Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?

Given recent recognition of the horrific results of some forms of female circumcision, a reader happening upon this title might well dismiss Shaye Cohen’s question with a sigh of gratitude that Jews have had better sense than to circumcise (or “excise”) women. The subtitle articulates the inadequacy of this response: as uncircumcised, women might be seen to be excluded from the covenant—perhaps even from Jewishness. Cohen traces the question historically: Who asks this question? Why? How do they answer? It also functions heuristically: What does the noncircumcision of women tell us about women in Judaism? About circumcision? About men? Or rather—what does it tell us about what men think about these issues?

The study’s focus is rabbinic writing from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, but its chronological scope is far greater. The first chapter lays out the “canonical history” of circumcision. Beginning from Torah texts and classical rabbinic literature (the Mishnah, the two Talmuds, and related works), Cohen traces transformations of circumcision through the eighteenth century on four “trajectories”: from rendering the child ritually pure to conferring sanctity; from removal of the foreskin to the shedding of salvific blood; from an apotropaic protection from death to salvation from evil, sin, and death; from sign of the covenant to sacrament analogous to Christian baptism. A final chapter engages the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, delineating the emergence of challenges to circumcision from the reform movement and from the emergence of concerns for equal status for women and girls.

The overarching questions of the relation of circumcision to covenant, and the import of its limitation to males, are set by Genesis 17. Cohen notes that this account is a composite and leaves the relation between covenant and circumcision unclearly defined: circumcision is an obligation proceeding from the covenant (throughout, but especially in Gn 17.14); or the covenant itself (17.10); or a sign (reminder to the deity) of the covenant (17.11, cf. Gn 9.12–17). Males only are to be circumcised; for Sarah there is the promise of a child, but no sign of the covenant. Yet the covenant is with her child Isaac and not with Ishmael and his descendants, though they are both circumcised. This paradox points forward: not all the circumcised are Jews (for instance, Arabs and most American men) and not all Jews are circumcised. Rabbinic texts insist on circumcision for male converts to Judaism but allow that circumcision may be delayed, or even dispensed with, to save the live of a child. The Jewish man who grows to adulthood uncircumcised remains a Jew, suffering some restrictions in rabbinic law but clearly a member of the community.

Outsiders looking in (for the most part Christian polemicists) seem to be the catalysts who get Jews thinking about the apparent anomalies of circumcision as sign of the covenant. The most exotic are claims that Jews circumcise women. Strabo (first century b.c.e./c.e.) described both Egyptians and Jews as circumcising men and excising women, while much later Richard Francis Burton (nineteenth century) ascribed the practice to “outlying tribes of Jews,” a view Cohen attributes to Burton’s sexual imagination, a factor doubtless engaged in much Christian polemic.

Philo of Alexandria (first century c.e.), the first (surviving?) Jewish writer to raise the question of why circumcision is limited to males, was aware of the circumcision of women in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt and felt compelled to explain why Jews circumcised only males: to check stronger male sexual desire and pleasure, and stronger male pride because of the greater male part in generation. He presents these two reasons as his addition to four ancient and traditional explanations for circumcision: (a) as a prophylactic against a disease most prevalent in the southern areas where circumcision is practiced; (b...