Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?

Abstract

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.

Genital Cutting as Gender Oppression: Time to Revisit the WHO Paradigm

“…Thus, within Judaism, the rite of circumcision institutes a separation, not only between circumcised and not-yet-circumcised boys, but between "the set of those who can be subjected to circumcision (boys and men, regardless of whether they are children or adults) and those who cannot (girls and women)" (p. 81). As Shaye Cohen (1997) argues, it is precisely this exclusion of females from the rite of genital cutting that reflects their lower status within the patriarchal social structure of rabbinical Judaism (see also Kimmel, 2001;Glick, 2005;Benatar, 2008). The fact that, in FGC-practicing societies, the rite of genital cutting does not exclude females is therefore significant.…”

“…Although almost every society that practices FGC also practices MGC in tandem-meaning that girls are not singled out for genital cutting-the inverse is not true. Instead, there are many societies that ritually cut the genitals only of boys, precisely on account of their gender (Cohen, 1997(Cohen, , 2022DeMeo, 1997;Abdulcadir et al, 2012). Insofar as being subjected to a medically unnecessary, non-consensual act of genital cutting is a moral violation in its own right, boys in these societies are discriminated against in the sense that, due to their gender, only they lack legal protection from such cutting (Möller, 2020).…”

Is Circumcision “Necessary” in Islam? A Philosophical Argument Based on Peer Disagreement

“…However, the WHO definition includes some forms of ritual female genital cutting (FGC) that are less physically substantial than the male circumcisions carried out within the same families, raising questions about sex-based categorizations (O’Neill et al, 2020 ). According to one interpretative tradition, girls within the practicing subsets of Muslims are considered equally “worthy” of being circumcised as are boys (albeit by means of a less intrusive procedure), thus marking a break with the older Jewish covenantal ritual from which girls are, by contrast, excluded--arguably due to having a lower status than males within classical rabbinical Judaism (Shweder, 2021 ; Cohen, 1997 ). In the case of Islam, the forms of FGC in question include so-called ritual “nicking, pricking, or partial removal of the clitoral prepuce or hood”—the most common forms of FGC in some “parts of South and Southeast Asia,” where they are carried out, alongside male circumcision, for religious reasons within some sects of Islam (Bootwala, 2019 ; Dawson et al, 2020 ; Duivenbode & Padela, 2019 ; Earp et al, 2021 ; Earp, 2022b ; Rashid et al, 2020 ).…”

Female genital mutilation and male circumcision: toward an autonomy-based ethical framework

“…Jewish women were Jewish by birth, but their Jewishness was assumed to be inferior to that of Jewish men." 120,121 Thus, as David Benatar has pointed out, "half of the Jewish people lack the physical mark that is widely associated with Jews. One would have thought that egalitarians would want to rectify this oversight."…”