accepted practice, while her own formulation of a general principle is that: ‘a ritually unclean person should not come into touch with a holy thing’ (1965: 32). Thus, both impure men (after sexual intercourse), and women (for whom menstruation and childbirth defile as well as intercourse) should not fast or enter a place of prayer. At the same time, prohibitions linked to impurity apply to ‘many actions in daily life which non-Muslims would consider profane…ploughing, [or] portioning wheat on the threshing floor’ (Granqvist 1965: 33). The latter observation may be understood in terms of the sanctity attached to threshing floors since antiquity in the Near East, beyond the specifics of any authoritative textual directives. In addition, notions of purity seem ‘naturally’ to adhere to food as substance which transverses the boundaries of the body (Douglas 1970). Along with rules of prohibition and permission, foods also take on positive spiritual meanings in life-cycle events, such as representation of the departed (e.g. Danforth 1982: 56, 105–6).
Many of the analytical questions raised continue to be relevant even as contemporary external conditions have dramatically altered the configuration of factors impinging upon the trajectories of individual lives. In terms of the emergence of ‘modernity’ in the West, and the growing valorization of the individual, it is now clear that even with a degree of ‘sanctity’ attributed to the judgements and emotions of single persons in today’s world, there is no unitary form to these developments as they appear within diverse socio-political frameworks and ritual routines. The traditional form of establishing a marriage in Judaism exemplifies such variation.
The ancient rabbinic formulation for a man to ‘take’ a wife assumes that he acquires exclusive rights over her sexual activities, and utters a public statement to that effect, while the woman agrees to this transaction by silently accepting an item of monetary value (a ring). The ceremony entails no parallel gesture or statement concerning her rights vis-à-vis the new husband. The political and legal situation in contemporary Israel makes Orthodox procedure the only manner in which a Jewish ‘religious’ marriage is sanctioned by the state, but both secular Israelis and Modern Orthodox women who have internalized some feminist assumptions have expressed reservations about traditional wedding ritual and have taken steps seeking to challenge or modify it. Among the former, there is a growing trend of couples travelling abroad and marrying in a civil procedure, and later having an unofficial traditional ceremony at home that includes gestures of equality like each member of the couple giving the other a ring. In some Modern Orthodox circles, women have begun to pressure amenable rabbis, who are sensitive to current developments, to find modifications of marriage ritual that do not contravene halakhah (Koren 2005). In both cases, these choices place this life-cycle ritual at the centre of attention and contention, and in the latter instance also reflect the growing access of women to the classic texts of rabbinic culture.
A different configuration of feminist engagement with normative scholarly traditions has been analysed by Saba Mahmood (2005) regarding the Mosque Movement in Egypt, through which women, who in the past had minimal direct contact with literate Muslim culture, became engaged in Islamic revival. While not focusing extensively on specific rituals, the importance of the body in the movement appears as ‘a site of moral training and cultivation’ (p. 139), and has implications for various life milestones. In discussions with mentors in the mosque, many mothers raised questions—with their daughters in mind—about premarital sexual activity. Another practical dilemma was: ‘at what age should girls be veiled in public?’ Some mothers wished daughters to begin at an age that collided with the ban of the Ministry of Education on veils in school. Mahmood’s account also questions some of the liberal assumptions of feminism, by explicating a contemporary movement that empowers individuals but ‘does not endorse a privatized notion of religion’ (p. 47) and ritual life.
Rituals related to death, burial, and mourning in Oaxaca, Mexico (Norget 2006), illustrate another pattern of responses linking received customs to changing conditions. The celebration of Dia de Muertos is a clear historical example of pre-Columbian rituals becoming absorbed into acceptable Catholic forms: in this case the consecutive holy days of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. In general, ancient rituals related to death continue to provide an avenue for the public expression of ongoing socially valued and emotional involvement of the living with the dead. Women are critical and central actors in performing these rites (that are interspersed among standard Catholic practices), not by moving into spheres previously closed to them by canonical authority, but precisely by their being specialists in older ritual forms that are sensuous, fluid, and non-codified (Norget 2006: 147). These popular forms, both persisting and continually evolving in non-elite segments of Mexican society, provide a glimpse into the sense of self of the participants, and into the moral vision that sustains them in marginality and poverty.
It clearly is not productive to seek lines of connection among these cases in any conventional ‘historical’ sense, but might it be useful to look for ‘family resemblances’ in the way that the three religions process the search, by everyday adherents, to situate life trajectories in the context of venerable traditions?
1 Thanks are due to Wasfi Kailani, David Satran, and Gillian Feeley-Harnik for the opportunity of discussing some of the issues in this chapter.