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in the end cost him his life, actually wrote a letter to the Sultan, asking the favor to be allowed to stand as godfather at the circumcision of his son. When it is remembered that the godfather at a Turkish circumcision has to make a strong profession of Moslem faith and the answers as sponsor for the child, and must promise that the child will be faithful to the Koran and Mohammed, it will be seen that, however much the lower levels of humanity may quarrel over trifles, the heads of the people easily accommodated themselves to any existing circumstances. Friar Clemens might as well have let such a liberal-minded monarch live, as any of the existing churches could easily have got along with him.

      On the other hand, we have the remarkable tenacity to custom and habit in this regard, as exhibited by the Moslems, who, although having neither ordinance nor authority for its performance, either in their law, creed, or in any order from their prophet, still no more zealous circumciser exists than the son of Islam, who exacts from all proselytes the excision of the prepuce. Mohammed was circumcised in his boyhood, and, although he did not order its performance to his followers, he did not see fit to proscribe a custom so general to the Arabians, where the greater development of the prepuce probably renders circumcision a necessity. From the same reason it is easy to perceive why the rite has found such general observance among the Africans, who are as noted for long and leathery prepuces as for their slim shanks. One author, writing in 1772, in a work entitled “Philosophical Researches on the Americans,” treats the subject in a very intelligent manner. His arguments are both ingenious and plausible. This author looks upon circumcision as of purely climatic origin in its inceptive causes. From a careful survey of the natural history of man in his general distribution over the globe, he finds that circumcision may be said to be restricted to within certain boundaries of latitude, equidistant on both sides of the line. No circumcised people have ever inhabited northern regions, and the bulk of the circumcised races are found within certain climates. From this reasoning it is easy to see why the rite should lose its standing under certain climatic conditions, unless bolstered up by some religious significance, as it is equally easy to foresee why it should flourish elsewhere, even without any religious backing or ordinance. It is well known that in Ethiopia and the neighboring countries, excrescences and elongation of either the prepuce or nymphæ are as probable as the existence of an enlarged thyroid gland or goitre among the inhabitants of some of the valleys of Switzerland or of those of the Tyrol. According to the author of the treatise just quoted, circumcision would be nothing more than a remedy to repair the evils that a faulty construction of the human body developed in certain climatic conditions.

      With the Israelites it is observed as a religious rite, although they are not strangers to the physical benefits that circumcision confers upon them; the fact that even where no prepuce exists, as sometimes happens, the circumciser nevertheless goes on with the rite, being satisfied with drawing a few drops of blood from the skin near the glans, stamps the operation essentially as being a religious rite. Persecutions have signally failed to suppress its performance by those of the Hebrew faith. Beginning with the decree of Antiochus, 167 B.C., which consigned every Hebrew mother to death who dared to circumcise her offspring, they have not ceased to suffer in defense of their rite. Adrian, among other repressive measures, forbade circumcision; under Antonine this edict was still enforced, but he afterward recalled it and gave to the Hebrews the right of observing their religious rites. Marcus Aurelius, however, revived the edict of Adrian. Heliogabalus, who ascended the Roman throne in the year 218 A.D., was himself circumcised. During the reign of Constantine all the laws that interfered with Hebraic rites were renewed, with the addition that any Hebrew who should circumcise a slave should suffer death. Under the sway of Justinian, in the sixth century, the persecutions against these people were so oppressive that a Hebrew was not allowed to raise or educate his own child in the faith of his fathers. In the seventh century, the augurs having prophesied the ruin of the Roman Empire by a circumcised race to the emperor Heraclius, the persecutions were renewed against these unfortunate people. In this century, Hebrews refusing baptism suffered banishment and confiscation of all their property; they were obliged to renounce the Sabbath, circumcision, and all Hebraic rites if they wished to remain. About this period the success of the Saracens induced persecutions of the Hebrews in Spain, where their children were taken away from them that they might be raised in the Christian religion. In the fifteenth century they suffered the greatest persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. The persecutions above cited were national and governmental persecutions levelled directly at the Jewish nation and creed; the persecutions that they momentarily suffered at other times had no signification beyond the exhibition of popular spite and fury, but those above cited were moves calculated to extirpate the creed, if not the people, from off the face of the globe. If repressive measures are of any avail, circumcision as an Hebraic rite should now have no existence. Its present existence and observance show a vitality that is simply phenomenal; its resistance and apparent indestructibility would seem to stamp it as of divine origin. No custom, habit, or rite has survived so many ages and so many persecutions; other customs have died a natural death with time or want of persecution, but circumcision, either in peace or in war, has held its own, from the misty epochs of the stone age to the present.

      There is something pathetic and soul-appealing in contemplating the early Christians forced to worship in the catacombs of Rome, hunted like wild animals in their subterranean burrows, and then given the choice of making offerings to the heathen gods or being thrown into the arena as prey to wild beasts; so are we stirred when we think of the Spanish Jew, who had made Spain his home for centuries, being driven into exile in such droves that no country could receive them; we see them perishing of hunger by the thousands on the African coast, and dying of starvation on the quays of the ports of civilized Italy. That many, through all these trials, were forced to embrace other religions is not astonishing. In Spain apostacy was to no purpose, as the Inquisition could not be expected to split hairs in regard to an apostate Jew, when it sent the best of Gothic blood, raised in the Catholic faith, to the auto da fé or the scaffold—the rack respecting neither faith nor profession that fell into its clutches. In milder persecutions, however, he escaped by outwardly conforming to the demands of his oppressors and history tells us of the circumcisions secretly performed on the dead Jew, that the spirit of the law of their fathers might be carried out.

      In other cases, threatened exile, confiscation, or exorbitant taxation drove them to adopt every possible expedient to eradicate the sign of their Israelitism and make attempts to reform a prepuce. The first attempts in this line were made during the reign of Antiochus, when a number of Hebrews wished to become as the people about them who were not persecuted—fecerunt cibi præputia. This is no easy operation, and in later times by the aid of appliances, both in Rome and in Spain, they undertook to cause the skin to recover the glans. Martial, in speaking of the instrument used in Rome, a sort of a long funnel-shaped copper tube in which the Hebrew carried his virile organ, terms it Judæm Pondum, the weight of which, by drawing down the skin, was supposed in time to draw it down far enough to answer the purpose. The apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Corinthians, refers to these practices when he says, “Was any one called being circumcised, let him not be uncircumcised.” The operation of reforming a prepuce, or of obliterating the marks of circumcision, does not appear to have been a success.

      The writer had one experience that was interesting. On one occasion he advised circumcision for the relief of a reflex nervous disease, in a tall, athletic Austrian sailor from the Adriatic; although the nature of the operation was explained to the man, he evidently did not appreciate its full nature and importance until a sweeping cut with a scalpel left the excised prepuce in the operator’s hand. Most Adriatic sailors have sailed up the Bosphorus and are more or less familiar with both the Greek and Turkish nations; the latter they despise with gusto, “porchi di Turci” being the affectionate appellation they bestow on their national neighbors. No sooner did he perceive the real condition of affairs than he began to beat his head, saying that he was disgraced forever, as he never would dare to associate with his countrymen again, as he would be liable to be taken for a porcho di Turco; his frenzy increased to such a pitch that to spare any unpleasantness it was deemed advisable to replace the prepuce, which was done accordingly, the man making a tolerable good recovery, as far as the grafted prepuce was concerned. It required a secondary operation to overcome some cicatricial contraction, and, on the whole, he had a very serviceable prepuce; but, what was more to the

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