This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological
history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for
Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual
meanings: first, the new religious status that a Jewish girl acquires—that of
an adult obligated by the precepts of Jewish law—and second, the event or
ritual marking this milestone. The close examination of the concept’s various
meanings in different Jewish languages tracks its development from
its hesitant beginnings in the nineteenth century to its emergence as a key
concept that refers to a central ceremony in the Jewish world of the twentieth
century. From that point, the article follows the two lexical paths that
bat mitzvah has traveled, in the United States and in Israel, and highlights a
basic anthropological difference in the ceremony’s social function.
