Circumcision

The Jewish rite is precisely specified. It takes place on the eighth day of life, counted inclusively, and it proceeds even when the eighth day falls on the Sabbath or the Day of Atonement, which very few obligations do. It is postponed only for the health of the child, and postponement for that reason is required rather than merely permitted.

The operator is a mohel, trained in both the procedure and the law governing it; many are also qualified physicians, and in some communities a doctor cuts while the mohel recites. The child is held by a sandak, an honoured role frequently given to a grandfather, and is placed briefly on a chair set aside for the prophet Elijah. Blessings are said by the father and by those present, the child is named, and the meal that follows is itself treated as a religious obligation rather than a social addition.

The theological content is covenantal rather than purificatory. The sign is placed in the body of a child far too young to consent, and that is the claim being made rather than an awkwardness to be explained away: membership of the people precedes individual decision and does not depend on it. This is exactly the feature modern objection fastens on, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise.

One element is contested inside Judaism itself. Oral suction of the wound is still practised by a minority of Haredi communities, and public health authorities in New York and in Israel have linked it to transmission of herpes simplex to infants, including deaths. Most Jewish legal authorities permit or require suction by pipette instead, holding that the requirement is for suction and not for the mouth. The dispute between the two positions is real and has not been resolved.

Circumcision in Islam is close to universal in practice and rests on a different legal footing from the Jewish rite.

It is not commanded in the Quran. It is derived from prophetic tradition and from the practice of Abraham, and jurists divide over whether it is obligatory or strongly recommended, with the Shafii school treating it as required and others as recommended custom. The timing is correspondingly loose: infancy, early childhood, or the approach of puberty, depending on region. In many countries it is a public celebration with the boy dressed for the occasion, a large gathering and gifts, and Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Gulf states keep the practice with quite different ceremonial around it.

Christianity decided against it early and explicitly. The dispute recorded in Acts and in Paul's letters is the first great argument in the church, and it settled that gentile converts need not be circumcised. That decision is what made Christianity separable from Judaism, and it is difficult to overstate its consequences. Two groups of churches are exceptions for cultural rather than doctrinal reasons: the Ethiopian, Eritrean and Coptic churches practise it, as does much of Christian sub-Saharan Africa.

Beyond the Abrahamic traditions the practice is widespread and independent. It is attested in ancient Egypt in tomb reliefs and in preserved bodies. It is a standard element of male initiation across large parts of Africa, Aboriginal Australia and Melanesia, where it is typically performed at adolescence within a longer period of seclusion and instruction, is bound up with age-grades and adult status, and has nothing to do with covenant in the Abrahamic sense. Reading those practices through a Jewish or Muslim frame, as early ethnographers routinely did, produces a false parallel from a real physical resemblance.

The practice sits at an unresolved intersection of medicine, religious freedom and the rights of children, and honest description means setting out the positions rather than choosing between them.

The medical evidence is real and limited in scope. Randomised trials in sub-Saharan Africa found that voluntary medical male circumcision of adults substantially reduced female-to-male HIV transmission, and the World Health Organization has recommended it since 2007 as one component of prevention in high-prevalence settings; programmes on that basis have circumcised many millions of adult volunteers. Evidence of benefit for infants in low-prevalence countries is much weaker, and paediatric bodies differ openly: American paediatricians have concluded that the benefits are sufficient to justify access without recommending it routinely, while several European medical associations have reached the opposite view. Complication rates in trained hands are low but not zero, and are considerably higher where the operator is untrained.

The legal position varies and has moved recently. A German court in Cologne ruled in 2012 that religious circumcision of a minor constituted criminal bodily harm, and the Bundestag legislated within months to protect the practice explicitly, after protest from both Jewish and Muslim organisations. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have each debated age limits or bans; none has enacted one. Most jurisdictions continue to treat parental consent as sufficient.

The objection is straightforward: an irreversible modification is performed, for reasons that are not medically necessary, on a person who cannot consent. It is pressed by secular campaigners and by a small number of Jews and Muslims who have declined it for their own children. The response from inside those traditions is that the rite is constitutive of membership and cannot be deferred to adulthood without becoming a different thing altogether. That is a genuine impasse rather than a misunderstanding either side could clear up.