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This chapter examines the subdeacons' offices for the feast of the Circumcision in France and their roles in the early Feasts of Fools. Peter of Corbeil, archbishop of Sens between 1200 and his death in 1222, may have been the first to compile a fully prescribed office for the feast of the Circumcision. He was also among those to whom Peter of Capua's complaint was addressed and a signatory to Eudes of Sully's decree. Peter of Corbeil was probably active in drafting the Paris reform. Although comparable Circumcision offices survive from Beauvais and Le Puyen-Velay, along with an office of the Epiphany from Laon, the Sens office was the first to be published in a fully annotated edition with text and music (1907). The Sens office's relative neglect in twentieth-century accounts of the Feast of Fools is thus particularly notable. This chapter discusses the activities of the Laon office of the Epiphany as well as the offices of the Circumcision in Sens, Beauvais, and Le Puy.

Chapter 3, an essay on the politics of circumcision in the contemporary Western Diaspora of Jews and Muslims, frames the debates about religious practice and ideas of health and illness and reflects historical conflicts about religious practices in the Abrahamic religions. The health exception is used to argue for or against what is in its essence a religious practice.

This chapter turns to private festivities and celebrations that take place within the family at home. These include marriage (discussed in detail in earlier chapters) and the days that follow, the birth of a child, circumcision of a boy, and the acceptance of a boy into a trade. This chapter looks at the types of entertainment employed—music, singers, and dancers, or Qur’an recitation and zikr—for men and women’s quarters, guests that visit the house or take part in processions, and the different foods and rituals that are observed.

This chapter focuses on four French cities where lay and clerical festivities overlapped during Christmas week: Toul, Tournai, Amiens, and Clermont. It first considers Toul's clerical feast of the Innocents that combined indoor liturgies with outdoor cavalcades, plays, and masked parades. It then examines a court case from Tournai, now in Belgium, that illustrates the more turbulent relationship between town and clergy at the feast of the Innocents after the cathedral summarily withdrew its outdoor festive entertainment. It also discusses the peaceful coexistence of the liturgical feast of the Circumcision and the secular feast of the prince of fools in Amiens. Finally, it analyzes the Clermont cathedral chapter's abolition of its Feast of Fools on December 5, 1450.

This chapter examines the “feast of the Ass” as part of the Feast of Fools during the mid-twelfth century. According to Pierre Louvet's account, the feast of the Circumcision was celebrated with an increasingly elaborate liturgy in the third quarter of the twelfth century in a few cities of northern France. In Beauvais, however, a further liturgical innovation was introduced. Before the beginning of first vespers on the eve of the feast, in front of the cathedral's west doors, the choir sang. An ass was then led into the church to the processional chanting of “Orientis partibus,” now known as the song (or prose) of the ass. This chapter considers the processional song of the ass in Beauvais and how the drunken prologue to vespers (or mass) has been associated with the liturgy of the Feast of Fools.

Although almost all Bedouin have followed Islam since early in its history, those who remained nomadic in the deserts of the Middle East found the religion barely accessible to them as an ongoing spiritual and psychological support, owing to their distance from Islamic religious instruction and institutions. For such support, they relied instead on primordial, often animistic, practices that had not changed much from the religious behavior of their pre-Islamic ancestors, and which could still be witnessed among pre-modern Bedouin down to the late 20^th century. This chapter identifies the similarities between these ancient pre-Islamic religious practices and those of the biblical Israelites, focusing specifically on their common attitudes toward sacrifice, the sacredness of blood, the role of ethics, and respect for taboos, oaths, and vows.

The chapter examines Derrida’s discussion of passwords and border crossings in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan. As his title suggests, Derrida is concerned with Celan’s relation to – and precarious situation at -- the frontiers of language. That the negotiation of these carefully patrolled frontiers requires a certain kind of linguistic performance is indicated by his title’s reference to Judges 12 in which those seeking passage across the river Jordan must not only know the difference between shibboleth and sibboleth but be able linguistically to perform it, At stake is not just the linguistic cultivation of the body, the shaping of its organs around the language(s) it has learned to speak, but the sometimes fatal inability of such organs to perform the differences they know and, in doing so, to move beyond a traditional conception of savoir toward a more bodily and culturally conditioned notion of savoir faire. Because it is a question in Celan of a poetic saying that is a doing and, moreover, a doing that, in the Freudian sense of “acting out,” does more than it means or know how to say, the linguistic borders the poet seeks to negotiate are also those between conscious and unconscious speech acts.

The chapter continues the reading of Celan’s poem “TO ONE WHO STOOD BEFORE THE DOOR,” shifting the focus from the “tropic of circumcision,” as Derrida calls it, to the figure of Rabbi Löw and the mystical tradition of golemic creation, a creative practice based on a certain performance of the divine Name. Celan conjures this tradition only to alter it from within, basing his own practice no longer on the properness of an unpronounceable Name but rather on a wound that will have gathered in its place. Here again Celan is viewed as a writer who is first and foremost a reader, and what he reads in this particular poem is the gathering wound that will have opened both in the body of the name “Kafka” and in the disease-ridden larynx of the writer. Celan gathers own his poem around this throttling silence in Kafka’s throat, reminding us of the way reading and gathering come together in the German verb lesen. Drawing his poetic reading of Kafka together in this way, Celan opens his language to the untranslatable violence of an unspeakable and irrepressible pain stuck in the throat, a pain that cannot simply be silenced or voiced.

This chapter analyzes the nexus of secrecy, the gift, and the apophatic in the thought of Derrida. Many scholars have weighed in on these themes, but I will reexamine them from the particular vantagepoint of the relation to Jewish mysticism that one may cull from the Derridean corpus. While my focal point is Derrida's understanding of kabbalah as an expression of polysemy and atheism, the implications of the ensuing analysis should put into sharp relief the theological appropriation of deconstruction attested in any number of theo-philosophies of transcendence that have proliferated in the course of the last few decades, many of them centered especially on the metaphor of the gift. For Derrida, Judaism is not primarily a demarcation of ethno-religious identity, but rather a literary trope that signifies what cannot be signified, the secret that characterizes the way of being human in the world. The secret is not a mystery that is inherently unknowable, but rather the unknowability that issues from there being nothing ontologically or metaphysically that is to be known, the secret that there is no secret. Judaism thus provided Derrida with an existential template by which he could articulate the pretense of the secret, the sense of being in place by having no place. The nexus of secrecy and the gift ensues from the fact that the bestowing of the gift occurs precisely as the impossibility of the gift presenting itself as a gift, an event that is totally heterogeneous to either theoretical or phenomenological identification. For the gift to be a gift, it must be free of economic calculability, but to be so free, neither the one who gives nor the one who receives can be conscious of the giving. The phenomenon of the gift may appear only within the horizon of its absence.

Paul’s attitude to the Law has been endlessly debated. Several scholars have argued in recent years that Paul’s critique of the Law only applied to Gentiles, and that he assumed its continued validity for Jews. But in fact Paul claimed to have a new revelation, which superseded the Law for Jews as well as for Gentiles. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision ultimately mattered. Paul may not have objected to continued Jewish observance of the Torah, but he undermined its significance to a great degree. He arguably posed a greater threat to Jewish identity than had Antiochus Epiphanes in the Maccabean era.

Interpreting sacred notions of the Hebrew Bible in a figurative sense was part of the hermeneutical manoeuvres of Early Christian writers. They proceeded by deliteralisation and metaphorisation. Paul’s notion of the ‘circumcision of the heart’, which is intimately linked to that of the ‘inner Jew’, was an attempt to internalise Jewish law-abidingness whilst abolishing its initial dignity. The chapter develops a two-phase model behind Paul’s metaphorisations. First the initial values (Jewishness and ritual circumcision) are projected onto a newly created target, namely inwardness. Subsequently, the original value is abolished. This process can be termed a value-shift, in contradistinction to similar instances which should be seen as value-extensions the source value being preserved and merely extended. . Corollaries of value-shift and value-extension are duty-shift and duty-extension. From a socio-religious perspective, metaphorisation goes along with a widening of the religious community. In the last resort, however, it reveals itself to be a moment in the genesis of new theological and even philosophical concepts such as inwardness as the locus of redemption.