Daniel sent us this one — and it's timely, maybe more than a lot of people realize. Belgium's parliament is considering a bill that would ban non-medical circumcision for anyone under sixteen. It was introduced in March twenty twenty-six by the Flemish socialist party Vooruit, and it has real coalition support. European Jewish groups have called it the most serious threat to Jewish life in Europe since the Holocaust. But here's the thing — this isn't new. States have been trying to ban Jewish circumcision for two thousand years. Daniel asked us to walk through the history of those attempts. So let's do exactly that.
The Belgian bill is worth understanding on its own terms before we go wide. It's a proposed amendment to Belgium's child protection laws. The core argument is that circumcision of minors for religious reasons constitutes a violation of bodily integrity — that a child can't consent, and the state has an obligation to protect that child until they're old enough to decide for themselves. The bill carves out an exception for medical necessity, but not for religious practice.
Which is the whole ballgame right there. If you define religious circumcision as a form of harm, then religious freedom doesn't enter the equation — you've already classified the act as something the state has a duty to prevent. That's the legal sleight of hand at the center of every one of these bans, going all the way back to ancient Rome.
And the Vooruit party has been explicit about this framing. They say they're not targeting Jews or Muslims — they're protecting children. The bill's supporters point to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to the principle of bodily autonomy. They'll tell you this is a human rights measure, not a religious freedom measure. But when you look at the history, that distinction has never held up.
Before we dive into the history, let's be clear about what's actually at stake here. Belgium has an estimated fifteen thousand Jewish families. If this bill passes — and the vote is expected late this year or early next — brit milah becomes illegal. A family that arranges a circumcision for their eight-day-old son could face criminal penalties. A mohel could face imprisonment. And the ripple effects across Europe would be immediate, because no European court has ever ruled directly on the legality of religious circumcision. A Belgian ban would almost certainly force that ruling.
That's why the historical pattern matters. Because if you only look at the Belgian bill in isolation, it's easy to treat it as a one-off — a peculiar moment in Flemish politics. But when you zoom out, you see the same thing happening over and over, in different legal languages, across centuries. So let's actually walk through it chronologically. Where does this start?
One thirty-five CE. The emperor Hadrian has just crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt — the last major Jewish uprising against Roman rule in Judea. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Jerusalem has been razed and rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, a pagan city Jews are forbidden to enter. And as part of a sweeping campaign to eradicate Jewish practice, Hadrian issues an empire-wide ban on circumcision.
Here's the legal mechanism, which is fascinating — and disturbing. Roman law classified circumcision as a form of castration under the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis. This was originally Sulla's law against assassins and poisoners. Over time it had been expanded to cover castration, which was seen as a violation of bodily integrity and a threat to Roman military manpower. Hadrian's jurists simply slotted circumcision into that existing framework.
Child protection by another name, two thousand years ago. The Romans weren't saying "we hate Jews and want to destroy their religion." They were saying "we have laws against mutilation, and this qualifies." The framing has always been the key.
It was devastatingly effective. Jewish communities in Judea were forced to perform circumcisions in secret for generations. Rabbis risked execution to continue the practice. The Talmud actually records debates from this period about whether a child could be circumcised if doing so might reveal the family's Jewish identity to Roman authorities. The ban didn't just make circumcision illegal — it made the very act of maintaining Jewish identity a clandestine, criminal enterprise.
What's striking is that Hadrian's ban was part of a package. He also prohibited Torah study, ordination of rabbis, observance of the Sabbath. Circumcision wasn't singled out — it was one front in a comprehensive assault. And that's the pattern we see again and again. These bans are never standalone. They arrive alongside broader efforts to suppress Jewish distinctiveness.
And Hadrian's ban didn't last forever. Antoninus Pius, his successor, partially rolled it back — he allowed Jews to circumcise their own sons but prohibited circumcision of non-Jewish converts. Which created a bizarre legal situation where the act itself wasn't banned, but expanding the Jewish community was. The Roman state was essentially saying: you can maintain your existing population, but you can't grow.
A demographic containment policy dressed up as bodily integrity. The more things change.
Let's jump forward about twelve hundred years to medieval Christian Europe. By the thirteenth century, circumcision has become a marker of Jewish difference in a predominantly Christian society. And it's increasingly viewed with suspicion — not just as a religious practice, but as something sinister. The blood libel accusations that swept through Europe in this period often incorporated circumcision into their lurid narratives. The claim was that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and circumcision was woven into those stories as evidence of Jewish cruelty.
This is where the legal restrictions start to get creative. In twelve sixty-seven, the Council of Vienna issued a series of rulings about Jewish-Christian relations. One of them prohibited Christians from serving in Jewish households. The stated reason was that it was improper for Christians to be in positions of servitude to Jews. But the practical effect was to restrict access to circumcision.
Because here's the thing — in medieval Europe, a mohel wasn't necessarily Jewish. The procedure was sometimes performed by Christian surgeons or barber-surgeons who had the technical skill. The Council of Vienna's ruling cut off that access. If a Christian couldn't work for a Jewish family, a Christian surgeon couldn't legally perform a circumcision. It was an indirect ban, but it had the same effect — making brit milah harder to perform safely and legally.
Indirect bans are a recurring theme. When you can't outlaw the practice directly without provoking backlash, you restrict the conditions that make it possible. You ban the practitioners, or you ban the gathering, or you ban the instruments. It's death by a thousand legal paper cuts.
Then we get to fifteenth-century Spain. The Spanish Inquisition, established in fourteen seventy-eight, was tasked with rooting out heresy among conversos — Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under duress. And circumcision became a forensic marker. The Inquisition's investigators would examine male children and infants for evidence of circumcision. If a family had claimed to be Christian for generations but their son was circumcised, that was proof of "judaizing" — secretly practicing Judaism.
The limpieza de sangre statutes — purity of blood laws — made this even more insidious. These weren't about religious belief. They were about lineage. Even if your family had been genuinely Christian for a century, if you had Jewish ancestry, you were tainted. Circumcision status became a way to identify that ancestry. The procedure itself wasn't just a religious act — it was a permanent, visible marker that the state could use to classify you.
That's a crucial distinction from the Roman ban. Hadrian was trying to suppress a living religion. The Spanish Inquisition was trying to police identity after the religion had supposedly been eradicated. Circumcision became evidence of a crime that might not have been committed — it was proof of who you were, not what you did.
The body as a permanent affidavit of Jewishness. You can't renounce it, you can't hide it, you can't convert your way out of it. That's the dark genius of targeting circumcision specifically. Most religious practices can be abandoned. This one leaves a mark.
Let's move into the modern era. The Soviet Union, nineteen twenties and thirties. The Bolsheviks came to power with an explicitly anti-religious ideology. Religion was "opium of the masses," and traditional practices — especially those deemed medically harmful or superstitious — were targeted for eradication. Circumcision was classified as a form of religious barbarism.
This is where the numbers get stark. Between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen thirty-two, over a thousand Jewish doctors were arrested for performing circumcisions. These weren't back-alley operators — these were licensed physicians who happened to be mohalim on the side, or who performed the procedure for Jewish families in their communities. The Soviet state treated them as criminals.
The legal mechanism was the anti-religious campaign laws, which criminalized the "exploitation of religious superstitions" for medical purposes. A doctor performing a circumcision wasn't just practicing religion — he was using his medical credentials to lend legitimacy to a prohibited religious act. That was considered an aggravating factor. You could lose your license, your freedom, and in some cases your life.
Again, the framing matters. The Soviets weren't saying "we want to destroy Judaism." They were saying "we're protecting citizens from harmful, superstitious practices." It was a public health argument, wrapped in Marxist scientism. The fact that the target was an ancient Jewish ritual was almost incidental to the official rationale.
But of course it wasn't incidental. The Soviet campaign against circumcision was part of a broader assault on Jewish religious life — synagogues were closed, Hebrew was suppressed, rabbis were purged. Circumcision was one target among many, but it was a particularly effective one because it struck at the very beginning of Jewish life. Ban brit milah, and you interrupt the transmission of Jewish identity at its most intimate moment — the eighth day of a child's life.
Which brings us to the Nazis. And this is where the historical record becomes almost unbearable to recount, but it's essential for understanding the pattern. In nineteen forty-three, the German occupation authorities in Poland issued a decree banning circumcision. The official justification was public health — the procedure was deemed unsanitary and dangerous under wartime conditions. But the real purpose was unmistakable. Circumcision was a marker of Jewish identity, and the Nazis were in the business of identifying Jews.
The decree was issued in the General Government — the Nazi administrative region that included most of occupied Poland. By nineteen forty-three, the mass extermination of Polish Jewry was already underway. The circumcision ban was part of the final stage of criminalization. A Jewish family attempting to circumcise a newborn son in the Warsaw Ghetto or in hiding would face immediate execution if discovered. The ban didn't just prohibit the practice — it made the very act of bringing a Jewish child into the covenant a capital offense.
Here's what I think people need to understand about the post-Holocaust period. After nineteen forty-five, there was a kind of unspoken consensus in Europe that you don't touch this. The memory of the Nazi ban was too raw. For a European state to restrict Jewish circumcision would have been politically unthinkable for decades. Which makes what happened in twenty twelve all the more significant.
The Cologne ruling. June twenty twelve. A regional court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that circumcision of a minor for religious reasons constituted "grievous bodily harm." The case involved a four-year-old Muslim boy who had been circumcised by a doctor. The procedure led to complications — not life-threatening, but enough to bring the matter to the attention of authorities. The doctor was prosecuted, and the court had to rule on whether parental consent could justify what would otherwise be considered assault.
The court said no. It ruled that the child's right to bodily integrity outweighed the parents' right to religious freedom and their right to determine their child's upbringing. The decision sent shockwaves through Europe. For the first time since the Holocaust, a German court had effectively declared Jewish religious practice illegal.
The reaction was immediate and intense. Jewish and Muslim organizations condemned the ruling. The Israeli Knesset held an emergency session. The Central Council of Jews in Germany called it an unprecedented intrusion into religious freedom. And here's the thing — the ruling wasn't binding nationwide. It was a regional court decision. But it created legal uncertainty. Suddenly, a mohel in Cologne couldn't be sure he wasn't committing a crime. A doctor in Berlin didn't know if the same logic might be applied there.
The German government understood the stakes. Angela Merkel's administration moved quickly. In December twenty twelve, the Bundestag passed a law explicitly protecting religious circumcision — four hundred thirty-four votes in favor, one hundred against. The law affirmed that parents could consent to circumcision on religious grounds, provided the procedure was performed to proper medical standards. It was a direct legislative override of the Cologne ruling.
That vote is worth dwelling on. Four hundred thirty-four to one hundred. That's a massive, cross-party majority in a country where circumcision bans had been Nazi policy less than seventy years earlier. The German political establishment understood exactly what was at stake. They saw the historical echo, and they moved to shut it down.
Here's the problem. The twenty twelve law was a political fix, not a constitutional resolution. The underlying legal tension — children's rights versus religious freedom — wasn't resolved. And in twenty twenty-one, a new petition was filed with the German parliament, signed by thousands of doctors and legal scholars, arguing that the twenty twelve law violated children's constitutional rights. The debate never really ended. It just went dormant.
While Germany was wrestling with this, other countries started picking up the thread. Iceland in twenty eighteen. A bill was introduced in the Althing, Iceland's parliament, that would have banned non-medical circumcision of minors. The language was almost identical to what we're seeing in Belgium now — bodily autonomy, child protection, the child's right to choose. The bill's sponsor, Silja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir of the Progressive Party, framed it as a human rights measure.
Iceland has a tiny Jewish community — fewer than two hundred people. The bill would have affected Muslims more directly, but the Jewish dimension was unmistakable. And here's what happened: international pressure killed it. The US State Department weighed in. The Anti-Defamation League mobilized. European Jewish organizations lobbied intensely. The bill was withdrawn before it reached a vote.
The fact that it got as far as it did was alarming. Iceland is a small country, but it's part of a pattern — Nordic and Benelux countries leading the charge on these bans. Norway debated a similar proposal in twenty twenty. Denmark has seen multiple attempts. Sweden is widely expected to be the next domino. These are countries with small Jewish populations, strong secular traditions, and legal cultures that prioritize children's rights. They're the laboratories for this kind of legislation.
Which brings us back to Belgium. The Vooruit bill isn't coming out of nowhere. It's the latest iteration of a legal argument that has been refined across multiple jurisdictions. The Icelandic bill was the rough draft. The Norwegian debate tested the messaging. The Belgian bill is the most sophisticated version yet — carefully framed to avoid the appearance of targeting religious minorities while achieving exactly that outcome.
Here's where I want to address a misconception that comes up a lot in coverage of this issue. People assume these are fringe proposals with no chance of passing. That was the assumption about the Cologne ruling before it happened. It was the assumption about the Icelandic bill before it gained traction. But the Belgian bill has coalition support. It's not a backbencher's pet project. It reflects a real shift in the European legal landscape.
The second misconception is that these bans are purely about child welfare — that the people behind them are motivated solely by concern for children's rights. And look, I'm sure some of them are. But the historical record tells a different story. Every major ban on Jewish circumcision, from Hadrian to the Nazis, has been part of a broader effort to suppress Jewish identity. The child welfare framing is consistent across two thousand years. The targets are consistent. The outcomes are consistent.
That's what makes the current moment so significant. We're not just seeing a single bill in a single country. We're seeing a legal argument that has been gaining momentum for over a decade, spreading from country to country, each iteration refining the language and the strategy. If Belgium passes this bill, it won't stay in Belgium. The European Court of Human Rights will almost certainly have to rule on it. And that ruling will set precedent for the entire European Union.
Let's talk about what's actually at stake legally. The European Convention on Human Rights protects religious freedom under Article Nine. It also protects the right to private and family life under Article Eight. The Belgian bill — and all the proposals like it — argue that Article Eight, interpreted to include bodily autonomy, should take precedence over Article Nine when it comes to irreversible procedures on minors. The parents' religious freedom ends where the child's body begins.
There's a genuine legal tension here that we shouldn't dismiss. Bodily autonomy is a serious principle. The idea that a child should have a say in permanent modifications to their body is not trivial. Plenty of thoughtful people — including some Jews — wrestle with this. The question is whether a secular state gets to define a religious practice as harm, and whether that definition should override thousands of years of religious tradition and the rights of parents to raise their children in their faith.
What makes the historical pattern so important is that it answers the question of whether these bans can ever be purely about child welfare. They can't. The record shows that every time a state has banned circumcision, it has done so in a context of broader suppression of Jewish life. The law may be written in the language of child protection, but the context is always assimilation or elimination.
Let me give you a concrete example of how this plays out in practice. When the Cologne ruling came down in twenty twelve, the immediate effect wasn't a sudden improvement in child welfare. It was legal chaos. Jewish and Muslim families didn't know if they could safely arrange circumcisions. Mohalim didn't know if they were committing crimes. Some families traveled to neighboring countries to have the procedure done. Others delayed, which created medical risks — circumcision on an eight-day-old infant is safer and simpler than on an older child. The ban didn't protect children. It made them less safe.
That's the irony at the heart of all these laws. They claim to protect children, but the practical effect is to drive the practice underground or abroad, where it's less regulated, less safe, and more traumatic. The Cologne ruling didn't stop circumcisions from happening. It stopped them from happening safely.
Let's pull back and look at the full sweep. Hadrian's ban in one thirty-five — framed as a general prohibition on mutilation. The medieval Council of Vienna in twelve sixty-seven — framed as regulating Christian-Jewish relations. The Spanish Inquisition — framed as rooting out heresy. The Soviet campaign — framed as combating religious superstition and protecting public health. The Nazi decree in nineteen forty-three — framed as a wartime health measure. The Cologne ruling in twenty twelve, the Icelandic bill, the Norwegian debate, and now Belgium — all framed as protecting children's bodily autonomy.
Same prohibition, different legal language. The vocabulary updates, but the underlying logic doesn't change. A minority practice is identified as harmful. The state steps in to protect the vulnerable. The minority community protests that its religious freedom is being violated. The state responds that religious freedom doesn't include the right to harm children. And round and round we go.
There's a demographic dimension to this that doesn't get enough attention. These proposals consistently emerge in countries with very small Jewish populations. Iceland has fewer than two hundred Jews. Norway has about fifteen hundred. Belgium has around thirty thousand — larger, but still a tiny fraction of the population. These are countries where most legislators have never met a Jewish family, never attended a brit milah, never had a conversation about what this practice means to the people who observe it.
Which means the debate happens in a vacuum. Legislators read a human rights brief, hear testimony about bodily autonomy, and make a decision based on abstract principles. They don't see the faces of the families whose religious lives they're upending. They don't grapple with what it means to tell a Jewish parent that the state considers their most sacred ritual a form of child abuse.
To be clear — this isn't an argument that religious practices should be exempt from all regulation. There are limits. If a religious practice endangered children's lives, the state would have a compelling interest in intervening. But circumcision, performed competently, doesn't endanger lives. It's one of the oldest and most studied surgical procedures in human history. The medical debate is about relative risks and benefits, not about life-threatening danger.
The medical debate is a whole other episode, honestly. But the key point for today is that the historical pattern is unambiguous. These bans are never just about medicine. They're never just about children's rights. They are always, always embedded in a broader political project of reducing Jewish distinctiveness. The child welfare framing is sincere for some advocates, I'm sure. But it's also a convenient vehicle for a much older impulse.
What does the pattern tell us about the Belgian proposal today? Let me offer a few takeaways. First, these bans tend to gain momentum in periods of heightened secularism and nationalism. Belgium is deeply secular. Its political culture is increasingly skeptical of religious accommodation. The Vooruit party is socialist, but the bill has appeal across the political spectrum because it taps into a broader European unease with visible religious difference.
Second, these bans almost never stay contained. The Cologne ruling triggered a continent-wide crisis. The Icelandic bill inspired copycats. The Belgian bill, if it passes, will be cited in Sweden, in Denmark, in the Netherlands. Legal precedents travel. The European Court of Human Rights is the ultimate destination, and a ruling there would bind forty-six countries.
Third, the response matters. Germany in twenty twelve showed that it's possible to push back — to pass legislation that explicitly protects religious circumcision. That took political will and a clear-eyed understanding of the historical stakes. The question is whether Belgium's political establishment has the same understanding, or whether the abstract appeal of children's rights will carry the day.
Fourth — and this is the uncomfortable part — these bans are often popular. The Icelandic bill had significant public support. Polling in several European countries shows majority support for restricting or banning non-medical circumcision of minors. The people pushing these bills aren't always operating in bad faith. They're responding to a genuine shift in how Europeans think about children's rights and religious accommodation.
Which is what makes this moment different from, say, the Soviet campaign or the Nazi decree. Those were top-down impositions by authoritarian regimes. The current wave is democratic. It's coming from legislatures, from public opinion, from human rights frameworks that were designed to protect minorities.
The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in nineteen fifty, five years after the Holocaust, with the explicit goal of preventing the kind of religious persecution that had just devastated the continent. And now, seventy-six years later, that convention is being cited as the basis for banning a practice that the Nazis also banned. You couldn't write a more bitter historical irony.
Let me address one more thing before we move to the closing. There's a tendency in American coverage of this issue to treat it as a European problem — something that happens over there, to communities that are too small to defend themselves. But the United States has its own history with this. In twenty eleven, San Francisco had a ballot initiative to ban circumcision. It gathered enough signatures to qualify. The proposed law would have made circumcision of minors a misdemeanor punishable by a thousand-dollar fine or up to a year in jail.
That initiative was ultimately struck from the ballot by a California court, which ruled that the city lacked the authority to regulate medical procedures — that's a state-level power. But the fact that it got as far as it did, in San Francisco of all places, suggests this isn't just a European phenomenon. The arguments are the same. The framing is the same. The only difference is that American constitutional protections for religious freedom are stronger than their European counterparts.
That's actually a useful lens for understanding the legal architecture. In the United States, the First Amendment provides robust protection for religious practice. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that religious freedom includes the right to raise children in one's faith. In Europe, the legal framework is different — children's rights are more strongly emphasized, and the balancing test tilts more toward the state's interest in protecting minors. That structural difference is why these bans keep emerging in Europe rather than the US.
What happens next? The Belgian bill is expected to come to a vote in late twenty twenty-six or early twenty twenty-seven. If it passes, the immediate effect will be to criminalize brit milah in Belgium. Jewish families will face a choice: leave the country, break the law, or abandon the practice. Muslim families will face the same choice. And the legal challenge will begin immediately — almost certainly winding its way to the European Court of Human Rights within a few years.
That court has never ruled directly on religious circumcision. It has ruled on related issues — religious freedom, parental rights, bodily integrity — but never on this specific question. A Belgian ban would force the issue. And the precedent would apply across the Council of Europe's forty-six member states. That's the stakes in a single parliamentary vote.
If the European Court upholds the ban, we're in uncharted territory. Every European country with a Jewish or Muslim population would face pressure to adopt similar legislation. The legal justification would already exist. The precedent would be set. What happened in Cologne as a regional ruling could become the law of an entire continent.
Now, I should note — there are reasons to think the European Court might not uphold such a ban. The Court has generally been deferential to member states on issues of religious practice, and it has recognized the importance of religious freedom in previous rulings. But the legal arguments on both sides are strong. A lot would depend on the specific facts of the case and the composition of the Court at the time.
The uncertainty itself is destabilizing. Jewish communities across Europe are watching this. If you're a young Jewish family in Antwerp or Brussels, you're making contingency plans. Some families have already left — not just because of this bill, but because of a broader climate that has made Jewish life in parts of Europe feel increasingly precarious. The circumcision ban is one piece of a larger picture.
That larger picture is what the historical pattern illuminates. These bans don't happen in isolation. They happen in contexts where Jewish distinctiveness is already under pressure, where assimilation is already being pushed, where the public square is already hostile to visible religious identity. The circumcision ban is often the sharpest point of the spear, but the spear itself is much larger.
To answer the prompt directly — what are the previous attempts to ban Jewish circumcision in history? Hadrian's Rome, the medieval Council of Vienna, the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet Union, Nazi-occupied Poland, the twenty twelve Cologne ruling, the twenty eighteen Icelandic bill, the Norwegian debate, and now Belgium. At least fifteen major attempts across nineteen centuries. Same prohibition, different legal language. Same pattern, different era.
The question Daniel is implicitly asking — the question beneath the question — is whether the Belgian bill is just the latest chapter in a very old story. I think the historical record is clear on that. The language has been updated for the twenty-first century. But the structure, the logic, the target — they're all recognizable.
The one thing I'd add is that recognizing the pattern doesn't require taking a position on the underlying medical or ethical debate. You can have genuine questions about circumcision and still see that these bans have historically been vehicles for something larger. The pattern is the pattern, regardless of where you land on the practice itself.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen sixties, Soviet engineers in Kyrgyzstan accidentally tapped into a massive underground methane pocket while drilling for natural gas in the permafrost. The resulting leak ignited and has been burning continuously for over sixty years in what locals call the Door to Hell — a crater nearly two hundred thirty feet wide that releases thousands of tons of methane annually, an unintended consequence of Cold War resource extraction that's still contributing to atmospheric warming today.
...right.
Here's the open question we'll be watching over the next year. Will the Belgian bill pass? And if it does, what happens to the fifteen thousand Jewish families in Belgium — and to the legal landscape for religious freedom across Europe? The European Court of Human Rights has never ruled on this. A Belgian ban would force that ruling, and the precedent would reshape the continent.
If you want to understand the legal arguments on both sides, this is the moment to pay attention. Read the bill. Read the responses from Jewish and Muslim organizations. Watch for the next domino — Sweden, Denmark, maybe the Netherlands. The pattern is two thousand years old, but it's playing out in real time.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you've got a question you want us to dig into, send it our way.
We'll be back soon.
