Below you will find my translation of
MICHAEL WOLFFSOHN'S
"THE FORESKIN OF THE
HEART"
and to Professor
Wolffsohn's C.V.
The author and translator
retain their respective copy rights. If you wish to publish in a commercial
context you need to obtain permission of the author via this e-mail address.
----------------------------------------
Here the Link to the Archive for the on-going debate
LINK TO MICHAEL WOLFFSOHN'S ORGINAL GERMAN CONTRIBUTION TO
THE "CIRCUMCISION CONTROVERSY"
and to a follow up piece of his
And to Professor Wolffsohn's Home Lair
http://www.wolffsohn.de/
============================================
Michael Wolffsohn
Babtism in lieu of Circumcision? The Facts for
the German Debate.
Jewish identity does not depend on the foreskin.
The circumcision controversy is not a “German debate.” [1]
The “halacha”, Jewish religious law, is
unequivocal: an uncircumcised Jew is a Jew insofar as he is the son of a Jewish
mother. Although most German-Jewish and Israeli contributions to this debate
would make you believe otherwise, sheer verbal assertion does not replace
scholarship and the fact that several Jewish political and Rabbinical
representatives in Germany invoked the Shoah and threatened emigration if
circumcision of infants was prohibited, or an exception was not legalized in
Germany under its Basic Law, was a tactless as well as silly maneuver, especially
so in the light of a German democracy that has stood the test of time. That
“Germans, of all people”, as is argued, ought not to participate in the debate,
is an exclusion that I, as a German Jew, am unwilling to countenance
Are “German, of all people”
less democratic than we Jews, than I? Once again: I will name no names.
Whatever your opinion on the Cologne judge’s circumcision verdict: it
represents especially for us as Jews an opportunity to make the acquaintance of
and bethink Jewish ideas/beliefs, and then, with revivified inner strength, to
maintain – or to change them. We - as opposed to the Christians – ought to
recognize that it is especially this subject that ought to bring us together,
rather than it drive us apart.
The debate in Germany to date has deepened the
division! Have done with the furthering of the divide! Symbols and rituals are
bridges: that is, they are crutches on the way to god. Jews, Christians, and
even Atheists ought to ask this basic question: how many crutches does a person
need to reach God or the fulfillment of high ethical principles? Circumcision
is a ritual.
The Bible dresses belief in
and thoughts about God and the world in stories, commandments, and
laws.
Liberal readers, believers
as well, seek what is fundamental and what it means. They do not clutch at the
letter and the word, they search for the spirit of the law. The personification
of this liberal Jewish spirit was, indeed, the Jew Jesus.
In his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew
5, 18) he emphasized that he did not want to change a single comma in Jewish
law. However, Jesus wanted to lead that law and its practice back to its
spirit. Orthodox Jews (and Christians) understand the Bible literally because
for them it is God’s word.
Without destroying any bases for belief, one can
regard the matter in this fashion: God inspired certain human beings to utter
this word, they fixed it in the form of letters and then canonized it. But you
can also see it in this fashion: the Bible is the work of human beings. However
you regard it, it is a matter of fact that the biblical narrative about
circumcision – Brit Milah in Jewish, Khita in Islamic – is not as unequivocal
and unbroken as claimed.
The Biblical narrative from the Old Testament
about circumcision can be found in the story of Abraham. In Genesis 17, God
demands, even orders the progenitor to cut off his successors’ foreskins as a
sign of his covenant with the eternal.
This edict appears to lack any grounding.
However, you can actually
find it in the representation of the (not completed) sacrifice of Isaac
in Genesis 22. This story of Isaac’s sacrifice is the masterly literary
transcription of something that transpired in human history: the transition
from human to animal sacrifice. The basic thought of the sacrifice was to offer
God what one loved most.
Since development usually signifies refinement
through symbolization, the great majority of humanity was satisfied with an
alternative that conserved human beings and that was also a valuable
alternative.
A member of a rural society
that raised animals would typically sacrifice one of them — also dear and
valuable. The aboriginal thought of the human sacrifice underlies the idea of
circumcision. Circumcision is the substitute for the sacrifice of the body in
toto.
A piece of the man’s dearest bodily part, needed
for the breed to perpetuate itself, is sacrificed. Subsequent to Isaac’s
non-sacrifice the Bible neither speaks of further exchanges of words between
father and son, or Abraham and his wife Sarah.
Given the intellectual and literary genius of
the Bible poets this lack is unlikely to have been fortuitous, and its message
is easily discernible: sacrifices of one kind or another are not invariably
productive of family peace.
The basic thought appears to say: this custom
leads to quarrels. Even in Abraham’s family. And even Moses, the “greatest
Jewish prophet”, did not circumcise his oldest son as the Bible tells us in a
roundabout way.
According to Exodus 4, 24-26, the circumcision
was performed belatedly by
Zippora, Moses’ non-Jewish wife - a matter that
lands us, if we take the
Bible literally, in yet another halachine [Jewish
religious law] absurd problem, for Moses’ direct descendants were not Jews,
because, as cited above, only children born of Jewish mothers or who convert
are Jews.
Incidentally, the Bible
tells us without further ado that Moses’ second wife, as well, was not
Jewish, but a black woman or Ethiopian, a matter that was most displeasing to
Moses’ people.
In Joshua 5, 2-9, the Bible reveals to us that
the men who wandered around the desert for forty year were not circumcised. No
reason given, but one can and ought to be derived: this custom remained
controversial, and not only during the so-called - that is not actual -
historical occupation of the land that Joshua undertook (around 1200 b.c.), but
until the time of the Bible poets during the era of the second Temple.
For the writers of the Bible did not only
recount the Biblical myths, they also wove into the text the religious and
social tensions of their time. “Your ought to circumcise the foreskin of your
heart and no longer be obstinate,” it says in Deuteronomy 10, 16, and similarly
in 30, 6.
The message is unequivocal: circumcision - as a
command, not as a ritual – is purely symbolic, and is not to be taken
literally. The confirmation comes in Jeremiah 4, 4: “Circumcise
yourself for the Lord and remove the foreskin of your hearts.” Which is how we
most unexpectedly arrive at the bridge from the Jewish to the Christian
Testament, to Paul (Romans 2, 25):
“Circumcision is useful, if you follow the law;
but if you transgress the law, you will have become uncircumcised despite your
circumcision.” Oughtn’t Jews also be mindful of this variant of Paul’s: “Circumcision is something done to the heart by the
spirit and not by the word.” (Romans 2, 28). Circumcision does not make you
into a Jew, nor fasting laws, which many Jews obey, but obedience to its
spirit, ignored by all but a few. That is something that the great Jewish
Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah frequently complained about, and the Jewish
Pharisee Paul stands in the immediate tradition. (1 Cor. 19):
“It does not matter whether you are circumcised
or not, but whether you obey God’s laws.” That was not only Paul’s mission, but
also that of the rabbinical Talmudic one in the first century
A.D.
We know the result. Circumcision? Yes. However,
the Rabbiniate was split. One of their commentary stories has God and Abraham
discuss the pro and con of the Brit Mila, which of course was a reflection of
their internal discussion.
Moreover, it is historically confirmed that
until the second century A.D. converted Jews outside Judea did not need to be
circumcised. They were baptized.
Scholarship is divided on the question of
whether baptism replaced
circumcision – as one might assume. No, baptism is not an unchristian but
an older (and by no means solely) Jewish practice. One ought not to forget that
John the Baptist was a Jew and as a Jew in Judea baptized the Jew Jesus.
It was not until Emperor Hadrian’s 130 A.D.
prohibition of circumcision
(an edict that was not intended to be overly strict in its
application) that the custom of circumcision - which, as indicated, was
controversial within Jewry - became an inviolable law.
Yes, so much Jewishness is
part of Christianity and so much Christianity is part of being Jewish. Perhaps
insight into these facts will help to make the circumcision discussion a bit
saner as well as enhance Jewish and Christian self-knowledge, self-reflection
and self-determination, leading to a Jewish-Christian dialogue of informed
believers. Foreskin or not? Jewry has more to offer than that.
===========================================
[1] On June 26 of 2012 a Judge in Cologne, Germany
http://www.lg-koeln.nrw.de/
Presse/Pressemitteilungen/26_ 06_2012_-_Beschneidung.pdf condemned a German physician for violating
the German constitution’s guarantee of the inviolability of a person for having
circumcised - it was a four year old Muslim boy. But the judge did
not pronounce a guilty verdict nor administer punishment since the physician
was practicing within a tradition and was unaware of the conflict of those
constitutional guarantees with those guaranteeing freedom of religion, in this instance the Abrahamic religious practices of
Brit Milah
in Judaic and the
Islamic practice of Khitan
Thus ensued a conflict between
the Jewish and Islamic religious in Germany and the German legal authorities
that continues to this day. The chief Israeli Rabbi went to Germany
and asserted that the prohibition of the Brit Mila constituted a prohibition of
the fundament of Jewish identity and German Jews therefore would have to leave
the country. The Bundestag, the German parliament, responded quickly to calls
from the two dominant parties, Christian and Social Democrats, to pass a
resolution, endorsed by Chancellor Angele Merkel, in favor of an exception for
the practice
Yet the
controversy will not be resolved most likely until that
whatever exception the Bundestag passes goes before the German Supreme Court.
.[M.R.]
Translated from the German by Michael Roloff
============================================
Michael Wolffsohn is Professor Emeritus at the Bundeswehr University
in Munich.
Michael
Wolffsohn (17 May 1947–) is an Israeli-born German historian.
Wolffsohn was born in Tel Aviv,
in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and today is Israel. His parents were German Jews who fled in
1939.
In 1954, the Wolffsohns moved to Germany, settling in West Berlin. In 1966,
Wolffsohn began his studies at the Free
University of Berlin, obtaining a PhD in History in 1975. From 1967 to 1970,
Wolffsohn served in the Israeli Defence Forces.
From 1975 until 1980, Wolffsohn taught at the University
of the Saarland. Since 1981, Wolffsohn has served as a professor at
the Bundeswehr
University Munich as a professor in Contemporary History. His
major interests are Israeli
history, international
relations, and German Jewish history.
Wolffsohn has argued in favor of German patriotism and has
claimed that the crimes of National Socialism represent no reason why modern
Germans cannot be proud of their country. In his book Eternal Guilt? (1993),
he argued against the idea of Germans having to bear guilt for the Holocaust for
all time.
Wolffsohn has strongly supported Israel and has argued for greater Western
understanding and support of the Jewish state in face of what Wolffsohn regards
as fanatical Islamic extremism. Likewise, Wolffsohn has
supported the War on Terror and
the administration of George W. Bush. In May 2005, he was a leading
critic of the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Franz
Müntefering, who compared a group of American capitalists attempting
to purchase a German company to a “plague of locusts”. Wolffsohn noted that the
capitalists in question were Jewish, and that the Nazis had often compared Jews
to locusts, and labeled Müntefering an anti-Semite. Wolffsohn
wrote that as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, he was grateful to the
Americans for liberating his grandparents and that as a German Jew, he felt
deep shame over increasing German anti-Americanism.
More recently, Wolffsohn has been a leading critic of the novelist Günter Grass over
his disclosure about his membership in the Waffen-SS during World War II.
[edit]Work
§ Meine Juden—eure Juden, Piper
1997 ISBN 3-492-03637-6.
§ Die Deutschland Akte: Juden und Deutsche
in Ost und West : Tatsachen und Legenden, Ed. Ferenczy bei Bruckmann
1995 ISBN 3-7654-2730-6.
§ Frieden jetzt?: Nahost im Umbruch,
Ed. Ferenczy bei Bruckmann ISBN 3-7654-2707-1.
§ Eternal Guilt?: Forty Years of
German-Jewish Relations, Columbia University Press 1993 ISBN 0-231-08274-6.
§ Verwirrtes Deutschland?: Provokative
Zwischenberufe eines deutschjüdischen Patrioten, Ed. Frenczy bei Bruckmann
1993 ISBN 3-7654-2706-3.
§ Wem gehört das Heilige Land?: Die Wurzeln
des Streits zwischen Juden und Arabern, C. Bertelsmann 1992 ISBN 3-570-01622-6.
§ Spanien, Deutschland und die
"Jüdische Weltmacht": über Moral, Realpolitik und
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, C. Bertelsmann ISBN 3-570-00355-8.
§ Keine Angst vor Deutschland!, Straube
1990 ISBN 3-927491-32-2.
§ Ewige Schuld? : 40 Jahre
deutsch-juedisch-israelische Beziehungen, Muenchen : Piper, 1989ISBN 3-492-10985-3.
§ Israel : polity, society, economy,
1882-1986 : an introductory handbook, Atlantic Highlands, NJ :
Humanities Press International, 1987 ISBN 0-391-03540-1.
§ West Germany's Foreign Policy in the Era
of Brandt and Schmidt, 1969-1982: An Introduction, Peter Lang Publishing
1986 ISBN 3-8204-8616-X.
§ German-Saudi Arabian Arms Deals 1936-1939
and 1981-1985 : with an essay on West Germany’s Jews, Frankfurt am
Main : P. Lang, 1985, ISBN 3-8204-7490-0.
§ Die Debatte über den Kalten Krieg:
Politische Konjunkturen, historisch-politische Analysen, Leske + Budrich
1982 ISBN 3-8100-0368-9.
