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Something else to consider (SPOILER)


We are supposed to believe that for 70 years this former Nazi lived his life as a Jew. In all that time, his family and others including physicians and caregivers and others did not notice/did not question why he was not circumcised. Obviously, his wife would have had to have been in on it. He could not have hid it from her. Thus I can only conclude that he had the extremely delicate and extreme measure of adult circumcision. But that is not something readily or easily undertaken.

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Hmm..I thought circumcision was and is fairly routine, whether jewish, or not. So maybe it wasn't in Germany, during that era? I'm protestant, and have never known of many men who weren't circumcised. In fact, i didn't consider not circumcising my son.
This comment isn't meant to be critical in any way. I just wasn't aware that it wasn't commonplace.

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Thus I can only conclude that he had the extremely delicate and extreme measure of adult circumcision.


No such conclusion is necessary. There were many assimilated Jews swept up by the Nazis who were second or third generation Christians who did not practice Judaism or regard themselves as Jewish, but who were considered so by one or another version of the Nuremberg laws brought in by the Nazi regime. These "Jews" generally had a Jewish grandparent (or even parent), but were Lutherans, Catholics,or agnostics. They would not have been circumcised, because circumcision, while routine in the US, was not so in Europe at that time.

It would not have been particularly surprising for someone professing to be an assimilated Jew who had survived the concentration camps was in fact of Jewish descent though he had never been raised in that culture or faith. Some such people after the war returned to their Jewish roots; we aren't told whether Zev became a practicing Jew or not - since Judaism is passed to children through the mother under Talmudic law, it would not have been necessary for him to do so.

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