Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism.

• Author: Steinberg, Naomi
• Position: Review

By LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1996. Pp. 262. $42.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

This volume asks how and why circumcision came to be so central to Judaism. It chronicles the history of this ancient ritual and its symbolic meaning in light of what the Rabbis between 70-555 C.E. thought they were accomplishing through circumcision. Here Hoffman distinguishes between the unofficial public meaning shared by the participants, which changes over time, and the official meaning of the brit milch, the covenant of male circumcision, whose authoritative meaning emphasizes initiation into the covenant between God and the people of Israel.

In his first chapter, Hoffman explains that he became interested in the topic when researching "The Jewish Life Cycle." His investigations led him to conclude ". . . my whole point is that the Rabbis made Judaism inseparable from the male lifeline. Like it or not, they had no idea of a female lifeline" (p. 24). Hoffman develops this thesis by interpreting that for the post-exilic priesthood, circumcision was a birth ritual for males that insured the fertility of the Israelites. In the rabbinic period, circumcision was no longer a birth ritual, but an induction ritual, the Rabbis having come to this reinterpretation in reaction to the nascent Christian community and its emphasis on the salvific role of the blood of Jesus. As a result, the blood of circumcision came to symbolize the saving powers of the covenant between God and the Jews, and wine came to symbolize blood. In Hoffman's opinion, a circumcised child received "an oral transfusion of wine as blood for the child" (p. 91). Hoffman concludes then that the importance of circumcision lies not in the cutting of flesh but in the shedding of blood and that the salvation wrought through circumcision blood officially had eschatological meaning; it was a guarantee of life in the world to come, a meaning lost by the Middle Ages.

Hoffman also tackles the gendered significance of this ritual. He maintains "that circumcision's primary meaning was social, not biological" (p. 80). The blood of circumcision came to be opposed to menstrual blood. He concludes: "But the essence of my argument is that precisely because rabbinic Judaism was a religion of the body, men's and women's bodies became signifiers of what the Rabbis accepted as gender essence, especially with regard to the binary opposition of men's blood drawn during circumcision and women's...