Holy Curiosity: Circumcision as a Rhetorical Concept in a Bohemian Catholic Sermon from the 18th Century
Holy Curiosity: Circumcision as a Rhetorical Concept in a Bohemian Catholic Sermon from the 18th Century

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the topic of Jewish circumcision and other birth rituals in a narrow segment of three Christian literary treatments from the early modern period that are intertextually connected. Analyzing three literary genres, the paper focuses on a festive sermon by the Czech Catholic priest Štìpán František Náchodský from the beginning of the 18th century, an ethnographic description by the Christian Hebraist and Calvinist scholar Johann Buxtorf, and a polemical text by the Jewish convert to Catholicism Ernst Ferdinand Hess from the end of the 16th century. The connecting material on the basis of which the topic of circumcision is presented as a rhetorical concept, however, is primarily Náchodský’s sermon. Direct quotes from individual passages describing the circumcision celebration have completely different senses in various contexts and show how an early modern preacher could change their meaning through ellipses, alterations, and the overall framework. The paper shows how the description of circumcision was recast into homiletic works that had a much greater range of reception, and what role it may have played in the formulation of Baroque piety and in the depiction of the contemporary Jewish community in the Bohemian lands.

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