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Reviewed by:
  • Why Aren't Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism
  • Ruth Langer
Why Aren't Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism. By Shaye J. D. Cohen (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005) 317 pp. $39.95

In his previous book, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, 1999), Cohen examined the emerging concept of Jewish identity in late antiquity. The new volume is a fitting sequel, tracing the role of circumcision in defining Jewishness from late antiquity to today. The question, as Cohen demonstrates, is not new. Yet, in developing his theme, "the challenge to the circumcision of Jewish men [End Page 435] posed by the non-circumcision of Jewish women" (222), Cohen combines the ancient question with issues of identity construction, feminist concerns, and wide-ranging historical research, with a focus on the Jewish–Christian dialogue/polemics about this issue and its impact on Jewish redefinitions of the meaning of circumcision.

In his introductory chapters, Cohen presents a history of Jewish male circumcision from within the rabbinic tradition and follows it with an exploration of female circumcision and Jewish responses to it. He then turns to a history of the question embodied in his title, introducing the patristic challenges that compared Christian baptism of men and women to the Jewish exclusion of women from the ritual that ostensibly defined Jewishness. These challenges became of concern to Jews only in medieval Europe. Cohen devotes the heart of the book to an analysis of the various Jewish responses to them. He contextualizes his Jewish thinkers with the non-Jewish cultures with which they were in dialogue, as well as with the Christian polemical literature of which they were likely aware.

Cohen employs feminist approaches in his analysis of the medieval Jewish answers. He discusses four alternative medieval explanations for the restriction of circumcision to males: that it "bespeaks [women's] secondary, anomalous, problematic place in the rabbinic hierarchy" (xiv); that circumcision is necessary for men to control their lust, or, in the Christian claims, to make them effeminate; that circumcision does not define Jewish identity or covenant and thus does not exclude women in any significant way; or that women's observance of the laws of menstrual purity is their equivalent to circumcision in that it is also blood-oriented and covenantal. Each of them, to various degrees, was a topic of conversation among Jews and a point of polemical debate between Jews and Christians. As Cohen demonstrates, if not the emergence, then the application of these theories arose in answer to these external challenges. The interface with non-Jewish cultures forced and shaped the Jewish discourse around the role of circumcision in the construction of Jewishness.

Cohen's final chapter moves to modernity and the challenges arising from the Jewish desire to fit into Western society and from the emerging demand for parity between men and women. As he reiterates throughout, however, equality was not a concern of the medievals, even though it subconsciously shapes our readings of their teachings (and Cohen's interest in presenting them, although he succeeds, for the most part, in avoiding apologetics). Beyond the search for egalitarianism, Cohen concludes by pointing to looming contemporary challenges to celebrating circumcision raised by the Western rejection of Muslim and African female circumcision as mutilation. Is male circumcision also mutilation? Does it confer medical benefit?

The wide scope of this volume creates openings for occasional minor errors. For instance, Cohen cites the text of the Seder Rav Amram Gaon as that of medieval Babylonia (131, n. 70), though the liturgical [End Page 436] texts in this volume are almost certainly those of later European copyists. In wondering why the Bekhor Shor does not consider bridal defloration and circumcision to be analogous, he forgets that the infant is not an active partner in his own circumcision (204). But these are indeed minor quibbles on points that do not detract from the thought-provoking insights of this superb volume.

Ruth Langer
Boston College
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