ABSTRACT
The Jews of Medieval Europe as well as the Christian majority among whom they lived experienced a dramatic cultural revival from the late eleventh through the early thirteenth centuries. An important dimension of that revival was a new awareness on the part of Jews and Christians of members of the other culture. The possibility of Jews and Christians being attracted to the other culture is an expression of the great cultural and social transformation of the twelfth century and is related to the subject of the “individual in the twelfth century.” A Jewish awareness of the newly important eucharistic wafer is obliquely reflected in a new Jewish children’s initiatory rite of passage, from the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, in which small boys were brought to a Hebrew teacher and given cakes to eat baked with milk and honey and on which Hebrew alphabets and Torah phrases were inscribed.
