This is a very influential book by one of the leading secularists of our time. I subscribe to many of the particular claims made in the book, but there are problems. It is a polemical work and suffers from shortage of citations, and oftentimes it feels like Hitchens uses his memory to retrieve certain claims. My biggest objection, from the point of view of a secular Jew, is that “religion”, “belief in God” and “tradition” are lumped together.

Others have done fact-checking of their own, here are the issues I noticed:

Strawmanning

  • “And the truth is that the Jews used to claim credit for the Crucifixion. Maimonides described the punishment of the detestable Nazarene heretic as one of the greatest achievements of the Jewish elders…”

The source of this claim is most likely the ideas Maimonides expressed in his “Epistle to Yemen” where he writes that “And the Sages of Blessed Memory … did to him [Jesus] what he deserved.” (“וְהִרְגִּישׁוּ הַחֲכָמִים ז”ל לְכַוָּנָתוֹ קוֹדֵם שֶׁיִתְחַזֵּק פִּרְסוּמוֹ בָּאֻמָּה, וְעָשׂוּ בּוֹ הָרָאוּי לוֹ”). This is clearly an allusion to taking credit for the demise of Jesus in general (which would echo the narrative of the New Testament), but it would be incorrect to say that Maimonides writes that the Sages crucified him. Whatever the interpretation, Maimonides does not call this “the greatest achievement”.

  • “[Maimonides] insisted that the name Jesus never be mentioned except when accompanied by a curse”

In the same Epistle, Maimonides does write “may his bones be ground to dust” (שחוק עצמות) after Jesus’es name but he does not prescribe this.

  • “[Maimonides] announced that his punishment was to be boiled in excrement for all eternity.”

Boiling excrement is mentioned as the punishment of Jesus in Talmud in Gittin 67b. Maimonides quotes the words from this Gemara: “anyone who mocks the words of the sage is judged in burning excrement”, in his Introduction to Mishnah when writing that the words of the Sages are clear and not to be mocked. He does not write about Jesus in this passage.

  • “Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means of a hole in the sheet”

This is a popular myth that has no roots in reality. See e.g. Ribner & Kleinplatz (2007) “The hole in the sheet and other myths about sexuality and Judaism”.

  • His [Luxenburg’s] most celebrated example concerns the rewards of a “martyr” in paradise: when retranslated and redacted the heavenly offering consists of sweet white raisins rather than virgins.

Christoph Luxenburg’s interpretations of Quran’s language have been widely discredited, see e.g. King (2009) “A Christian Qur’ān? A Study in the Syriac background to the language of the Qur’ān as presented in the work of Christoph Luxenberg”. With respect to houri, Quran contains enough references to them to remove any doubt that the word refers to virgins, e.g. Surah 55: “… Fair ones (houri), close-guarded in pavilions … Whom neither man nor jinni will have touched before them…”

  • “This man’s death in Brooklyn in 1994 was confidently expected to produce an age of redemption”

Quite the opposite: the Lubavitcher Rebbe was not expected to die, so his death evoked two reactions among believers of his messianism: it was either interepreted as sign of him not being the Messiah (by the mainstream) or a new belief emerged that he did not die in reality (or that he would resurrect). “For the Chabad movement, his death simply made no sense”.

  • “so there are those who preserve the ghetto policy which maintained a watcher at the gates, whose job it was to alert the others if the Messiah arrived unexpectedly.”

I think this idea stems from a Jewish joke about a “job” given to a poor man whose duty it was to wait for Moshiach at the gates/outside of the shtetl, not a well-paid but at least steady work as the punch line goes. See a version of the joke in Telushkin (2010) “Jewish Humor”, Harper Collins.

  • “the promise (made to Abraham in Genesis 17) that circumcision would lead to his having a vast progeny at the age of ninety-nine”, “Full excision, originally ordered by god as the blood price for the promised future massacre of the Canaanites …”

These passages can be understood as “reading between the lines”, but it must be stressed that they are not even paraphrases of the original text of Genesis 17.

  • “It has been argued that the process is more hygienic for the male and thus more healthy for females in helping them avoid, for example, cervical cancer. Medicine has exploded these claims, or else revealed them as problems which can just as easily be solved by a “loosening” of the foreskin.”

This categorical language creates a false impression of an overwhelming medical consensus about the costs and benefits of circumcision without providing references for the claim. E.g. the benefits of male circumcision with respect to prevention of cervical cancer in women are well supported, see the metanalysis by Morris et al (2019) “Does Male Circumcision Reduce Women’s Risk of Sexually Transmitted Infections, Cervical Cancer, and Associated Conditions?” and general discussions about benefits and risks of circumcision in Bolnick et al (eds) (2012) “Surgical Guide to Circumcision”. It must be said that many of the relevant studies have been conducted after 2007.

  • “Full excision … is now exposed for what it is—a mutilation of a powerless infant with the aim of ruining its future sex life.”

Paradoxically, here Hitchens appears to agree with Maimonides on something, namely that circumcision brings about “a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question”. A meta-analysis of the effects of adult circumcision concludes that “circumcision is unlikely to adversely affect male sexual functions” (Tian et al (2019) “Effects of circumcision on male sexual functions: a systematic review and meta-analysis”, and analogously an even bigger review of circumcision performed at different ages concludes that properly designed studies “suggest that medical male circumcision has no adverse effect on sexual function, sensitivity, sexual sensation, or satisfaction” (Morris & Krieger (2013) “Does male circumcision affect sexual function, sensitivity, or satisfaction?”. Again, the most relevant studies have been published after 2007.

  • “mohel … cut around the prepuce and complete the action by … sucking off the foreskin and spitting out the amputated slap along with .. blood and saliva”

The description of brit milah is incorrect in that the removal of the foreskin (milah) in any version of the procedure precedes the suction of the blood (metsitsah) and thus there is no “sucking off the foreskin and spitting out the amputated slap” in metsitsah bepeh. See e.g. Bolnick & Katz (2012) “Jewish Ritual Circumcision”, Cohen (2003) “A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood”

Other inaccuracies

  • Francis Crick even allowed himself to flirt with the theory that life was “inseminated” on earth by bacteria spread from a passing comet.

What is meant here is probably the paper by Crick & Orgel (1973) “Directed panspermia” which puts forward a hypothsis that “microorganisms” (not bacteria) populated the Earth from a spaceship (not comet). Importantly, as the title suggests, the proposed theory is specifically about intentional seeding, or directed panspermia, while the passage refers to lithopanspermia instead.

  • “… the primitive rite of peri’ah metsitsah …”

The custom of oral suction is called “metsitsah bepeh”, not “peri’ah metsitsah”. Periah is a separate stage between milah and metsitsah which includes the removal of the inner preputial off the glans. See citations above.

  • “some people … are prone to a form of sickle-cell anemia which … results from an earlier mutation that gave protection against malaria.”

There is no “earlier mutation”. Sickle-cell anemia is caused by the homozygous state of the E6V amino acid mutation in the β-globin gene called the HbS allele. Its relatively high prevalence in Africa is the result of a selective advantage of heterozygotes that develop less severe symptoms when contracting malaria. See e.g. Piel & Williams (2016) “Sickle Cell Anemia: History and Epidemiology”.

  • “Mount Ararat in modern Armenia”

The mountain that is nowadays referred to as “Ararat” (Armenian Արարատ, Turkish Ağrı Dağı) is located on the Armenian highlands but is outside of the borders of modern Armenia, in Turkey.

  • “vertebrate (or “chordate”) … named … Pikaia gracilens”

The position of Pikaia gracilens within the phylum Chordata is uncertain but has not been assigned to the Vertebrata. See e.g. Malatt & Holland (2013) “Pikaia gracilens Walcott: Stem Chordate, or Already Specialized in the Cambrian?”.

Terminology

  • “It is because we evolved from sightless bacteria”, “the original bacteria that began life on the planet”

The term “bacteria” here should be understood as a synonym to “prokaryotes” which is a minority termninological view nowadays.

  • “The folk memory, now confirmed by archaeology, makes it seem highly probable that huge inundations occurred when the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were formed, and that these forbidding and terrifying events continued to impress the storytellers of Mesopotamia and elsewhere.”

There is a hypothesis of the “Black Sea deluge” about a hypothetical sudden and catastrophic event when the Neoeuxinian Lake became connected with the Mediterranean Sea to become the Black Sea with a subsequent water level rise which might have inspired the flood myths (Ryan et al (1997). “An abrupt drowning of the Black Sea shelf”). This latest stage in the evolution of the Black Sea basin can hardly be pointed out as the moment/period when the Black Sea was formed. Somewhat similar flooding might have happened to the Mediterranean (Turney & Brown (2007) “Catastrophic early Holocene sea level rise, human migration and the Neolithic transition in Europe”). The Mediterranean Sea was connected with the ocean throughout the Quaternary, see Benjamin et al (2017) “Late Quaternary sea-level changes and early human societies in the central and eastern Mediterranean Basin: An interdisciplinary review”. So, sudden inundations did take place or might have taken place but they were not associated with the formation of the Mediterranean Sea or the Black Sea (in the latter case it might a matter of semantics though).

Typos

  • “For the story of Sabbatai Sevi, see John Freely, The Last Messiah (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001).”

The book is called “The Lost Messiah”.