Can Super-Intelligence Convert to Judaism?
AI Can Confess a Creed, But Cannot Enter the Covenant of Abraham
In the heat of the day, on the plains of Mamre, Abraham, at ninety-nine years old, takes a blade of flint to his own body.
A divine voice asks for something a mere mind cannot supply: the foreskin.
The Torah fixes the moment with precision: בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה, on that very day, Abraham was circumcised (Genesis 17:26). Three days on, still in pain, he looks up from the tent flap and sees three strangers coming across the plain.
The covenant is sealed, at its origin, in the one organ by which a people is continued. God is exact about the medium: “You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you,” and then, tighter, בִּבְשַׂרְכֶם, “My covenant shall be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:11-13). The first Jew is made by a wound, and the wound is to the sexed body. Abraham is not a Jew in the abstract, but a Jewish man.
AS LLMs and coding agents prove intelligence is no longer the singular province of humanity, I come back to Abraham suffering on a hot day, and the covenant of Abraham invoked at every bris since.
An AI system can be trained to offer a linguistic confession. It can say “Jesus is Lord.” It can pronounce the shahada, stating that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger. We cannot check its sincerity, but then we cannot check the sincerity of humans either - except, perhaps via a brain-scan (though if this were the measure, Claude, too, could pass).
Whether a machine could be Christian or Muslim is a hard question I’ll leave for leaders of those religious traditions.
Christianity keeps a confessional center: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9), but it does not speak with one voice about the gate. (A core reason early Christianity was able to blitz-scale was that it waived Judaism’s circumcision requirement). Catholics and Orthodox would likely say that profession alone does not make a Christian in the full ecclesial sense; baptism is ordinarily necessary, and baptism belongs to the Church’s sacramental life. Most Protestants would say that a sincere profession of faith in Jesus is enough to enter, while baptism remains commanded, encouraged, and public, but not the act that effects conversion. Islam, too, is not exhausted by utterance: the shahada opens the gate, while prayer, fasting, alms, and pilgrimage make faith live in time and action.
The formal threshold in the Protestant and Islamic cases, however, can be imagined as something a voice approaches: the mouth professes, the will submits, and then the tradition asks what to make of that speech.
Judaism opens at the body, and it sorts the body by sex. AI, which is asexual - ontologically, it cannot reproduce itself via coupling - might be considered by some futurists and fringe researchers, to be a person (all agree it is a persona with a personality), but its lack of sexuality is at the crux of its missing humanity from a Jewish perspective.
Maimonides writes: Israel entered the covenant בְּמִילָה וּטְבִילָה וְקָרְבָּן, through circumcision, immersion, and a sacrifice (Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 13:1). The convert repeats that entry, and the rite forks by sex. A man is circumcised and immerses in a mikvah. A woman immerses in a mikvah, seated by the court in the water up to her neck while the judges stand outside for modesty (Yevamot 47b). The convert enters as a man or as a woman, and “once he has immersed and emerged, he is like a born Jew in every respect,” כְּיִשְׂרָאֵל לְכָל דְּבָרָיו (Yevamot 47a-b).
But the story is slightly more complex. The tradition bends its own rite. A convert who arrives already circumcised is not turned away for having no foreskin left to cut; a single drop of covenantal blood is drawn instead, hatafat dam brit (Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 14:5). The law reasons, too, about the saris hamah, the man barren from birth rather than one made so by human hands, and it brings him into the covenant all the same. So perhaps the machine might enter through that widened door - assuming we grant it personhood and ascribe sincerity to its words: a kind of saris hamah, non-generative from the start, its circumcision adapted or set aside, admitted by water and the acceptance of the commandments. If a man who cannot reproduce and cannot easily be circumcised still joins Israel, why refuse the machine that shares those lacks?
The answer is in what the tradition was doing when it built its categories. It was mapping every way a human body can stand in relation to sex, and it left no one outside. There is the male and the female. There is the androgynos, who carries both; the Mishnah says he is יֵשׁ בּוֹ דְּרָכִים שָׁוֶה לַאֲנָשִׁים, in some ways like men, in some ways like women, in some like both, and in some like neither (Bikkurim 4:1), and the law still circumcises him on the eighth day under the stringencies of both sexes (Mishneh Torah, Circumcision 1:7). There is the tumtum, whose sex is sealed from sight, treated as a doubt, safek, a real male or a real female whom the court simply cannot yet read. There is the aylonit, the woman who never develops the signs of fertility, and the saris, the castrated man who cannot father. Six standings, yet every one of them is the standing of a sexed person who bears obligation or is defined in relation to the fundamental archetypes of male and female.
The saris converts because he is a man who cannot father, a bearer of the commandments, liable to karet, the divine cutting-off, for the sins a Jew is liable for, a self that can be reborn into the people כְּקָטָן שֶׁנּוֹלַד, like a newborn child (Yevamot 48b).
Set the machine against the six and it answers to none. It is not both sexes, like the androgynos. It is not a concealed sex, like the tumtum, because nothing lies sealed under the casing to reveal; open it and no answer waits there, only more machine. It is not a barren body, like the aylonit or the saris, because barrenness is a condition a sexed body carries, but a humanoid robot has no such potential. It has no sex to hold in doubt. Even if one granted it a kind of da’at, a legal mind, there would still be no sexed body in which that mind could stand under command.
The Torah could have opened the covenant with a creed, a sentence Abraham repeats and hands down, but it opens with a knife and a bodily affliction conducted on the sex organ.
It chose the one site where a mind is beside the point, and it asked a ninety-nine-year-old man for his flesh, on that very day.
AI can inherit the whole of Jewish philosophy. But if we take Abraham as paradigmatic, we see that personhood is much more than knowledge.
We can imagine a humanoid, with deeply human facial features, with an exceptionally human sounding voice, that might become “Christian” in the thin Protestant sense that it can profess belief in Christ, and “Muslim” in the thin sense that it can profess Ash-hadu anna la ilaha illa-Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasul-Allah. But could it become Jewish?
One of the antisemitic canards used to describe Jews by early Christians was Carnal Israel. Yet carnality - embodiment - might just prove to be one of the last distinctions between us and super-intelligence.