Brit Milah (Bris)

The command is brief. Genesis has God tell Abraham that every male among his people is to be circumcised at eight days old, and that a male who is not has broken the covenant. Everything procedural is rabbinic.

The timing is unusually immovable. The eighth day displaces the Sabbath, on which cutting is otherwise forbidden, and it displaces the Day of Atonement. A boy born at twilight, where the boundary between one day and the next is genuinely uncertain, is circumcised late rather than early, on the reasoning that the ninth day is a delay while the seventh is a wound inflicted outside the covenant altogether.

What does move it is the child. An infant who is jaundiced, feverish or underweight waits until he is well, and this is not treated as a concession but as law: danger to life sets aside almost the whole of Jewish practice. The Talmud goes further and rules that a woman who has lost two sons to the procedure does not circumcise the third, and extends the exemption to her sisters' sons. The tradition worked out, in late antiquity, that the risk ran in families.

The operation has three named parts. The foreskin is cut; the inner membrane is drawn back so that the corona is fully uncovered; and blood is drawn from the wound. The third part, metzitzah, is the one that has caused trouble in the modern period, because a minority of ultra-Orthodox practitioners perform it by direct oral suction. New York City health authorities documented neonatal herpes transmissions traced to the practice and in 2012 required written parental consent before it; the requirement was withdrawn in 2015 in favour of an agreement with community leaders, and the underlying disagreement about whether the city may regulate it at all has not gone away.

Around the surgery sits a ceremony that is mostly about welcome. A sandek holds the child; an empty chair is set for Elijah; the boy receives his Hebrew name in the same breath as the covenant. The rite is not and has never been argued by the tradition as a health measure. It is a permanent mark made on a body that could not consent, and the permanence is the entire point being made.

On 7 May 2012 the regional court in Cologne decided an appeal in a case involving a four-year-old Muslim boy who had suffered bleeding after a circumcision performed by a doctor. The doctor was acquitted, because the legal position had been too unclear for him to have known he was doing anything wrong. But the court reached that acquittal by holding that a religiously motivated circumcision of a boy unable to consent is bodily harm within the meaning of the criminal code, and that parental consent cannot authorise it, because the child's rights to bodily integrity and to his own future religious self-determination outweigh the parents' right to raise him in their faith.

The decision bound no court outside Cologne and settled nothing as precedent. Its effect was nonetheless immediate. German hospitals suspended the procedure. Jewish and Muslim organisations described the ruling as making religious life in Germany impossible, and the historical resonance of a German court restricting Jewish practice was raised at once and by nearly everyone, including by German politicians.

The Bundestag responded within seven months. On 12 December 2012 it passed a law adding section 1631d to the civil code, which permits parents to consent to the circumcision of a male child where it is performed according to the rules of medical practice, requires anaesthesia and permits a religious practitioner rather than a physician only in the first six months of life. The vote was 434 in favour, 100 against, with 46 abstentions. It took effect at the end of that month.

Related legislative attempts elsewhere have not succeeded. A 2018 bill in the Icelandic parliament would have criminalised non-therapeutic circumcision of boys and did not become law, after objections from Jewish and Muslim organisations across Europe and from Nordic religious leaders. The children's ombudsmen of the Nordic countries had issued a joint statement in 2013 calling for the practice to be deferred until a boy can consent, which carried no legal force.

The medical position that most commentary leans on is the 2012 statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which concluded that the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks but are not great enough to recommend it universally, and that the decision should rest with parents, including on religious grounds. It was received as a vindication by both sides of the argument, which is a fair indication of how carefully it was worded.

Sources Section 1631d of the German Civil Code (Buergerliches Gesetzbuch), on circumcision of a male childDeutscher Bundestag with Circumcision Policy Statement, Pediatrics 130(3)American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Circumcision

It is a mistake to file objection to circumcision as something that happens to Jewish practice from outside. A small but articulate current of Jewish objection to it is old, and the contemporary version is not imported.

The alternative that has developed is a naming ceremony without cutting, sometimes called brit shalom, performed by a small number of rabbis mostly in the Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements and by unaffiliated celebrants. Its advocates argue that the covenant is carried by observance and by belonging rather than by a surgical mark, and that a tradition which has repeatedly reinterpreted its commandments can reinterpret this one. Organised Jewish groups opposing circumcision exist in the United States, Israel and Europe.

The response from the mainstream of every major Jewish denomination, including the liberal ones, has been firm. Reform Judaism, which dropped a great deal else, reaffirmed circumcision and trains its own circumcisers. The argument made against brit shalom is not primarily medical. It is that this particular commandment has been the one Jews were killed for keeping, twice under empires that specifically banned it, and that abandoning it under pressure from a surrounding society is a category of act with a long and unhappy history.

That argument is doing real work and it is worth stating precisely rather than dismissing. It is also not an answer to the objection actually raised, which is about the consent of the person being cut rather than about the strength of the tradition. Both things are true at once, and the entries on this site are not going to pretend otherwise in either direction.

The parallel Muslim debate is smaller and differently shaped, largely because khitan has no fixed day, no unanimous legal status, and no comparable history of prohibition to defend against.