Why aren't Jewish women circumcised? This improbable question, first advanced by anti-Jewish Christian polemicists, is the point of departure for this wide-ranging exploration of gender and Jewishness in Jewish thought. With a lively command of a wide range of Jewish sources-from the Bible and the Talmud to the legal and philosophical writings of the Middle Ages to Enlightenment thinkers and modern scholars-Shaye J. D. Cohen considers the varied responses to this provocative question and in the process provides the fullest cultural history of Jewish circumcision available.

Shaye J. D. Cohen is Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (California, 1999), From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (1987), and Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (1979).