Europe has spent 2,000 years trying to regulate, marginalize, expel, convert, humiliate, and ultimately destroy the Jews. Sometimes it was done with pogroms. Sometimes with inquisitions. Sometimes with expulsions. Sometimes with gas chambers.
Today, it is done with “health regulations."
The decision by Belgian prosecutors in Antwerp to criminally charge Jewish mohels for performing brit milah - the covenant of circumcision practiced by Jews for more than 3,300 years - is not merely a legal controversy. It is not some neutral dispute over hygiene standards. It is an assault on Judaism itself. It is antisemitism dressed up in bureaucratic language and wrapped in the sterile vocabulary of modern European progressivism.
The prosecutors claim they are concerned with “medical standards." But Jews have heard this before. Europe always finds a civilized excuse for its uncivilized hatred.
First they said Jews poisoned wells. Then they said Jews spread disease. Then they said Jews corrupted finance. Then they said Jews polluted racial purity. Now they say Jews cannot circumcise their sons safely.
The mask changes. The hatred remains.
The sheer arrogance of Belgium is breathtaking. Here is a continent that annihilated six million Jews less than a century ago now lecturing Jews on how to care for Jewish children. Here is Europe - whose soil is soaked with Jewish blood - deciding that rabbis who have performed thousands upon thousands of circumcisions are somehow less competent than secular medical bureaucrats.
It would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.
Europe always finds a civilized excuse for its uncivilized hatred.
Let us state the obvious: Jewish ritual circumcision is one of the oldest continuously practiced religious rites in human history. Jews were circumcising their sons when Belgium did not exist, when most European nations did not exist, and when the ancestors of modern Europeans were still worshiping pagan idols in forests.
The Jewish people have survived for over three millennia with brit milah at the center of Jewish identity. We are the longest surviving people of the ancient world. The covenant of circumcision is not incidental to Judaism. It is Judaism’s foundational physical covenant with God, dating back to Abraham.
And now Belgian prosecutors want to criminalize it.
The irony is staggering. Europe - a continent collapsing under demographic decline, family disintegration, loneliness epidemics, nihilism, and civilizational exhaustion - is attempting to lecture the Jews about moral continuity and human flourishing.
The Jews, meanwhile, built the family-centered civilization that gave the world the Bible, ethical monotheism, the sanctity of marriage, and the idea that children are sacred blessings rather than lifestyle inconveniences.
And yes, Jews circumcised their sons through all of it.
The most absurd aspect of the Belgian prosecution is the implication that mohels are somehow unsafe or unqualified. This is nonsense.
An experienced mohel often performs thousands more circumcisions over a lifetime than the average physician. Circumcision is not an occasional side procedure for a mohel. It is his life’s sacred work. It is an art refined through decades of precision, training, apprenticeship, and religious devotion.
The average hospital doctor performing circumcisions may conduct them sporadically amid dozens of unrelated medical responsibilities. A veteran mohel may have performed ten thousand.
Who exactly is more experienced?
“No one does it better." That line from James Bond applies perfectly here.
Moreover, the complication rate in Jewish ritual circumcision is extraordinarily low - infinitesimal compared to the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the practice. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish boys are circumcised globally every year. Almost all experience no complications whatsoever.
The Jewish people have literally conducted millions upon millions of circumcisions across centuries and continents. If brit milah were the barbaric danger its critics claim, Jewish continuity itself would have been impossible.
Instead, the exact opposite is true.
Study after study has demonstrated medical benefits associated with circumcision, including reduced rates of urinary tract infections, reduced HIV transmission risk, reduced sexually transmitted infections, and lower rates of penile cancer. The American Academy of Pediatrics has acknowledged significant health benefits associated with the procedure.
Years ago, I wrote in The Wall Street Journal defending circumcision against precisely this kind of ignorant European hostility. The argument remains exactly the same today: the anti-circumcision crusade is not really about medicine. It is about discomfort with Jewish distinctiveness.
Jews remind Europe of something Europe increasingly despises: covenant, obligation, discipline, family continuity, and faith.
Circumcision says that the human body is not merely an instrument of pleasure but part of a sacred moral mission. It says children belong not to the state but to families and traditions.
Modern Europe despises such ideas.
Europe increasingly worships personal autonomy above all else. The state may chemically castrate children in the name of “gender affirmation," but an eight-day-old Jewish baby entering the covenant of Abraham? Suddenly the state discovers concern for bodily integrity.
The hypocrisy is nauseating.
Where is Belgium’s outrage over rising antisemitic violence across Europe? Where is Belgium’s moral panic over Islamist extremism? Where is Belgium’s emergency prosecution of hate crimes against Jews?
Instead, the prosecutors target rabbis performing one of Judaism’s holiest rituals.
Because Europe always chooses the Jews.
Let us also dispense with the fantasy that this is limited to Belgium.
France has repeatedly flirted with restrictions on religious expression. Scandinavian countries have openly debated banning circumcision. Across Europe, kosher slaughter has come under attack. Jewish schools require armed guards. Synagogues resemble military compounds.
European elites love to proclaim “Never Again," while creating societies in which Jewish life becomes steadily more difficult, isolated, and dangerous.
And then they wonder why Jews leave - or perhaps are pleased to see them go.
The tragedy is that Europe learned absolutely nothing from its history. The old antisemitism of the far Right has now merged seamlessly with the fashionable progressive antisemitism of the modern Left. One side accused Jews of being racially impure. The other accuses Jews of being morally impure. Both arrive at the same conclusion: Jewish practices must be controlled, diminished, or eradicated.
Circumcision becomes an ideal target because antisemites can pretend they are motivated by humanitarian concern.
But if this were really about child welfare, these prosecutors would celebrate Jewish family life rather than attack it. Jewish communities have among the strongest family structures, lowest crime rates, lowest rates of family abandonment, and deepest multigenerational continuity anywhere in the Western world.
Instead, Europe pathologizes Jewish continuity because Europe itself increasingly lacks continuity.
The birthrates collapse. Churches empty. Marriage disappears. National identity fragments. Meaning evaporates. Into that vacuum enters resentment toward those stubborn minorities who still believe in God, family, nation, and covenant.
The Jews become intolerable precisely because we survive.
That survival infuriates Europe. It always has.
The Belgian prosecutors likely imagine themselves enlightened defenders of modernity. In reality, they are participating in one of Europe’s oldest traditions: persecuting Jews while claiming moral superiority.
History will judge them harshly.
And let Belgium hear this clearly: the Jewish people will not surrender brit milah. Not for Belgium. Not for Europe. Not for anyone.
The covenant survived Pharaoh. It survived Rome. It survived the Crusades. It survived the Inquisition. It survived Hitler.
It will survive Belgian prosecutors.
The real scandal here is not Jewish circumcision. The real scandal is that less than a century after Europe tried to exterminate the Jews, European governments once again feel entitled to criminalize core Jewish religious life.
That is the true barbarism.
And decent people everywhere - Jews and non-Jews alike - should say so plainly and without fear.