“A Barbaric, bloody act”

The anti‐circumcision polemics of the Enlightenment and its internalization by nineteenth‐century German Jews

Abstract

English abstract: “Nothing will come of it; As long as the Jews remain Jews and will be circumcised, they will never become more useful than harmful in civil society,” Kant said. The German Enlightenment demanded the Jews to aban‐ don their religious identity expressions, most notably the circumcision. As a result of non‐Jewish discussions about rituals, the core role of circumcision was challenged for the first time in Jewish history by supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment movement. Jewish laymen condemned the “scary, unenlight‐ ened” traditional rabbis. Their anti‐circumcision campaign also found support among some Reform rabbis. Indeed, many Jews gave up the circumcision–but the existing resentment towards them did not disappear. The following arti‐ cle provides a case study in the genealogy of “secular” attitudes towards the body. The paper traces this genealogy from Early Christian positions on cir‐ cumcision through historic Protestantism towards discussions about the Jew‐ ish ritual in the Age of Enlightenment. The article wishes to highlight the con‐ tinued relevance of the matter and show how both having a “German body” and being part of the “German nation” were seen as incompatible with being circumcised–and are up to debate until the present day.