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