God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Blended with the virulent antisemitism of the West, artistic representations of Christ’s circumcision often portrayed a chubby white baby Jesus as the self-sacrificing victim of the bloodthirsty, hooked-nosed Jewish circumcisers surrounding him. Frequently garbed in the imagined vestments of the ancient Jewish priesthood, or topped with the distinctive peaked hat that had become a conventional, malevolent marker of ‘Jewishness’ in European art, these men are regularly depicted crowding around the child, leering at the large blade menacingly positioned at his tiny genitals.42 In some works, the ugly caricaturing of Jewish ritual was further embellished by the deliberate mis-gendering of the circumciser as a hideous, villainous woman. In the masculinist world of medieval and Renaissance Christianity, circumcision was still closely associated with castration. The Jewish ‘mutilation’ of the genitals was therefore cast as a feminizing, sexually abusive wound, fating little boys to an unmanned adulthood.43