Five Things You Didn’t Know About Brit Milah

1. Multicultural: If you think this is only a Jewish or Muslim custom, think again: more than a billion men in the world are circumcised today, many of them neither Jewish nor Muslim, and many of them cannot explain why. The reason might not be religious, but cultural; a social custom passed down from generation to generation.
2. Originated in Egypt: According to Greek and Roman sources, the custom of circumcision began in Egypt, and all other peoples who practice circumcising their sons – yes, including the Jews – are peoples who “inherited” the custom from the Egyptians. Over time, the Jews transformed the act into an identity marker symbolizing the covenant with God.
3. Condition for residing in the Land of Israel: While other peoples in the ancient world abandoned the custom, the Jews actually strengthened it. According to testimonies from the Hasmonean period, anyone who was not circumcised was not allowed to live in the Land of Israel. It is told that Mattathias himself visited the communitites and ensured that every uncircumcised child underwent circumcision.
4. The Greeks weren’t into it: In kindergarten we were taught that the Greeks banned circumcision because they wanted to harm the Jews. Whether that’s true or not, they had additional reasons to specifically target the custom of circumcision. To the Greeks, who considered the ideal of beauty to be a supreme value, circumcision seemed like an act that disfigures and damages the body, like castration, and therefore Emperor Hadrian forbade Jews from circumcising – not necessarily out of religious hostility.
5. It used to be possible to “turn back the clock”: In the ancient world, not all of the foreskin was removed during circumcision, and Jews who wanted to assimilate with the Greeks could stretch the foreskin and hide the fact that they were circumcised. Among other reasons for doing this was the desire to participate in sports competitions at the gymnasium, where men competed completely nude. Apparently following these cases, it was decided to remove the entire foreskin. Today the only way to hide circumcision is through surgical means.

Bonus fact: Why aren’t Christians circumcised? Jesus was circumcised – we all know that – so why actually aren’t Christians circumcised? The first Christians, who were essentially Jews, were preoccupied with the question of whether non-Jews joining Christianity also needed to undergo circumcision. At first some did, but at some point they apparently understood that imposing circumcision on people in their 30s is not the most successful way to recruit new believers to your religion.

This article was originally published in Hebrew.

For more, watch Dr. Yael Escojido’s series at BAC, “Circumcision in the Ancient World” (in Hebrew).