ple that participated in the morning prayers. The task of the participants was to
respond to the verses recited by the father and the circumciser and to serve as a
welcoming committee. These same people also participated in the two feasts—
one the night before, and the other on the afternoon following the ritual.
The blessing chanted by the community, “as he has entered the covenant,
so may he enter Torah, the wedding canopy and good deeds,” symbolizes both
the public aspects of the ritual and the connection between the circumcision
and the baby’s future life. If the blessing for a life of fulfillment of the com-
mandments or the performance of good deeds is not connected to any specific
stage of life, the other two blessings evoke two further status changes the boy
will undergo—first, when he begins studying Torah and becomes part of the
male world and, later, when he gets married. The community thus represents
the society the infant will belong to, and presents, through the blessing, the
stages of life the child will pass through in order to become a full member of
the congregation.
The community in the synagogue is certainly the male community. There
were probably a fair number of women at the ceremony as well—both because
some women attended daily services and because such a celebration certainly
drew others who did not attend daily. Sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries suggest that some of the women remained at home with the parturi-
ent and that a celebration took place there while the men were in the syna-
gogue. If, however, we accept the logic suggested in the previous sections of
this chapter, it would follow that in periods when women had a larger role in
the ritual, more would have been present in the synagogue.
Circumcision and Baptism: A Comparative AnalysisAt this point, we may assemble the different pieces of the previous discussion.
What similarities and differences can be revealed by comparing the Ashke-
nazic circumcision ceremony to the baptism rituals conducted by the Jews’
Christian neighbors? How do they help us understand medieval Jewish social
and ritual practices? There are many points of similarity between the circum-
cision ritual and the ritual of baptism: the white clothes worn by the infant; the
carrying of the baby to and from the ceremony by a figure/figures other than
the infant’s parents; the importance attributed to the role of co-parents/ba’alei
brit; the meals prepared before and after the circumcision ritual; and the wash-
ing of the infant and his preparation for the ritual. Even if, in some cases, these
actions are ancient components of the ceremony, they took on new meanings
in the medieval context, when a person was assigned especially to perform
them. In other cases, we find new functions arising in the medieval circumci-
sion ritual, such as that of the ba’alei brit. While we can expect any rite of ini-
tiation to involve persons who help and accompany the initiate, here we find