Which religions get circumcised

In Galatians, Paul asserted,. I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. In contrast, Jews and Muslims conceptualise tradition as belonging to a community. Presumably, for the German Court, baptism did not raise a similar concern to that of circumcision because it does not leave a mark on the body.

The characterisation of Judaism as an overly legalised tradition was a significant component of early Christian self-articulation and polemics against Jews during antiquity and beyond.

The modern state assumes both aspects of early Christian polemics: elevating belief over law and recognising biblical law. By adopting a notion of religiosity based on Christian traditions, the German court also adopted perspectives on the human body that are not neutral, but rather emerge from those same traditions.

In both the Jewish and Islamic traditions, circumcision is not bodily harm, but rather bodily improvement. The rabbinic Jewish tradition views circumcision as perfecting the body. In both the Jewish and Islamic perspectives, the notion of what is natural and unnatural is the reverse of prevalent secular assumptions. Robert Yelle explains that Christian antinomianism, which precedes Protestantism,.

It is widely recognised that states often construct religion as individual belief. For instance, Benjamin Berger illustrated that secular law constructs religion as private, individual and autonomous.

First, secular law defines religiosity as private belief. Secondly, secular law identifies religiosity as an individual right.

The ECtHR case of Valsamis v Greece illustrates how secular law regulates the border between the individual and the public. This case, and others, indicates that secular law constructs the individual right of freedom of religion as a non-political right. Thirdly, as many scholars have observed, secular law defines religiosity as a matter of autonomous choice, although most followers of Jewish and Islamic traditions do not experience it as such.

Rather than a premeditated choice between equally available alternatives, many women wear headscarves because of customary traditions they consider to be fixed and unalterable. Indeed, many women perceive the wearing of a headscarf as an obligation required by law.

Secular law uses the notion of choice to depict traditional practices as discretionary. Contrary to secular ideas, Jewish and Islamic traditions entail public acts ie taking place in the public sphere and collective obligations.

Both Jewish law and Islamic law recognise a category of obligations that fall on the entire community, rather than on individuals.

In contemporary Western states, Muslims who do not conform to the state-sanctioned understanding of religiosity are more likely to be considered threats to the public sphere.

The same is true of Jewish and Muslim circumcision. Although state law primarily defines religion as religiosity, it also constructs a notion of religious law that is based on a written legal code ie positive law. Islamic legal sources provide multiple, authoritative opinions on the timing of circumcision, ranging between seven days and the onset of puberty.

While Islamic scripture does not proscribe a specific age for circumcision, the orthodox Islamic legal view is that puberty constitutes the upper age limit for circumcision. Because the state primarily recognises a written and verifiable legal code as binding, the court ignored the multivocality of Islamic law. Thus, the court fused Christian ideas with its objective of legal certainty when it presumed that only codified, written law validates practices. In addition to the German court, the German legislature has considered the timing of circumcision.

The German Civil Code specifies:. In the first six months after the child is born, circumcision may also be performed pursuant to subsection 1 by persons designated by a religious group to perform this procedure if these persons are specially trained to do so and, without being a physician, are comparably qualified to perform circumcisions. The German Legislature and Ethics Council formally justifies the distinction of six months based on the lower sensation of pain and the lower medical risks for circumcision at an early age.

The German legislation appears to cater to Jewish practices of fixed circumcision timing, thereby giving less weight to Muslim practices.

When states evaluate Islamic law, they often do so by comparing it to Jewish law. In the case of circumcision, this comparison contributes to viewing Islamic circumcision practices as customary, rather than binding, and consequently as non-legal. Accordingly, the Jewish timing of circumcision was taken as uncontested and unquestionable, while Muslim traditions did not receive similar respect. State law both constructs and enforces a distinction between binding religious laws that the state affords legal protections and customs that the state denies legal protections.

This is why some state courts have demanded that minorities prove that a given practice is not only a custom, but also a legally inscribed duty. For example, some secular courts have declared that animal slaughter on Muslim holidays is merely a custom and not an obligation. Some early Christian writings characterised Judaism as overly legalistic, even while acknowledging the divine basis of Jewish law. Yet, Jewish and Islamic legal traditions are not positivist; mandated law is only one component of both legal traditions.

Admittedly, the distinction between custom and mandated law is meaningful even within Jewish and Islamic traditions, since both recognise custom as a source of law. First, the distinction between custom and mandated law does not correspond to the distinction between written and unwritten law; customs may be written while legal obligations may be oral. What makes certain norms more obligatory than others is not a procedural standard, but rather a dynamic process within traditions.

Thirdly, secular states apply the distinction between custom and obligation inconsistently, or in ways that are prejudiced against minorities. Moreover, this is not an isolated case of a Christian practice being depicted as a custom. By virtue of a variety of historical reasons, the Islamic legal tradition is significantly more pluralistic than the Jewish legal tradition.

As a result, when the state demands evidence of religious law as it does in some religious freedom cases , it discriminates against Muslims more than it does against Jews. Indeed, Jews, especially in the tight-knit communities of central and eastern Europe, developed a narrower legal orthodoxy than Muslims.

As the previous sections have illustrated, the German court has simultaneously construed circumcision as a matter of religiosity private belief, individual right and autonomous choice and religious law a practice by a divinely ordained legal code.

In Europe, circumcision and, relatedly, animal slaughter is sometimes associated with barbarism. While the German court did not raise public threat as a consideration, it likely explains why this case entered the German legal system. It is probable that the history of the Nazi genocide of Jews motivated the German parliament to pass legislation permitting circumcision. Consequently, the role of circumcision in Jewish versus Muslim communal belonging is not equivalent.

This is particularly evident in the conversion process. Jewish and Islamic traditions about circumcision indicate not only dissimilar practices, but also disparate understandings of belonging. The state classification of Jews and Muslims as a public threat has normalised the false assumption that they are corresponding groups.

Admittedly, states often classify groups with relatively benign goals, including gathering statistical and demographic information; nevertheless, state bureaucracies have used religious affiliation—as well as other state classifications, such as gender, ethnicity and race—as an indicator of public threat.

When states associate Jews primarily in the past and Muslims at present with violence, they contribute to the myth that religion is a primary or unique cause of violence.

The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalise a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. This myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalisation of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious.

Nonetheless, there are notable distinctions between how Jews and Muslims are depicted as public threats: Jews are viewed as conspiratorial actors, while Muslims are viewed as violent actors.

In contrast, Muslim violence is often portrayed as public; the archetypical Islamophobic accusation is terrorism. The most common accusation levelled against Jewish and Muslim slaughter concerned its inhumane character. Judaeophobes and Islamophobes associate ritual slaughter with Jewish and Muslim violence, implying that adherers of the practice are prone to even more extreme violent acts.

Secular states stigmatise Jews and Muslims as being incompatible with secular public values and as being threats to political authority and public security.

Recent and historical experience has amply demonstrated that restrictions on religious expression, often defended by the State on grounds relating to national security, public order, or even human rights, could in fact be intended to target and marginalize particular minorities on a discriminatory basis. In the pre-secular world, Jewish and Muslim identities were inevitably political. The modern state tolerates its religious subject so long as the private beliefs of autonomous individuals do not threaten political authority.

In contradistinction, the modern state views public acts of collectivities as a threat to political authority. This is evident in a case concerning a Hasidic Jewish community in Montreal. When the community sought to maintain an eruv a rabbinically required symbolic line delineating Jewish space for Shabbat observance , they were confronted with secular opposition to their presumed invasion of public space.

Therefore, the eruv challenges the secular notion of religiosity and religious group. Not surprisingly, the eruv has been the subject of controversy in multiple secular states. Secular intolerance for those who do not fit within its legal definition of religion can transform into fear and repression. When secular law exerts its authority over minorities, it frequently identifies them as public threats.

It is no coincidence that many Islamophobes in the United States claim that Islam is a political movement rather than a religion, and therefore should not be protected under the First Amendment. Secular states often characterise minorities as violent threats because the state is focused on maintaining its monopoly on the use of violence.

In the contemporary context, the notion that religious groups pose a public threat has a disparate impact on Jews and Muslims. James Renton and Ben Gidley observed that.

The closest we come to it in history, in essence though not in scale, is the structure of the anti-Jewish surveillance and control apparatus of the Nazi state. My head was spinning. I thought about leaving for the UK. I could pick up our passports and take a plane and be out of the situation for good. I wanted to believe that, in time, our relationship could heal. Again, the difficulty of the moment seemed to pass. I visited family and friends in the UK a few months later, taking our son for his first birthday.

I returned to Turkey and not long after became pregnant with our second son. In the sweltering heat of Istanbul, our son would often toddle naked around our home. I overheard my husband joking with him one day about his future circumcision. I also realised children must be psychologically prepared by their adult carers to undergo circumcision. Boys may be nervous, but they also become objects of pride. Circumcision is seen as a rite of passage towards becoming a man. Attempting to prepare our son for circumcision felt like a betrayal of our compromise that our son would be free to choose for himself.

When he started to wake up crying, talking of nightmares of being cut, I objected more strongly to any discussion of the matter until he was older. I sought to reassure my child that no one would hurt him, that his baba had only been joking and would stop. He asked questions and my husband wanted to answer. When my husband asked me to research male circumcision to understand the benefits, I agreed. At one level, wishing the tensions within our family might be resolved, I was open to finding out whether the claims of benefits might be true.

But turning to the internet, what I found was an overwhelming amount of information supporting remaining intact. I began by bringing up the most obvious negative argument of resulting harm. My husband maintained it was far safer in medical clinics than the rural homestead in which he had been circumcised. I had seen a sepia-faded photograph, a large crowd of men surrounding him on what looked like a hot and dusty day to witness his circumcision as a young child. I suggested he read a Muslim site which contained some of the most extensive and detailed medical research I had found together with Islamic religious argument against circumcision.

He flatly refused. But I felt I was talking to a wall — he simply did not want to discuss it further. And circumcision, he said, was going to happen. Our marriage suffered increasingly and circumcision seemed to have cracked its foundations. I told my husband that I wanted us to move as a family to the UK, believing we could all be happier there. I wanted our sons to start school there, and my father was in growing need of home care.

The nearing threat of circumcision had become a pushing factor, too, though one I felt I could no longer safely voice. It was late summer Our eldest son was sleeping in his pushchair, while I carried my youngest, just a couple of months old, in a sling.

Through rarely seen tears he began to explain how important circumcision was, that it was about belonging, and that, in effect, if his sons were not circumcised, they simply would not be his. I replied there was so much more to being a father that created a sense of belonging.

I was disturbed by his emotions and the extremity of his statement, recalling the time he told me to take the baby and go. The second is linguistic theory regarding the meaning of the Semitic root H-T-N. Returning to the baffling biblical verse where Zipporah conducts a circumcision, upon completing the act, she twice asserts that someone is a hatan, meaning "bridegroom", of blood - but what exactly might a bloody bridegroom be?

Some scholars hypothesize that in ancient Hebrew, hatan didn't only mean "bridegroom" but "man undergoing circumcision. This double meaning of "someone undergoing circumcision" and "bridegroom" may seem bizarre. But in Arabic, the same root H-T-N carries both the meaning of circumcision and marriage. Zipporah's statement may attest that ancient Hebrew also used this same root to mean circumcision and marriage. There is physical support for this thesis: the peoples who spoke West Semitic languages roughly correspond to the ancient peoples who practiced circumcision.

Speakers of the East Semitic languages did not practice circumcision, and they don't use this root neither for marriage nor for circumcision. This tidy separation implies that circumcision arose after the West and East Semitic people split, but before the West Semitic peoples split again into the different language communities, including the speakers of Arabic and Hebrew. The way West Semites used H-T-N may hint at how the root took on the meaning of both "wedding" and "circumcision".

West Semitic languages don't use this root for just any marriage related words. Words of the root H-T-N appear in words for "bridegroom" but not bride, for "father of the bride" but not for "father of the bridegroom. Perhaps, at some ancient time, before Arabic and Hebrew diverged, weddings were events at which the father of the bride circumcised the bridegroom.

A study published in applying Bayesian regression models used by geneticists to determine biological family trees to determine the family tree of Semitic languages concluded that West and East Semitic languages split in about BCE, so circumcision probably came about after that date. The same study also concluded that Arabic split from the rest of the other West Semitic languages at around BCE, so circumcision probably came about before that.

Otherwise it is difficult to explain how Arabic and the rest of the West Semitic languages share the root H-T-N in relation to marriage. According to the same research, these West Semitic people from whom proto-Arabic speakers splintered probably lived in modern-day Syria.

Since the first archaeological evidence of circumcision is a tomb drawing from ancient Egypt dating to the 24th century BCE, it could have been introduced to the Egyptians by Semitic tribes as they expanded southward. So it seems that Jews circumcise their sons because their ancient Semitic forebears did, but why did they start circumcising in the first place?

Since circumcision was carried out on the sexual organ, and probably at puberty, we can assume they thought it would improve fecundity. Indeed, fertility is exactly what is promised Abraham by God in return for circumcision. But where would these ancient Semitic people get the idea that cutting their foreskin off would improve fertility?

The answer may be from their farming habits. Archaeological evidence shows that the farming of grapevines and olive trees was spreading through the region during this period. These plants require regular pruning to increase yields. Maybe some ancient Semitic sage came up with the idea that if pruning vines increases yields, why not prune penises too? If this is all true, Jews circumcise their sons because an ancient tribe converted an agricultural innovation into a questionable method to increase male fertility, and later a small group of their descendants bestowed this practice with a national meaning, which endures to this day.

Elon Gilad Mar. Updated: Apr. Get email notification for articles from Elon Gilad Follow.