Written through Blood: The Moral Complexities of Jewish Ritual Circumcision

Abstract

Neonatal male circumcision has been practiced for centuries. Contemporary debate is dominated by those who claim circumcision is necessary for health reasons, and those who argue that it violates autonomy and inflicts harm. Jews are beginning to interrogate their ancient ritual and question whether it is a necessary violence, and whether this violence can be absolved?

The purpose of this dissertation is to consider the relationship between circumcision, violence, and morality. My research problem asks: Because circumcision is violent, does it necessarily mean that circumcision is immoral? Is there another way of conceptualising circumcision that thinks violence differently? In other words, can something that is violent be ethical? My questions are: 1. What is violence? What are the typical features and attributes of violence? 2. What is circumcision and why is it practiced? What moral commitments guide the practice? 3. How does Jewish ritual circumcision reveal the limitations and possibilities of conventional understandings of violence? What implications does Jewish ritual circumcision have for those who consider circumcision as violent and immoral?

To address these questions, I adopt textual method of analysis that is inspired by Jacques Derrida who defines text as a means of accessing the world. This perspective allows me to treat circumcision as a text. I look at three different versions of this text: proponents of circumcision, anti-circumcision activists, and Jewish ritual circumcision. My argument uses different perspectives on violence (such as Sigmund Freud and René Girard, along with Derrida), in addition to a range of Jewish scholarly texts (such as the Torah, Talmud and a Kabbalistic narrative). I argue that contemporary arguments about circumcision exhibit attributes of division, externality, and inflexible moral values, and my intervention into the debate seeks to explore how we can think of the violence of circumcision beyond opposition or externality. I argue that the Jewish ritual allows us to think of violence as generative, such that there is violence inherent in the making of text, and the making of bodies.