From Abraham to America

I had expected the figure to be far higher and decided to conduct an informal study. So for a couple of weeks, after swimming each day at the local pool here on Mercer Island, Washington, I looked around in the public showers of the men’s locker room. I saw not a single uncircumcised penis. In a Christian country like ours, where the Jewish obligation to circumcise infant males should be of negligible consequence, some large proportion of newborn boys have the tip of a highly sensitive bodily organ rudely snipped off. What compelling rationale could there be for this? Should more Americans consider letting their sons go uncut?

David Gollaher thinks so. In good, clear, pop-historical prose, he traces the story of circumcision from its earliest recorded appearance in Egypt, around 4000 B.C. Certain mummies from the period have been scanned by X-ray and found to bear signs of the surgery. A funerary bas-relief from 2400 B.C. shows priestly circumcisers doing the deed to young men, some of whom have to be restrained to keep them from fainting or running away. Under one scene a caption has the patient coaching the surgeon to “thoroughly rub off what is there,” to which the doctor reassures him, “I will cause it to heal.”

Still, it is unlikely that Americans would ever have embraced the surgery were it not for our Old Testament heritage. The patriarch Abraham was the first man ever to be commanded by God to undergo circumcision — at age ninety-nine and at his own hand, no less.

Over the 3,700 years that followed, Jewish commitment has occasionally faltered. Influenced by classical Greek culture, Hellenized Jews sought to hide or even reverse their circumcisions. (The objection had to do with modesty: In Greek eyes, the exposed glans made the Jewish male look as if he were in a nonstop state of arousal.)

Later Jewish religious radicals likewise sought to dispel the mystique of circumcision. Liberal German rabbis of the nineteenth century saw no reason that a Jew should not look like a German in every detail including his reproductive anatomy.

But out in the pews, ordinary Jews would have none of this particular reform. The ancient habit was retained, along with the Passover seder as the only two consistently observed aspects of biblical ritual among modern-day liberal Jews.

The rationale was never medical. As Maimonides, the medieval Jewish sage and physician, put it: “No one . . . should circumcise himself or his son for any other reason but pure faith.” But one of the earliest promoters of circumcision American-style, Dr. Norman H. Chapman, in 1882 called Moses “a good sanitarian” and endorsed the surgery as a “precautionary measure” against a variety of complaints linked with an irritated foreskin, including paralysis and spinal deformity. As a prophylactic measure, circumcision was introduced in 1870 in New York City by that “Columbus of the prepuce,” Dr. Lewis A. Sayre.

Since David Gollaher wants to make the case that Americans would be better off if we rejected circumcision, he focuses on the medical reasons for infant circumcision. As Maimonides anticipated, these reasons are pretty weak. The practice certainly offers a defense against irritation and inflammation of the glans. It probably gives some protection from penile cancer, since there is less penis there in which cancer cells may gestate. But penile cancer is an extremely rare condition to begin with.

Some research suggests that circumcised men are less vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease. It’s unclear, however, whether this benefit comes more from the operation itself or from good sexual habits like self-restraint and hygiene. Though Gollaher doesn’t say so, there also has to be a correlation between circumcision and socioeconomic status, and it figures that children from more privileged backgrounds stand a better chance of learning about how to avoid getting the clap.

Against these modest benefits is to be weighed the extreme discomfort of the infant boy. Anyone who has attended a brit milah (the Jewish rite of circumcision) will recall the baby’s screams as he’s carried back from the mohel (circumciser) to his mother. This is not gentle surgery, and Gollaher observes that in hospitals it is generally conducted without anesthetic.

Finally there is the diminution of sexual pleasure entailed by removing the protective sheath from the glans, ensuring that this once exquisitely sensitive skin will acquire a new leathery toughness from exposure to the wide world. (This effect was recognized by Maimonides, who saw it as an inducement to sexual moderation.)

At best, then, circumcision adds up to a medical draw. And as Gollaher points out, it’s a basic rule of medicine that a surgeon shouldn’t operate unless benefits outweigh risks. For circumcision opponents, this is pretty much all you need to know. Groups like NORM (National Organization of Restoring Men) and NOHARMM (National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males) have sought to turn public opinion against the surgery. Since 1971, the American Academy of Pediatrics has twice reversed its opinion. The latest view of its Task Force on Circumcision (1999) is that “existing scientific evidence supports potential benefits of newborn circumcision; however these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision.”

If the only benefits of circumcision were medical, then snipping off your newborn boy’s prepuce would indeed be an unjust welcome to the world. But in his descriptions of traditional attitudes toward circumcision, Gollaher assumes that these traditions are merely of antiquarian interest — ignoring the possibility that they may have something of lasting value to say.

Let us at least entertain the view in which, to put it simply, God cares about circumcision. After all, this biblical outlook is the only way of accounting for the fact that in our famously Bible-believing country, a peculiar practice like male genital cutting took hold. Only in his last two paragraphs does Gollaher gesture to this, the real reason that circumcision prospered here as almost nowhere else. For some three centuries, “through the forming of a nation and the trial by fire of the Civil War, American ideology [came to embrace] the idea that, in the divine scheme of history, America had succeeded Israel,” becoming in Lincoln’s phrase, God’s “almost-chosen people.” The true meaning of circumcision for America is then perhaps bound up with the meaning of this “ritual” for Abraham’s progeny. And what is that?

As illuminated in the Talmud and Midrash, circumcision points first of all to the need for sexual self-control. Traditionally, brit milah is performed in public, in daylight, as an indication to all that what a man does with his penis is not just his business. This level of meaning has not been lost on the folks at NORM and NOHARMM. Gollaher notes that in recruiting adherents, the two groups have done rather well among activist homosexuals, to whom the appeal of considering one’s choice of sex partners to be a purely private matter seems obvious.

Circumcision also has to do with nationhood. It’s a sign of unity with other men of your nation. It also has to do with forgiveness. Along with the Sabbath, circumcision is understood as an acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty. Abstaining from creativity one day a week reminds us of His lordship of the impersonal world of human interactions, while chipping off a bit of your most prized organ (well, after the brain, maybe your second-most prized organ) calls to mind His mastery of the personal world of human relations as well.

The meaning of circumcision can speak to non-Jewish Americans as much as to Jews. That day on which the patriarch Abraham took himself in hand, he was not alone. Tradition tells us he also circumcised the several hundred members of his extended household. Abraham recognized that a household must be united by common values, and the values of his household were crystallized in the mark of brit milah. Despite an ethnic heritage that was diverse in the extreme and today grows ever more diverse, America has likewise drawn strength from the common values of its people.

So, I don’t really think it’s too much of a stretch to say that American values, which overlap with biblical values to a remarkable degree, are manifested by the little mark at the tip of 60 percent of American penises.

David Klinghoffer, the author of The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy, is writing a biography of the patriarch Abraham.