this first, preliminary chapter I ask what kinds of meanings Jewish circumcision carried in the Roman context, and how those meanings were both appropriated and contested: first, by the Jews themselves; second, by the earliest texts of the Jesus movement (the writings of Paul and his followers, including the Gospel of Luke); and, third, by early gentile Christians seeking to grapple with the overdetermined Jewishness of their religious past. My basic argument, throughout this chapter, is that Jewish circumcision circulated as part of a cultural economy of signs in the early Roman Empire: the stereotypical function of circumcision supported, but also destabilized, Roman control and management of Jewish otherness. The cultural force of circumcision, and its ability to resignify in multiple contradictory ways among ancient Jews and Christians, must be understood in this Roman imperial context. Only by considering the cultural and political implications of Jewish circumcision can we begin to understand the implications of imagining this overcharged sign on the body of Jesus.
The increasing significance of Jewish circumcision among Roman authors as “the mark of Judaism” has been well documented in modern scholarship.3 Indeed, by the early empire, Jewish circumcision was already something of an overdetermined symbol in Roman literature, as a mark of cultural difference and general ridicule among Roman literate elites.4 For Horace and Persius, the superstition of the “clipped Jews” (Iudaei curti) is a social nuisance (Hor. Sat. 1.9.69–70; Pers. Sat. 5.185).5 Martial jealously contemplates the sexual prowess of foreskinless Jewish men (Epig. 7.30.5), while Juvenal bemoans the weird Jews who “worship the sky” and “by and by, shed their foreskins” (Sat. 14.99).6 The valences of circumcision in these writings varies considerably, from a sign of hypersexuality to cloistered superstition. The one commonality is that it signifies Jewish: “Jews did constitute an identifiable ethnic group in the varied social mosaic of the Roman Empire, and circumcision did serve as the chief mark of their distinctive way of life.”7 In fact, over the centuries spanning the rise of the Roman Empire—and the early spread of Christianity—Jewish circumcision became a part of a complex and labile cultural economy of signs: a system of symbols that made the otherness of provincial peoples at once distinct from yet legible to the controlling eyes of empire.8
I have already discussed, briefly in the Introduction, the particular mode of Roman imperial power: unlike that of “Hellenism,” the founding power of Romanitas was the containment and appropriation—but never erasure—of “other” cultures.9 A crucial component of this form of imperial control was a political culture based on knowledge of these others in Rome’s midst. Clifford Ando, in his recent work on Roman religion, has brilliantly inspected one sphere of Roman life in which such epistemological discourse functioned: when Romans courted the gods of their enemies (evocatio) or “translated” the religious beliefs and practices of other peoples (interpretatio), they were expanding the “empiricist” bases of their own imperial religion.10 Ando’s study, which stretches from Cicero to Augustine, suggests that the epistemological foundations of Roman society extended beyond what we might define as the narrowly religious: in war, politics, literature—“culture,” writ large—Romans prided themselves on their ability to incorporate others into a distinctly Roman body of knowledge.11
In order to be effectively incorporated into Rome’s epistemological structures, these other cultures could not be conglomerated into an amorphous “other,” but must remain distinctive and distinguishable.12 Roman imperial power, in part, operated through stereotype, “the primary form of objectification in colonial discourse.”13 The “effete Persian,” the “educated Greek,” the “painted Gaul,” and, indeed, the “circumcised Jew” all functioned to render legible, and therefore knowable and containable, the variegated other populations that made up the Roman Empire.14 Petronius, in the first century, casually and effectively deploys a host of such distinctive marks (as two of his characters argue about possible disguises to escape a sticky situation): “why not circumcise us,” sneers one character, “so we look like Jews? And pierce our ears, so we can imitate Arabs; and whiten our faces with chalk, so Gaul thinks we’re her citizens” (Petr. Sat. 102.14).15 The comical list of specific traits (and others in the novel’s scene) underscores the mastery implicit in Roman specular identification.
Stereotyping, like so many forms of epistemological colonial control, is simultaneously effective and unstable, the conveyer of ambivalent knowledge that makes empires work even as it undermines them.16 On the one hand, stereotypes operate through repeated assertions of optical dominance. Yet at the same time these various signs may not be obviously “visible” to the Roman charged with decoding and categorizing the provincial others under his gaze, or may be misleading. Suetonius’s tax-dodging Jew’s circumcision was not visible; the magistrate, relying on the word of (it seems) a snitch (delator), removed the old man’s clothes in order to prove what was otherwise not manifest to his juridical sight. Indeed, as Shaye Cohen has astutely observed, the stereotype of “the circumcised Jew” would routinely fail to mark out Jews in the ancient Roman city: first, because Jews were not unique in their circumcision; second, because clothing conventions dictated that male genitals were not routinely open to inspection.17 Stereotypes are inherently unreliable, Jewish circumcision included.
Circumcision fails in another sense, of course, in that it (ostensibly) only marks out male Jews: what would Suetonius’s judge open to inspection if the accused Jew before him were a woman? Later (as we shall see) Christians would seize upon this gender inequity to argue the essential incompleteness of the Jewish covenant.18 But in the Roman system of signs the strangely gendered nature of Jewish recognizability reveals not only the gaps in Roman specular authority but also the ways in which Rome’s cultural economy was itself deeply gendered, as are all colonial systems of stereotypes.19 By this I do not simply mean that imperial powers dictate the visible markers for “male” and “female,” although this is, to some extent, true in cultures that legislate codes of dress and comportment.20 I mean that stereotyping regimes mark cultural actors as either viewers or viewed, and draw on common tropes of “male” and “female” to encode those roles.
We should recall Joan Wallach Scott’s fundamental insight about gender systems: “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.”21 When the Roman Empire constructs a relationship of power based on specular prowess, it is creating a fundamentally gendered relationship with the provincials: the (male) Roman exerts his power over the (female) provincial through his masterful gaze, replicating the social norms of dominating male and dominated female as a basic unit of asymmetrical social interaction.22 The indisputable maleness of the Jewish sign of circumcision is, therefore, ironic and even paradoxical: by submitting to a sign on his male sex, the Jew becomes the feminized subject of the Roman Empire.23 The sign of maleness becomes a sign of feminine submission. In this gender reversal, circumcision signifies more, and less, than it is.
As a queered sign, therefore, circumcision (like all colonial stereotypes) is never accurate or straightforward. Stereotypes, however, do not need to be “right” to be culturally authoritative and do important political and social work. Suetonius’s story suggests the confidence that imperial Rome had in its specular authority: the man who, presumably, was otherwise unclassifiable is certified as “Jewish” and levied the appropriate tax. Of course, as historians, we have no way of knowing whether this man was really Jewish, or simply appeared so (or even if he was “really” circumcised, or those viewing his naked body merely agreed that he was so). We can’t even know if Suetonius really witnessed this scene, heard about it, invented it, or misremembered it. All we know is that this man’s body, at least as reconstructed by Suetonius, represented to an audience (of onlookers, or readers) the economic circulation of signs in the Roman Empire. Stereotypes become true because they work.
Significant in the promulgation of the power of stereotypes is the moment just before the man’s clothes are removed, his genitals exposed, his Jewishness confirmed. It is at this moment that the anxieties of imperial identity
