LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Circumcision: Jews
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The Jewish people have practiced circumcision since their beginning. Ritual circumcision is ... practiced by the Muslims. Aboriginal cultures in Australia have performed ritual circumcision since before the dawn of cultural memory. Many cultures in Africa, and other parts of the world, have long held this custom.
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Tying Jewish survival and identity to circumcision underestimates Judaism's power and ignores its purpose. It neglects the significance of Jewish ideas and ethical values. Is a man who is circumcised and is a member of a cult or commits immoral acts more of a Jew than an uncircumcised man who is committed to Jewish values and lives an ethical life? Is a circumcised atheist more of a Jew than an uncircumcised believer in one God? Having a body part removed has its effects, but it does not guarantee one will be more religious or more commited to Jewish values.
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The second view saw circumcision as a sign of a political or group identity. The rhetoric in which the accepted science of the late nineteenth century clothed its rejection of circumcision is of importance. It was intense and virulent, and never free from negative value judgments. One central example should suffice. The liberal Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1901), one of the standard ‘ethnological’ sources from the late nineteenth century for the nature of human sexuality, decried the ‘mutilation of the genitals’ among ‘savage tribes’ including the Jews.
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Unlike Christian baptism, circumcision... important it may be, is not a sacrament. Circumcision does not give a Jew his religious character as a Jew. An uncircumcised Jew is a full Jew by birth (Talmud Hul. 4b; Avodah Zarah 27a; Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh De'ah, 264, 1).
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Paul indicated that for a Jew to inherit the promises associated with the Abrahamic and New Covenants, he needed the promised "circumcision of the heart," something completely distinct from the "circumcision of the flesh." The "circumcision of the heart" is simply the "new birth."
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The Law and the Prophets consistently upheld the need for circumcision, and the intertestamental period did, too. Circumcision was one of the Jewish customs forbidden by Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Maccabees 1:48). Hellenizers who tried to surgically reverse their circumcision were considered to have "abandoned the holy covenant" (verse 15).
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