I saw a Hungarian film (think it was Hungarian) where it was part of the story; they waited until the child was at or near puberty. Ouch. That was their custom.
I understand your points, but if uncircumcized men aren't scrupulously clean, there is an unpleasant odor.
Christ didn't reverse it. One of the apostles did for gentiles. I think probably the Jewish Christians still practiced it, but then the Jewish Christians started to disappear, why I'm not sure, assimilation, killed, don't know.
I hadn't read about the degree of snipping. That would be of consequence, but then why do it at all? To set them apart with a physical mark is all I can see to it. It isn't easy to discuss this, and has caused minor problems in the family. My daughter had a boy by a man of Cherokee? descent who for a time was raising the other one, and he was upset that the one wasn't circumcized.
I must honestly tell you I don't know what I would do now. When I had my son circumcized, it didn't have anything to do with religion, I signed the paper, my uncircumcized husband (ex now) didn't say anything one way or the other. If it is going to be done, it's better to be done to a baby, but then they should at least use anasthesia.
Looking back on things, you wonder about a lot of things. All or most Muslims are circumcized; no doubt they borrowed that from the Jews they were in contact with at the time; they borrowed other ideas from Christians. Who knows?
I'm horrified by female circumcision which is even worse. It grossed me out so bad when I saw it on tv documentary, I almost fainted and had to turn it off. I'd probably be grossed out by a male circumcision, too.
It's curious if there will be a backlash against the Jews who will refuse to abandon the practice if the medical establishment and public opinion goes further against it.
Just an odd factoid I read somewhere, if a Jewish mother lost two boys due to hemophiliac bleeding (which they didn't know about at the time), the next boy child was granted a reprieve.
The reason it was switched among Jews from just snipping the tip to radical circumcision is because Hadrian banned circumcision after the Bar Kokhba rebellion (or maybe after the Kitos War, I forget exactly) and the ban was not lifted until the reign of Marcus Aurelius (if I recall my history correctly).
So, many Jewish men were able to pass themselves off as Hellenic (say in the baths or the gymnasia), because if you didn't get a good look you couldn't tell exactly. The shift to radical circumcision was to ensure that Jewish men could not do that; that there was no way to make it appear as if they were uncut.
As the Byzantine Christians took power and persecuted the Jews even more intensely than had the Romans, the custom became all but universal for the same reasons. So one could not hide it. And that has more or less remained the custom to this day, although there have been periodic movements to go back to the less invasive procedure.
The point of it of course was to seal the covenant of Abraham, and it was not thought that you had to rip the whole prepuce off in order to do that. Even with the shift to radical circumcision it was not a matter of the covenant so much as a cultural move to distinguish the Jewish community from their persecutors.
I don't know the precise history with regard to Islam, though it's worth noting that it's not in the Koran but rather in one of the Hadith, which are alleged sayings of Mohammed (probably made up) not in the Koran.
PS. As for backlash against Jews, I really rather doubt it. In Europe there's no backlash for that reason, and in Britain where circumcision had become as prevalent as in the United States before the war it's plunged to a trivial 2-3% of births, just Jews and Muslims. But there's no backlash against them it seems to me; people just accept it for what it is.
Even I who am so intensely hostile to it would let that be if it came to it. Yeah, it'd be nice in my view if everyone came to think of it as I do, but I know it won't happen for religious reasons, at least not in my lifetime. What I'd like to see is a process play itself out as in Britain, where once the tide turned the practice plunged to nonexistence except for those groups that have it as a religious tenet.
I'd rather they reinterpret their tenets, personally, but that's for them to decide. For the Jews in particular it would merely require a return to biblical practices, to at least make it a far less radical practice. I would not persecute the groups or anything like that, because that would be replacing one 'wrong' (in my view) with a much greater one.
My intense hostility is reserved for the elective, non-religious practice.
Kill two; get one free?
Do you think it hurts less on an infant?
I read somewhere that it was once (still?) believed that the infant felt no pain. I doubt very much that that's true.