ABSTRACT
In his fascinating study Unheroic Conduct: The Rise o f Heterosexuality and the Invention o f the Jewish Male, Daniel Boyarin writes that
The topos of the Jewish man as a sort of woman is a venerable one going back at least to the thirteenth century in Europe, where it was widely maintained that Jewish men menstruate. As the fourteenth-century Italian astrologer Cecci d’Ascoli writes: ‘After the death of Christ all Jewish men, like women, suffer menstruation.’ As Peter Biller has shown, melancholia and sexual excess (attributes later assigned to both women and homosexuals) were already given in the thirteenth century as among the major factors that produced Jewish male menstruation. The explanation of this myth is to be found in the consistent representation of male Jews in European culture as female, largely because of their circumcision, which was interpreted as feminizing.1
