In his book The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Yale University Press, 2004) Ivan Marcus argues that prior to the Middle Ages, the line between childhood and adult responsibility – now marked for a boy at the age of 13 as the objective age of legal majority – was much fuzzier. Boys were educated and matured into adulthood gradually, more as a subjective process than an objective event. Only in the Middle Ages did rabbis begin to see certain suggestions in the earlier literature as norms. In the process they ironically prohibited to younger boys who were ready the ability to perform certain rituals, such as don tefillin in their morning prayers.
The shift, which is at least partially attributable to the Christian environment in which these (mainly) German rabbis lived, is fascinating, and raises the question of how and why Jewish communities, or indeed any society, moves to an objective measure of “adulthood.”
