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Spinoza on Circumcision and Ceremonies

The May 2012 decision by a regional court in Cologne, Germany, that the circumcision of a four-year old Muslim boy ‘‘represents grievous bodily harm,’’ caused an outcry among German Jews and Muslims. They were rightly concerned that an overzealous concern to protect the human rights of vulnerable children had infringed on religious freedom. Moreover, the ruling demonstrated an almost unfathomable historical amnesia by the court and rights advocates. Not surprisingly, Spinoza has been mentioned by some in the context of these debates. In a review published in The Forward, Allan Nadler mocked the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who attacked the decision of the Cologne court through a reference to Spinoza, as one who wrote that circumcision had the power to sustain Jewish identity over the centuries: ‘‘That Spinoza—who considered the ritual practices of Judaism entirely archaic and often barbaric—is marshaled by an Orthodox chief rabbi in the defense of any Jewish rite is quite incredible, especially given what Spinoza actually had to say about circumcision.’’ Prominent modern Jewish philosophers, such as Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas, have attacked Spinoza more systematically on just these grounds. For them, Spinoza represents the stereotype of a self-hating Jewish intellectual who betrays the Jewish people as a condition of his acceptance to the enlightened Republic of Letters. They also accuse him of advocating the view that Christianity supersedes Judaism. In other words, a spiritual Christianity fulfills and ultimately replaces a carnal Judaism. It may be, as Levinas puts it, that Christianity is only the ‘‘penultimate’’ stage on the road to the