It has been brought to my attention by a reader that Strabo 16.2.38 should read as follows:

‘From superstition arose abstinence from flesh, from the eating of which it is now the custom to refrain, circumcision, cliterodectomy, and other practices which the people observe.’ (1)

The Greek regarding clitoridectomy I am informed translated literally means ‘excisions’ and refers to the female body: therefore, the translation of ‘female circumcision’ would have perhaps been more apposite as the use of ‘cliterodectomy’ forces one to think a moment about what that suggests and look it up in a dictionary for confirmation. ‘Cliterodectomy’ might be technically accurate, but it doesn’t convey the same point as the more meaning ‘female circumcision’ would.

The possibility that jews were engaging in this practice - now thankfully largely relegated to sub-Saharan Africa - as a companion ritual - much like the Bat Mitzvah is the female companion to the male Bar Mitzvah - to the mark of the covenant. If you think about it: it makes a perverted sort of sense in that if the male jew bears the mark of covenant then so should the female jew, but the female jew hasn’t had a mark of any kind for so long that people seem to have forgotten about the possibility of this having originally been the case.

I will write further on this in future, but it might be a while as this is new even to me and I am not persuaded it was necessarily the case as I can’t think of any direct or implicit references to it in the jewish literature.

References

(1) Strab. 16.2.38