Writing on the Phallus: Midrash and Circumcision

Paul, as is well known, was to win the field in Christianity, just as Christianity was to win the field in the western world. The true cultural issue dividing Christians from Jews by the second century was the significance of bodily filiation, membership in a kin-group, for religious life. As long as participation in the religious community is tied to those rites which are special, performed by and marked in the body, the religion remains an affair of a particular tribal group, “Israel in the flesh.” ^[51] The fraughtness of circumcision (almost obsession with it) of all of these people is not to be found in the difficulty of the rite to perform but in the way that it is the most complete sign of the connection of the Torah to the concrete body of Israel. People of late antiquity were willing to do many extreme and painful things for religion. It is absurd to imagine that circumcision would have stood in the way of conversion for people who were willing to undergo fasts, the lives of anchorites, martyrdom, and even occasionally castration for the sake of God. The aversion to circumcision must have a different explanation, a cultural one.^[52]

In early Christian writings from Paul on, there is a parallelism between the allegorical form and the content of hermeneutics. Thus, just as the materiality of the language is transcended in the spirituality of its interpretation, so also the materiality of physical, national, gendered human existence is transcended in the spirituality of “universal” faith. In midrashic interpretations of circumcision as well, there is a perfect homology between form and content of the interpretation. The midrashic interpretations of circumcision focused strongly, of course, on the physical rite itself and the inscription that it made on the body. In their writings, this mark of natural or naturalized membership in a particular people is made the center of salvation. These texts, in their almost crude physicality, register a strong protest, I suggest, against any flight from the body to the spirit with the attendant deracination of historicity, physicality, and carnal filiation which characterizes Christianity. The following text is exemplary. The role of the materiality of language and the significance of the physical body of σάρξ are both captured together in one image:

All Israelites who are circumcised will come into Paradise, for the Holy Blessed One placed His name on Israel, in order that they might come into Paradise, and What is the name and the seal which He placed upon them? It is ShaDaY. The Shin [the first letter of the root], he placed in the nose, The Dalet, He placed in the hand, and the Yod in the circumcision. (Tanhuma Tsav 14; Wolfson 1987a, 78)

In contrast to Paul and his followers, for whom the interpretation of circumcision was a rejection of the body, for the Rabbis of the midrash, it is a sign of the sanctification of that very physical body; the cut in the penis completes the inscription of God's name on the (male, Jewish) body. The midrash speaks of circumcision as a transformation of the body into a holy object. It constitutes, moreover, an insistence (typical of midrash) on the meaning of the actual material form, the shapes of letters and sounds of language. It is this insistence—and not “playfulness,” as in some currently fashionable accounts—that leads to midrashic punning and seeking of significance in such very concrete, physical, material features of the Hebrew language. The penis—not phallus—in this text constructs precisely the refusal of logos. The insistence on the literal, the physical, is a stubborn resistance to the universal, a tenacious clinging to difference. At the same time, of course, the very claim that only the male, Jewish body has inscribed on it the full name of God reveals the real and present danger of both the gender and “racial” politics of commitment to difference, a theme to which I will return.

By substituting a spiritual interpretation for a physical ritual, Paul at one stroke was saying that the literal Israel, “according to the flesh,” is not the ultimate Israel; there is an allegorical “Israel in the spirit.” The practices of the particular Jewish People are not what the Bible speaks of, but faith, the allegorical meaning of those practices. It was Paul's genius to transcend “Israel in the flesh.”

Thus, we see that the very same discursive moment, found in both Philo and Paul, which produced the devaluation of the ethnic body—Jewish—as the corporeal, produced also the devaluation of the gendered body—female—as the corporeal, and this is how the Universal Subject becomes male and Christian. For Paul, the “Jewish Question” and the “Woman Problem” were essentially the same, although the possibilities for “solving” them that he could imagine were substantially different.