circumcision

circumcision or posthetomy, is the operative removal of all or part of the prepuce of the penis. By extension to the female the term is also used for clitoridectomy, which can range from the ritual drawing of blood to infibulation (the removal of the clitoris and parts of the labia). Male circumcision has been read in the West to be a sign of everything from sexual hygiene, to cosmetic appearance, to tribal identity or a mark of adulthood, to either diminishing or enhancing sexual desire, to increased or decreased fertility, to patriarchal subjugation, to enhanced purity, to the improvement of sexual endurance, to a form of attenuated castration, to menstrual envy, to a substitute for human sacrifice.

In Pharaonic Egypt boys were circumcized between the ages of 6 and 12. The Jews were the group which continued to practise infant male circumcision in Western Europe after the advent of Christianity. Infant male circumcision as practised by the Jews occurs on the eighth day after birth. It represents the covenant of God with Abraham (Genesis 17: 10–14). Even after the Shoah and the increased presence of Muslims, who also ritually circumcize their infants in Europe, circumcision continues to be associated with the image of the Jews.

There are four ‘traditional’ views of the ‘meaning’ of circumcision in connection with the Jews. Following the writings of Paul (Acts 15), the first view saw circumcision as inherently symbolic and, therefore, no longer valid after the rise of Christianity. This view was espoused by the Church Fathers, Eusebius and Origen; it continued through the Renaissance (Erasmus) and through the Reformation (Luther). It forms the theological basis for the distinction which Christians were able to make between their bodies and the bodies of the Jews.

The second view saw circumcision as a sign of a political or group identity. The rhetoric in which the accepted science of the late nineteenth century clothed its rejection of circumcision is of importance. It was intense and virulent, and never free from negative value judgments. One central example should suffice. The liberal Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1901), one of the standard ‘ethnological’ sources from the late nineteenth century for the nature of human sexuality, decried the ‘mutilation of the genitals’ among ‘savage tribes’ including the Jews.

The third reading of circumcision saw it as a remnant of the early Jewish idol or phallus worship. Thus J. H. F. Autenrieth saw circumcision as but a primitive act practised by culturally inferior peoples such as Jews and African Blacks. Autenrieth, by 1829 the Chancellor of the University of Tübingen, entered the discussion of the meaning of circumcision with a public lecture on its history. For him, as for others, circumcision was a surrogate for human sacrifice. The nineteenth-century British anthropologist John Lubbock saw such rites of sacrifice as a ‘stage through which, in any natural process of development, religion must pass’. But the Jews also sacrificed their animals at the Temple as ‘symbols of human sacrifice … [which] were at one time habitual among the Jews’. Circumcision was a sign of ‘the inherent barbarism of this people’, a view seconded by a Dr Hacker in a medical journal during 1843. Here again the medical discussion of a social practice becomes contaminated by the racial context into which it is placed. Indeed, this view dominates the discussion of the ethno-psychologists into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the meaning of circumcision as a semantic sign. The experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt sees circumcision as
of the nature of sacrifice. Along with the offering of hair in the cult of the dead and with the pouring out of blood in connection with deity worship, it belongs to that form of sacrifice in which the sacrificial object gains its unique value by virtue of its being the vehicle of the soul. Thus, the object of sacrifice, in the case of circumcision, may perhaps be interpreted as a substitute for such internal organs as the kidneys or testicles, which are particularly prized as vehicles of the soul but which can either not be offered at all, on the part of the living, or whose sacrifices involves serious difficulties.

For Wundt, politically a liberal in his time, Judaism is ‘… but one of those vanquished cults which struggled for supremacy in the pre-Constantinian period of the Roman World Empire’. And the practice of this substitute for ritual sacrifice is a sign of the barbarism and marginality of the Jew.

The fourth reading of circumcision saw it as a form of medical prophylaxis. This seems to be first claimed in the writing of the Greco-Jewish historian Philo, who was writing in a strongly Hellenistic culture which found any mutilation of the body abhorrent. He claimed that it was a prophylaxis against diseases of the penis, which also promoted the well being of the individual and assured fertility. But the hygienic rationale was also evoked, as we have seen, in the work of Johann David Michaelis, the central German commentator on this practice in the eighteenth century. It is only in the middle of the nineteenth century that the debate about the medical meaning of circumcision impacts upon the Jewish community in Central Europe. Prior to this the discussions concerning the meaning of circumcision in the Christian community remained separate from Jewish concern in Europe. While the image of the circumcized Jew was raised as a central metaphor for Jewish difference in Great Britain with the presentation of the Jewish Naturalization Act in 1753, it only became of importance with the gradual acculturation of the Jewish in Germany and Austria toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The debates within and without the Jewish communities concerning the nature and implication of circumcision surfaced in Germany during the 1840s.

By the end of the nineteenth century, ritual circumcision had grown in disrepute in Germany because of its association with questions of ‘race’. However, when Jewish practice was understood as hygienic and could be emulated, circumcision came to be held in higher repute. In a study undertaken by the British surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson in 1854, the incidence of syphilis among London Jews was found to be one-fifteenth of that of the general community. He found that this did not reflect a higher moral stance (as the gonorrhea rate was the same in both groups), but assumed that it was the result of a more general immunity. Hutchinson's views echo the more general assumption of the time, that ‘Jews escape the great epidemics more readily than the other races with whom they live’. In the US it came to be associated with the hygiene movement after the Spanish–American war and was seen as a universal panacea for venereal disease. By the late twentieth century, circumcision for prophylactic reasons had come to be common medical practice in the US, but very uncommon in the UK, and even after the Holocaust it remained a relatively rare medical procedure in Germany.

Sander L. Gilman

Bibliography

Gilman, S. L. (1993). Freud, race and gender. Princeton University Press, Princetown.
Hoffman, L. A. (1996). Covenant of blood: circumcision and gender in Rabbinic Judaism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Remondino, P. C. (1891). History of circumcision: from the earliest times to the present: moral and physical reasons for its performance: history of eunuchism, hermaphrodism, etc. and of the different operations practised upon the prepuce. F. A. Davis, Philadelphia and London.