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Circumcision: Jews
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Circumcision was common, although not universal, among ancient Semitic peoples. The Book of Jeremiah, written in the sixth century BCE, lists the Egyptians, Jews, Edomites, Ammonites, and Moabites as circumcising cultures. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, would add the Colchians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, and Syrians to that list.
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"Circumcision is one of the commandments which, having been accepted with joy, are ever obeyed with joy, and, because the people gave their lives for them, are observed with steadfast loyalty" (R. Simeon b. Eleazar, in Shab. 130a). This refers to the martyrdom which the Jewish people underwent during the Hadrianic persecution, which was especially directed against
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Circumcision is performed by a mohel, an observant Jew who has been trained in the relevant Jewish law and surgical techniques. (In most traditions, circumcision performed by a physician is not valid even if a rabbi is present, although the Reform movement has begun to accept such circumcisions.)
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Circumcision was so important to Jewish self-identity and worship that faithful Jews were willing to die rather than abandon this physical reminder that they were God's covenant people. The books of Maccabees record their eventual victory. Circumcision and other Jewish customs were enforced and were emphasized as religious obligations for Jewish people.
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Later he more explicitly denounced the practice, rejecting and condemning those who promoted circumcision to Gentile Christians. He accused Galatian Christians who advocated circumcision of turning from the Spirit to the flesh. And in Gal 3:3 says "Are you so foolish, that, whereas you began in the Spirit, you would now be made perfect by the flesh?" He accused circumcision advocates of wanting to make a good showing in the flesh Gal 6:12 and of glorying or boasting of the flesh Gal 3:13. Some believe Paul wrote the entire book of Galatians attacking circumcision and requiring the keeping of Jewish law by Christians, saying in chapter five: "If ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing."
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The third reading of circumcision saw it as a remnant of the early Jewish idol or phallus worship. Thus J. H. F. Autenrieth saw circumcision as but a primitive act practised by culturally inferior peoples such as Jews and African Blacks. Autenrieth, by 1829 the Chancellor of the University of Tübingen, entered the discussion of the meaning of circumcision with a public lecture on its history. For him, as for others, circumcision was a surrogate for human sacrifice. The nineteenth-century British anthropologist John Lubbock saw such rites of sacrifice as a ‘stage through which, in any natural process of development, religion must pass’. But the Jews ... sacrificed their animals at the Temple as ‘symbols of human sacrifice … [which] were at one time habitual among the Jews’.
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