Berlin museum has circumcision exhibit

The first things you see when you enter the current temporary exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin are the life-sized, hyper-realistic sculptures of two naked men.

One is a dark-skinned Australian Aborigine, a plaster model made for anthropological purposes in 1939. The other is a 1998 sculpture in resin by the Canadian artist Evan Penny, depicting a thin man with very pale skin named Murray. 

Both are very visibly circumcised—and that is, as it were, the point.

The exhibit, which runs until March 1, is called “Snip It!” and its logo is an upturned banana with the end portion of its peel cut away. Get it?

The exhibit explores “Stances on Ritual Circumcision” in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts in the wake of bitter national debates sparked by a June 2012 court ruling in Cologne that declared ritual male circumcision to be “bodily harm.” 

Six months later, the German Bundestag overwhelmingly passed a law protecting male circumcision. (The exhibition includes video footage of the parliamentary debate before that vote.)

“Jews and Muslims alike felt threatened in their ability to practice their religious customs, whereas many critics of circumcision demanded state protection for the physical integrity of children,” exhibition co-curator Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and museum program director Cilly Kugelmann wrote in the museum’s journal. “Atheists bitterly challenged religious positions, pediatricians attacked the practice of circumcision as bodily injury and a traumatic incision, and legal scholars argued over whether religious freedom could be interpreted as a license to commit violence.”

The exhibit sketches the history of the practice. Ritual circumcision of boys dates back thousands of years, and today one third of the world’s men are circumcised, according to statistics quoted in the exhibit. These include 70 percent of men in the United States.

Snip It! focuses on both the ritual and the politics – as well as on the surprising ways the practice is dealt with in popular culture, including in TV sitcoms, memoirs, short films, and even on South Park.

On display are highly decorated knives and other instruments used for the brit milah, the ritual circumcision carried out on the eighth day of life that is a boy’s first rite of passage into Jewish identity.

Jesus was born a Jew, and paintings in the exhibit, including a lush scene by Peter Paul Rubens dating from around 1605, depict his circumcision. Some celebrate the Christ child’s Jewish birth. But other artworks demonize Jews and Jewishness, portraying circumcision as the first step of Jesus’ suffering, martyrdom, and ultimate passion on the cross.

The Muslim section of the exhibit, which focuses on the large Turkish community in Germany, is particularly interesting. Here, ritual circumcision takes place when boys are older, between four and 12. Photo essays, videos and other displays show how the youngsters are dressed up for the occasion in elaborate outfits, like fairy-tale princes. It is a major rite of passage for the family and community that clearly shares some of the celebratory aspects of a bar mitzvah.

SOURCE

Photo © Jüdisches Museum Berlin, by Oliver Stratz