Foreskin, the play: Circumcision as art for a Turkish playwright

by IGAL AVIDAN

Image in Istanbul of an 18th century circumcision ceremony of Sultan Ahmed III’s sons.

A quiet New Year’s Eve in the maternity ward of a Berlin hospital. The doctor, a woman of Turkish descent, pours sparkling wine for herself and a blonde nurse. But the quiet ends when a fit, young, undershirt-clad macho man arrives pushing his pregnant wife Ela in a wheelchair. His name is Abraham B. Schneider. Pronounced in German, B. Schneider comes out as Beschneider, meaning “circumcisor.”

His brother-in-law, an elegantly dressed real estate mogul named Mohammed Habibi Nassir, enters with them. Before the baby boy is even born, both men are vigorously insisting that he must be circumcised, after being pressured to do so by Ela’s domineering Turkish mother Elif. When the only German family member, Christian Eichelmann [another pun, Eichel meaning “glans”] arrives, the other men try to bribe him into a pro-circumcision stance. Eichel, though, feels he has to defend “Europe’s last firewall” and “the oppression of the German majority.”

Is this comedy playing at a Berlin theater payback for the national debate that took place two years ago about forbidding circumcision? At the time, a German court ruled that when carried out for purely religious reasons, circumcision was an act of bodily harm. After further discussions and deliberations, the country’s national parliament passed by a wide margin a regulation stating that parents had the right to have their sons circumcised shortly after birth, but only if certain standards are observed and if a religious circumcisor can carry out the procedure

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