AN EARLY WARNING FROM BELGIUM

Next Thursday, Jews around the world will begin the Three Weeks, the annual period of mourning for the destruction of ancient Jerusalem and its two magnificent Temples, together with the loss of Jewish sovereignty—first to the Babylonians, and later to the Romans.

We tend to imagine destruction as a dramatic but one-off event: a military siege, walls breached, buildings burned, soldiers marching through the streets wreaking violence and havoc. But Jewish history teaches that destruction begins long before the battalions appear.

Again and again, it begins when the ruling culture decides that Jewish distinctiveness is intolerable. Which is precisely why the latest attack on Jewish life in Europe should not be treated merely as a political or legal issue requiring resolution. It is the thin end of a wedge that may ultimately bring an end to Jewish life in Europe.

Last month, Belgian prosecutors moved to put Antwerp mohalim on trial for “intentional assault or battery with premeditation against minors” and the unlawful practice of medicine, on the basis that they had performed brit milah on Jewish babies without Belgian medical licenses. In other words, the Belgian state has recast one of Judaism’s oldest and most indispensable rituals as a premeditated criminal attack on a child.

To be clear, this argument against Jewish circumcision is not new. The language is different and the bureaucratic mechanisms more refined, but the underlying message remains disturbingly familiar: Jews may live among us, but Judaism must first be brought into line with our definition of enlightened civilization.

A negligent mohel should no more be shielded by his faith than a careless doctor by a medical degree. Training, oversight and clear standards are not enemies of Jewish tradition. But Belgium’s approach goes far beyond regulation.

A mohel is not simply an unlicensed medical practitioner. He is the trained agent of a covenant that has defined Jewish identity for almost four thousand years. To classify brit milah simply as a medical procedure is already a profound category error. To indict a mohel as though he were an assailant is to place Judaism itself in the dock.

More than two millennia ago, the Hellenistic regime of Antiochus understood exactly what brit milah represented. Circumcision was banned in Judea, alongside Shabbat observance, Torah study and other foundations of Jewish life. The aim was not merely to prevent a ritual; it was to produce a society in which Jews would cease being Jewish.

The First Book of Maccabees describes the price paid by those who resisted. Women who circumcised their sons were executed, and their infants were hung from their necks. Families and mohalim were killed with them. The passage is horrifying because the victims understood what their persecutors understood: without the covenant, Jewish continuity itself was at stake.

But not every Jew resisted. Some Jews, desperate to enter Greek society, tried to conceal the evidence of their circumcision. In the gymnasium, where athletes competed naked, the Jewish body was visibly different. So they underwent a procedure known as epispasm, drawing the remaining skin forward to disguise or partially reverse the circumcision.

Rabbinic literature calls such a person a mashukh—someone stretched back into the appearance of being uncircumcised. It is difficult to imagine a more haunting symbol of assimilation. These Jews did not simply stop observing a mitzvah. They attempted to erase the covenant from their own bodies.

That moment in history exposes the two forces that have always endangered Jewish survival. The first is external coercion: the ruler declares that Jewish practice is primitive, cruel or incompatible with the public good.

The second is internal surrender: Jews conclude that acceptance is worth the price of becoming less visibly, less stubbornly and eventually less meaningfully Jewish. The ancient world offered Jews a bargain: you may belong, provided you stop looking and behaving like Jews.

Modern Europe would be appalled by any comparison with such brutal precedents. But the absence of murderous intent does not mean the absence of danger. Jewish life can be weakened without anyone issuing an order for its destruction. It can be regulated into impossibility, one practice at a time, by officials who sincerely insist that they are acting neutrally and humanely.

Under Roman rule, circumcision again became a flashpoint. Some historians believe that Hadrian’s prohibition of circumcision was among the catalysts for the Bar Kochba revolt. What is certain is that the Greco-Roman world frequently regarded brit milah as a barbaric mutilation. What Jews understood as a sacred covenant, the dominant culture viewed as bodily damage. That clash of definitions has never entirely disappeared.

Postwar Europe has spent decades insisting that Jewish life belongs on the continent. Jewish institutions are protected, Holocaust memorials are funded, and European leaders regularly speak with great emotion about the Jewish contribution to civilization. Europe needs living Jewish communities as evidence that it has transcended the hatreds that culminated in the Holocaust, and Jews have become indispensable witnesses to Europe’s claim of moral rehabilitation.

But increasingly, Europe’s interest in a Jewish presence appears hollow and superficial. Europe sustained flourishing Jewish civilization for over a thousand years, but also witnessed some of history’s worst atrocities against Jews. Pogroms, expulsions, persecution and intolerance were recurring features of European Jewish life. Now, once again, a European country is creating conditions that may drive Jews out.

The pressure on Jews to detach themselves from core beliefs and practices has become relentless across Europe. Whether it is attachment to Israel, shechitah, brit milah, Jewish education or visible Jewish identity, each is increasingly treated as an obstacle Jews must overcome to secure unconditional acceptance.

Europe welcomes Jews enthusiastically when Jewishness is cultural, historical and safely ceremonial. Jewish museums, klezmer concerts, Holocaust memorials and dignified speeches about tolerance are perfectly acceptable. The difficulty begins when Jews insist on living as Jews.

Some European officials have correctly declared that a ban on circumcision would amount to a ban on Jewish life. Belgium—home to a Jewish community since the Middle Ages—should listen. Any system that places an ancient and indispensable religious practice outside the law, then prosecutes those who perform it for failing to comply with this new framework, is prejudiced, plain and simple.

As the Three Weeks approach, we should remember that the violent rupture of total destruction rarely occurs without earlier cracks. The obliteration of Jewish life does not begin with mobs and pogroms. It begins with reassuring declarations that Jews remain welcome, followed by a growing list of Jewish practices and behaviors that are not.

Brit milah is not a Jewish cultural accessory. It is a covenant with God and a declaration that Jewish life is intended to continue into the next generation. And so, while the mohalim may be standing trial in Belgium, the deeper defendant is brit milah itself—and the ultimate verdict will be on Europe.