Brit milah

Brit milah, the Jewish covenant of circumcision, is a recurring touchstone in E. L. Doctorow's City of God, a novel that circles the question of what it means to belong to a people and to a faith. The rite appears at the novel's theological and personal crossroads: it is the ancient sign that separates Jew from gentile, the very obstacle that the apostle Paul removed for his gentile converts, and the bodily mark that Thomas Pemberton—an Episcopal priest on the verge of converting to Judaism—discovers he has carried since infancy. In a book obsessed with the visible signs of the sacred, from a stolen brass cross to a Torah scroll, brit milah stands as the most intimate and irreversible of signs, inscribed not on a building or an object but on the flesh itself.

The Rite in Sacred History

The novel reaches back to the origins of the covenant to explain its power. In a passage that reads like a midrashic retelling of early Christian history, the narrative recalls how Paul, after his vision on the road to Damascus, preached that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. His fellow Jews were largely unconvinced, but gentiles listening at the back of the synagogue received him more warmly. The obstacle was circumcision: grown men were afraid of the knife, "as who could blame a grown man." Paul's solution was to declare that gentiles did not need to be circumcised to become Jews—"That was it, right there." The novel presents this as the hinge of history, the moment when the new faith split from the old and the gentiles followed Paul "bag and baggage." Brit milah, in this telling, is not merely a ritual but the very fault line along which Christianity and Judaism divided, the bodily sign that Paul's innovation rendered optional and thereby changed the course of the world.

Pem's Conversion and the Body's Test

For Thomas Pemberton, the rite becomes a personal question of faith and body. As he prepares for conversion, Pem and Sarah Blumenthal agree that his preconversion studies should be conducted by a rabbi other than her—he meets weekly with a former colleague of hers at Temple Emanuel. The arrangement keeps the intimacy of their relationship separate from the rigor of his instruction, but the bodily demands of conversion cannot be outsourced. Pem is profoundly grateful to have been circumcised as an infant. "Jesus," he says, "that would be one hell of a test of the faith." The exclamation is characteristic: even in gratitude, he reaches for the name of the Christian savior he is leaving behind. The novel notes that another conversion ritual is less assiduously held to by the Reformed—a ritual bath or immersion in a mikvah—but Pem wants to do that too. "In front of three witnessing rabbis you duck yourself naked in the pool, and when you come up you're reborn as a son of Abraham. As a dissolving Christian I find that comforting," he says. "Has a nice Baptist quality." The remark captures the paradox of his position: a man dissolving one identity while constructing another, finding comfort in the very physicality that his old faith had spiritualized away. The mikvah, like brit milah, is a rite of the body, and Pem embraces both as the price and the gift of becoming a Jew.

The Cross and the Covenant

The novel sets brit milah against its central mystery: the theft of the brass cross of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and its appearance on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. The cross, an eight-foot hollow brass object, is discovered by Pem lying flat on the black tarred roof of the synagogue, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, tarnished and shining in the autumn sun. The detective who investigated the theft had predicted the thieves would hit a synagogue for the Torah instead, because a handwritten scroll would bring a minimum of five thousand dollars, whereas the cross was "scrap metal" with a book value of zilch. The novel thus juxtaposes two sacred objects: the Torah, the handwritten scroll of the covenant, and the cross, the instrument of Christian sacrifice. Brit milah, the sign of the covenant that the Torah commands, stands between them—older than both, the mark that the cross's theology sought to supersede and that the Torah's law still requires. Pem's journey from the stolen cross to the mikvah and the covenant of circumcision traces a movement from one sacred economy to another, from a faith of sacrifice to a faith of the body's permanent inscription.

Sacrifice and the Mark of Belonging

The novel deepens the meaning of brit milah by connecting it to the ancient logic of sacrifice. In his remarks to the bishop's examiners, Pem invokes the scholar Burkert, who investigates the origins of the sacred and offers the image of the lizard that leaves its tail in the mouth of the predator, the fox that chews off its foot to escape the trap. "In that programmed biological response is the idea of the sacrifice. You give up a part to save the whole." Ancient myths abound in which human beings flee monsters and escape only by sacrificing pieces of themselves to divert or slow down the pursuit; Orestes gives up a finger. Brit milah is the oldest and most intimate instance of this logic: the giving up of a part of the male body as the price of belonging to the people of the covenant. The novel thus reads circumcision not as a primitive holdover but as the archetypal sacrifice, the model for every later offering of a part for the whole. Pem, who has given up his priesthood, his church, and his Christian identity, understands this economy from the inside. His gratitude for his infant circumcision is the gratitude of a man who discovers he has already paid the price of entry.

The Wedding and the New Life

The rite's meaning culminates in Pem's wedding to Sarah Blumenthal, where the language of covenant and body converges. At the reception, Pem grasps the cordless microphone and addresses the assembled guests. "Friends," he says, "I will not speak of my happiness, of my prayerful thanks to the Lord, may His name be blessed, that my dear love Sarah Blumenthal has found me worthy of her attention. You can believe that I will passionately live what's left of my life to earn what she has given me. I will soon be a Jew. I will find the joy of a hallowed life." His final act as a Christian and ex-Christian priest is a prayer that addresses God in "one of our intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills," acknowledging the monstrous evils of the century and the "exponential murder of souls" that has brought God into disrepute. The prayer is a kind of anti-sermon, a farewell to the Christian God who has been "bought and embraced like the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker" by the murderous and the righteous alike. In this context, brit milah is the sign of a different relation to the divine—not the cross that can be stolen and displayed, not the God who can be used at will, but the mark that cannot be removed, the covenant written on the body itself. Pem's conversion, sealed by his infant circumcision and his willing immersion in the mikvah, is his answer to the question that haunts the novel: how to belong to a people and a faith after the horrors of the century have discredited every easy claim to the sacred.