Send this to a friend Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Circumcision is the oldest of Jewish rituals and still going strong.
The rite has not been without its detractors or dangers. In the Maccabean era, Jews eager to make it in the Hellenistic world tried to have the operation reversed. The Romans regarded circumcision as a form of castration, which they found abhorrent, and denied Jews the right to circumcise converts, thereby restricting Jewish efforts to proselytize. Among the Conversos in Spain and Portugal ferreted out by the inquisition for preserving fragments of Judaism in secret were many who dared to circumcise their sons or themselves as adults. And in our day the Nazis checked for circumcision to identify Jews, a nightmare chillingly evoked by the recent French film Europa, Europa.