For more than 3,500 years, Jewish people have symbolized their covenantal relationship with God through the practice of circumcision. For the vast majority of Jews, brit milah remains the essential link to Jewish peoplehood; in some cases, perhaps the only link.
At various times, from the reign of Antiochus IV, when circumcision was prohibited, to the Shoah, when circumcision could bring with it a death sentence, many Jews have endured martyrdom rather than break the covenant.
Throughout the Hellenistic and Roman ages, when public nakedness was practiced and the removal of the foreskin of the penis was considered an “abomination”, many Jewish people were forced -- and some Hellenizers agreed on their own -- to undergo a procedure known as epispasm, or circumcision in reverse.
Romans were particularly hostile to the practice during the destruction of the Second Temple. Tineius Rufus, governor of Judea, took radical measures to enforce the ban, which historians today say sparked Jewish rebellions, including the revolt led by Bar Kochba, a soldier of outstanding courage.
In the Soviet Union, it was impossible for Jews to arrange for circumcision, and only the most hardy and brave were willing to risk it. In their effort to obliterate all traditional religious observance, the Soviets would arrest and put on trial those religious Jews who chose to have their sons circumcised on the eighth day after birth, in accordance with Genesis 17: 9-14.
This brief review of history allows us to better understand the depths of bigotry, totalitarianism and hysteria housed in the referenfum that the liberal hippies of San Francisco, the city that in the 1960s was the “beacon of counterculture” with its gay militants, the Free Speech Movement and the Summer of Love, have organized in November to ban the oldest continuing Jewish rite, practised since the days of the Patriarchs.
San Francisco could become the first major city in the U.S. to outlaw circumcision. A group of self-proclaimed “intactivists” have taken up the perverted language of international human rights: they are fighting, they say, for “genital autonomy” and “male-genital-integrity rights”.
In 2001 the Swedish Parliament also debated how to regulate the practice, the first restriction placed on a Jewish rite in Europe since the Nazi era. It's the same liberal Swedish Parliament that didn't have any moral problem in promoting eugenics, sterilization of the disabled.
The bill in San Francisco is the betrayal of that most cherished value of the secular Enlightenment: religious freedom.
One of Europe’s first countries to allow Jews to practise their religion, the extremely liberal Netherlands, openly may soon pass a law banning centuries-old Jewish ritual animal slaughter.
Last year the Supreme Court in England, a completely secularized country, ruled against an Orthodox Jewish secondary school in London, sued by a parent whose child had been refused admission to the school on the grounds that the child was not recognised by orthodox Jewish precepts to be Jewish. The President of the Supreme Court, Lord Phillips, said that the fact that the school had used a religious test of the child’s Jewishness was “irrelevant” because Jewish identity also involved racial or ethnic origins. What astounding and sinister arrogance for the illiberal and coercive UK society to presume to strip Judaism of its ability to define itself in religious terms!
These three cases – the circumcision ban in San Francisco, the ritual slaughter outlaw in Amsterdam and the school admissions case in London – show us the intollerant face of modern liberalism.
And of the Judeophobic bigotry built on hysterical assimilation, denial of identity, moral perfidy and ideological atheism, that has already found its proof at Stalingrad.