New Questions Being Posed on Circumcision : Judaism: The ancient custom is being looked at differently in a society that increasingly asks whether religious ceremonies reserved for men are divinely inspired.

For more than 3,500 years, Jewish people have symbolized their covenantal relationship with God through the practice of circumcision.

At various times, from the reign of Antiochus IV in the 2nd Century, when circumcision was prohibited, to the Holocaust, when circumcision could bring with it a death sentence, many Jewish people have endured martyrdom rather than break the covenant.

Jews believe that God first commanded Abraham to follow the practice, as written in the Book of Genesis. But Jewish societies ever since have grappled with cultural issues that affect the way circumcision is understood and followed, according to new research published in the February issue of Moment magazine, an independent magazine of Jewish culture and opinion.

Today, in a society that increasingly questions whether religious ceremonies reserved exclusively for men are divinely inspired or have their origins in a patriarchal culture, new questions are being posed about the ancient custom that by physical necessity excludes half the population.

“For those Jews who are concerned about feminist issues, circumcision does pose an enormous problem,” Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, an assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford University, said in an interview.

Circumcision has been central to Jewish identity ever since Abraham, according to Genesis 17, was commanded by God: “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.”

Any male who does not undergo circumcision “shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

Throughout the Hellenistic and Roman ages, when public nakedness was widely practiced and the removal of the foreskin of the penis was considered an abomination, many Jewish people underwent a procedure known as epispasm, or circumcision in reverse, said Robert G. Hall, an assistant professor of religion at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

For a period of hundreds of years, some Hellenized Jewish men reacted to social pressures against circumcision by undergoing a surgical procedure that would create a foreskin on a circumcised male by surgically freeing the sheath of the skin surrounding the shaft of the penis, pulling the skin forward and dressing the wound carefully so that it would reattach to the glans.

Many Jewish leaders condemned the practice of reverse circumcision, and even the Christian apostle Paul, in I Corinthians, urged his Jewish converts to “not seek to remove the marks of circumcision.”

But the social pressures, from the possibilities of being closed off from citizenship or athletic competition to being the subject of public ridicule, were overwhelming for many Jews, according to Hall, the author of “Revealed Histories: Techniques for Ancient Jewish and Christian Historiography.”

Many of those who had the surgery did not understand the act as renouncing their Judaism, Hall said. Some still considered themselves part of the covenant because they were circumcised originally, and others treated the passage in Genesis as an allegory urging religious individuals to restrain their passions rather than as a command for a specific physical act.

In deciding whether to have the surgery, “people felt tremendous pressures both ways,” Hall said.

There are no similar pressures today to avoid persecution surrounding circumcision. Largely for questionable health reasons, most Americans have their infants circumcised. But new questions have arisen, from whether the procedure is painful to infants to the validity of limiting such a major ceremony to males.

One of those questions, according to Suzanne F. Singer, managing editor of Moment, is: “Why isn’t our daughter greeted and welcomed to her people with the same intensity as her brother?”

In an article in Moment, which argues that circumcision as commanded in the Bible performs the same anthropological functions as it did in other societies in Africa and elsewhere, Eilberg-Schwartz says circumcision plays a role in symbolically differentiating men and women.

“Circumcision ties together the themes of covenant, memory and the male body. To put it another way, remembering the covenant requires having the appropriate member,” said Eilberg-Schwartz, author of “The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism.”

Some Jewish people have tried to solve the dilemma by creating separate ceremonies for young girls, and such efforts to create new rituals should be encouraged rather than to give up on the brit milah , or circumcision ceremony, according to Rabbi Joel Roth, head of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly.

He noted the instruction from the Talmud to retain any commandment for which Jewish people made the supreme sacrifice of martyrdom.

“Jews died rather than commit idolatry because only the avoidance of idolatry could ensure our spiritual survival; and Jews died to circumcise their sons because circumcision ensures our physical survival,” Roth concluded in Moment.