No abstract

Who was a Jew in antiquity? How was “Jewishness” defined? How did a non-Jew become a Jew, and how did a Jew become a non-Jew? In their minds and actions the Jews erected a boundary between themselves and the rest of humanity, the gentiles, but the boundary was always crossable and not always clearly marked. A gentile might associate with Jews and observe Jewish practices, or might “convert” to Judaism and become a proselyte. A Jew might avoid contact with Jews and cease to observe Jewish practices, or might deny Judaism outright and become an “apostate.” Or the boundary could be blurred through the marriage of a Jew with a gentile.

Classical rabbinic Judaism has always been, and in many circles still is, a male-dominated culture, whose virtuosi and authorities are males, whose paragon of normality in all legal discussions is the adult Jewish male, whose legal rulings in many areas of life (notably marriage and ritual observance) accord men greater privilege than women, and whose values define public communal space as male space. Within this culture women are unable to initiate a marriage or a divorce, are obligated to dress modestly in public and to segregate themselves behind a partition in synagogue, and are excluded from the regimen of prayer and Torah study that characterizes, and in the rabbinic perspective sanctifies, the life of Jewish men. In this culture women are socially and legally inferior to men.Of all the rituals from which women are excluded by rabbinic culture, the exclusion from circumcision is at once the most obvious and the most problematic. What sets circumcision apart from all the numerous other ritual practices that are observed by men but not by women is its status as a boundary marker.

According to rabbinic law, from the second century to the present, the offspring of a gentile mother and a Jewish father is a gentile, while the offspring of a Jewish mother and a gentile father is a Jew (albeit, according to the Mishnah, a mamzer, a Jew of impaired status).