Jewish male menstruation

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Jewish male menstruation is the belief that Jewish males experience menstrual periods, or periodic bleeding. This belief was popular among Christians across Europe throughout the late medieval and early modern period, including in Great Britain, Germany, and Spain.^[1] Common ways Jewish men supposedly menstruated were through nosebleeds, urination, and bleeding of hemorrhoids.^[2] The ability to menstruate was not associated with having a uterus. The first written mention of this phenomenon was in Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis in 1219.^[1] These attitudes have roots in both Humorism and religious, antisemitic Christian beliefs.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, contemporaries such as sexologist and physician Magnus Hirschfeld, physician Havelock Ellis, and neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud have expressed belief in the phenomenon of male menstruation, less specific than Jewish male menstruation, with Freud having claimed to experience male menstruation himself.^[2]