Course Description:
This course will focus on the subject of circumcision from a number of disciplinary perspectives including Jewish history, Biblical hermeneutics, Jewish-Christian-difference, science studies, anthropology, medical ethics, comparative cultural studies, psychoanalysis, race theory and gender studies. While our focus will be on male circumcision in Jewish tradition and Jewish history, we will look at how the practice is discussed in a wide range of critical literature from the Bible to the present. We will begin our explorations of circumcision by reading the relevant texts from the Hebrew Bible, accompanied by recent critical scholarship by Shaye Cohen, Jonathan Boyarin, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, and Eric Kline Silverman. We will then look at early Christian texts which criticize Jewish circumcision (and Judaism), and other texts which discuss the worship of Jesus’ foreskin. We will fast-forward to Maimonodes and Isaac ben Yedaiah (12th century philosophers whose discussions of circumcision acknowledge the painful, sexual and violent aspects of the rite even as they value and praise it) and to Kabbalistic texts on circumcision, along with recent scholarship by Elliot Wolfson. The second half of the course will focus on discussions of circumcision (particularly in Europe and North America) from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, including the medicalization of the ritual, the discussion of male and female circumcision as matters of human rights, the subject of circumcision in discussions about sexual and gender identity, and the importance of circumcision as a ritual marking individuals as belonging to particular religions, cultures, nations, ethnicities, races and classes. Finally, we will explore the rite and the ceremony as it is practiced in contemporary Jewish contexts and families and as it appears in contemporary literature, film and television.