Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (review)

Book Reviews 137 shalom, best regards), and some basic Arabic and Yiddish terms current in modem Israeli usage. All in all, reading the book is a pleasurable learning experience. Snira L. Klein University of Judaism Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism, by Lawrence A. Hoffman. Chicago Studies in the History ofJudaism. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996. 256 pp. $16.95. Lawrence Hoffman is professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. To many American Jews at the present time, as he makes clear (including himself among them), circumcision has become problematic. While they feel, often strongly, an obligation to practice it, their consciences do not rest easy. Is circumcision meaningful today? Is it cruel? Is it sexist? Is it necessary to the survival of Judaism, the Covenant, and the ultimate redemption of all? Can it be revised with integrity? Should it be scrapped? Over the last twenty years, Hoffman has authored or edited some eleven books. If we consider the evolving character of these, we will be impressed by his concern with liturgy and ritual not simply in their textual forms and histories but, even more, as public performances in which not only "official" (theologically sanctioned) meanings are encoded but in which also "public" (informally shared) meanings abound. In Hoffman, moreover, we fmd a welcome combination of historical scholarship with ethical and pastoral dedication. He knows that rituals matter. Beyond that, he knows that the particular way oftheir mattering has largely escaped the purview of most theology and history ofreligion, up until the rise of ritual studies in the last two decades. Better than most, he combines historicaVtextual knowledge with awareness ofritual as cultural and religious performance, more analogous to art than to theology, however closely to the latter it may be allied. For this, we must be grateful. But there is more. Hoffman is endowed with an ethical conscience attuned to feminism. He rejects the idea that the important thing about women is their relation to men-as men's wives, mothers, sisters, widows, etc. This regard for the public personhood ofwomen puts him at odds with a key part ofthe legacy ofRabbinic Judaism, about which he is, as far as I can judge, very well informed. The book begins with a description of the way the problematic of circumcision surfaced in reformist circles among enlightened German Jews a century and a half ago: Rabbis apparently found it possible to commit nothing less than liturgical surgery on 138 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 their time-honored prayer book; they could cancel age-old mourning and wedding customs; they even declared the Talmud no longer binding. They had no trouble dispensing with Hebrew and cutting off their ties to a Jewish Land of Israel. They would even think seriously of declaring a marriage with a non-Jew "not forbidden." But they could not even consider abrogating circumcision. Moreover, they could not even agree that males who are not circumcised are still Jews! Nowhere else, to the best ofmy knowledge, were the reformers so adamimtly tied to their past as in the case of circumcision. Why that is the case is the subject ofthis book. When earlier Rabbis (from 70 CE to the Middle Ages) elaborated the practice of circumcision into a rite, they designedit to accomplish two major things: I) The identification of Judaism as a covenant that passes ritually from father to son, generation to generation, without any religiously significant participation by women. 2) The replacement ofwomen's menstrual blood, together with the benign meanings it once had, by the blood shed by males in their circumcision, which blood was declared to be life-giving-that is to say, salvific. "To speak bluntly," Hoffman writes, what I found in this study surprised me (though perhaps, in retrospect, it shouldn't have). What is more, it made me very uneasy.... [p]recisely because Rabbinic Judaism was a religion ofthe body, men's and women's bodies became signifiers of what the Rabbis accepted as gender essence, especially with regard to the binary opposition ofmen's blood drawn during circumcision and women's blood that flows during menstruation. Gender opposition...