Only once did I attend a circumcision. It was in the 1960s, in those dear far-off days when young men like myself simply set off hitch-hiking to see how far we could get before it was time to turn round. Those days seem as long ago as the 1860s when I think about them now. I had reached the island of the lotus eaters, Djerba, in newly independent Tunisia. I was talking with a young woman of my own age; she was from the area, but had been educated elsewhere and was dressed in western style in a fairly short dress. This seemed to arouse no hostility at the time among the other people there who were mostly traditionally dressed and an old man in robes described her to me as representing la vie moderne en Tunisie. She suggested that we attended an event in the village that everyone was going to. I don’t think I understood what it was immediately, but a large crowd had assembled in front of an awning attached to a building.
A boy of six or seven was placed on a table. He was held, gently but very firmly, by two men. A third man raised his robe and with his left hand he stretched the child’s foreskin upwards. In his right hand he held what looked like two cut throat razors hinged into a pair of scissors and he very quickly cut right through the skin and tossed it into a bowl of water. The crowd cheered and ululated; naturally the boy screamed and cried. The three men and the boy then disappeared into the building and refreshments were served. Ten minutes later the boy emerged to applause. He clearly felt quite pleased with himself especially when his appearance was applauded, but he was walking in an uncomfortable way, trying to avoid contact between his penis and his robe. “Voyez comme il marche!” my companion giggled.
At this distance I feel the need to justify – or, at least, analyse – my own reaction to the event. I had just watched a child being mutilated, having arguably the most sensitive part of his entire anatomy destroyed forever. It was not so much that I didn’t object – active objection would have achieved nothing and caused me a lot of trouble – it was that I didn’t even disapprove and in retrospect I feel the need to analyse this lack of response. It starts with my age which predates the founding of the NHS in 1948. It was immediately decided that the health service would not offer circumcision as a service which took some of the credibility away from the practice whereas many middle class boys of my age and older had been circumcised on “medical” grounds. Thus among my peer group there were roughly even numbers of circumcised and uncircumcised. At boarding school where we routinely saw each other naked we often organised our pick-up games of football as between “cavaliers” (uncircumcised) and “roundheads” (circumcised).
In any case a kind of imperial relativism instinctively affected my reactions when travelling. This assumed and allowed that other people did things of which you would disapprove if they were not “other”. Thus in British India Muslims were regulated and judged as Muslims and Hindus as Hindus and allowed and expected to engage in practices which the British would not tolerate for themselves. There were limits as with the Hindu practice of suttee, the immolation of widows, and tolerance did not extend to “savages” such as South Sea islanders who engaged in cannibalism and head-hunting. As late as the 1950s Masai tribesmen in Kenya were executed for the practice of abandoning disabled children to their deaths. But if you had a respectable religion it was permitted to do things which would probably not have been permitted in a Christian country. I had undoubtedly absorbed the attitude from older relatives with nautical and military backgrounds that as you travelled you had to accept that “the locals” would be doing things that we wouldn’t dream of doing.
The ceremony I witnessed is known as tahara in Arabic and it is an important rite of passage. It can be done at many ages though the sort of age I witnessed is the most common. It is not mandatory in Islam, but merely virtuous. In Judaism eight days old is the prescribed age and it is a requirement of all forms of Judaism. It is an ancient practice: archaeological evidence suggests at least 6000 years old and possibly 10,000. Thus in Genesis 17 when God makes a covenant with Abraham and the Jews that requires all males to be circumcised he did not have to explain what he meant because the practice was well known and established in a number of cultures. The Christian rejection of circumcision began with St. Paul who had initially required Greek converts to be circumcised but in his first epistle to the Corinthians makes it clear that it is not a requirement for membership of the Christian fellowship. Since the Greeks were the dominant culture of the Eastern Mediterranean and traditionally regarded circumcision as mutilation and as a barbarous rite this seems to have been politic on Paul’s part.
Most of Christian history has duplicated this Greek view and there has normally been disapproval of circumcision and it has often been illegal or permitted only to specified minority groups. The Visigoths used it as a punishment. But in the nineteenth century this changed quite markedly in the anglophone world. The English doctor Jonathan Hutchinson observed that Jews had much lower rates of venereal disease than the majority population and surmised that this was because of circumcision. It became common among the middle and upper classes to choose to have baby boys circumcised. The change can be registered by reference to the Encyclopedia Britannica because the ninth edition in 1876 calls it mutilation and says it can only be justified on religious grounds whereas the “classic” eleventh edition of 1910 discusses medical benefits. Figures are not accurate, but it would seem that at peak in the 1930s more than a third of British boys were being circumcised.
The contemporary geography of circumcision is a consequence of its history. There are eleven countries where the rate is 99% – they are all predominantly Islamic. There are sixty seven countries where the rate is under 1% – they are largely in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. The larger anglophone countries lie in between. The UK is just over 20%, but the US is estimated to be between 70 and 80%. In both of those cases the current rate of circumcision of babies would appear to be lower. (One has to be careful with these figures because there are alternative sources and for many people the figures are of ideological importance.) Over the whole planet it would seem that about 38% of men are circumcised, making it the commonest surgical procedure globally.
The main reason why the USA seems completely exceptional as the only non-Islamic country where the rate of circumcision has approached Islamic levels would appear to be the acceptance of a medical argument which, given the effective existence of an anglophone academic medical community, applied also to the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But in the US the argument seems to have been accepted for far longer: in fact it was only in 2017 that the American Academy of Paediatrics stopped recommending the procedure. One thing that reinforced the prevalence of the procedure was its normality in two senses. Not only did it happen on an assumed, opt-out basis, but parents have testified that they accepted it because they did not want their sons looking different.
So what was the medical argument? One of the few active campaigners against circumcision, the actor and comedian Tom Rosenthal, says it is or was “pure bullshit”and there are countries, particularly in Northern Europe, where the medical benefits of circumcision remained completely unknown. Hutchinson’s original observation in 1855 was that Jews had lower rates of venereal disease than gentiles. But this was an entirely spurious correlation because it took no account of the sociological and cultural differences between the two groups. Other arguments have cited phimosis and penile cancer; the former is relevant by definition because it refers to an excessively tight foreskin and both are extremely rare. Urinary infections have also been cited, but the correlations are unconvincing. In any case any of these benefits should be weighed against the 2% of patients who suffer infections or side effects as a consequence of the procedure. In recent years HIV has been cited, but most of the cases of HIV transmitted during heterosexual intercourse are in Africa and the evidence is mixed.
When it comes to considering the sexual consequences of the procedure the evidence becomes highly elusive, anecdotal and dubious, but it is impossible to deny that there are effects. The abilities to have penetrative sex and to reproduce are not affected. But the removal of a highly erogenous zone, the point of first contact, is bound to have effects. Prima facie one can infer from the biology that a circumcised man would take longer to reach orgasm but have fewer orgasms. The former might be of benefit to both partners at early ages, but the opposite would be true later in life. But the foreskin plays a much larger part in non-penetrative sexual activities such as masturbation and fellatio. There is a strong suggestion from the historical narrative that this is the hidden agenda of the arguments for circumcision. Whereas the Visigoths in Spain regarded circumcision as a punishment the Moorish-Jewish philosophers Maimonedes and Isaac ben Yediah specifically recommended it as reducing both sexual pleasure and sexual temptation. We should also remember that the Victorian enthusiasm for circumcision was the product of a period and culture which told boys that masturbation would make you go blind. There were still hints of this, incidentally, among older teachers in the 1950s: when I was taught the “facts of life” there was no threat of blindness, but there were vague warnings of “debility” and mental illness. (We took no notice.)
By its nature evidence about sexual pleasure is elusive. But there are two correlations worth considering. The first is that people live longer in countries where there is a low rate of circumcision. The second is that they are less angry – compare Scandinavia, Japan and the Caribbean with the Middle East, North Africa and the USA. Of course these are spurious correlations: there are far too many factors involved and the second one is merely the subjective observation of a seasoned traveller. But, I submit, they are no more spurious than the medical evidence which was cited in favour of circumcision.
The superficial evidence suggests that few people regret the loss of their foreskins. What you never had (consciously) you never miss? There are many sources on the subject which conveniently stress that there are advantages and disadvantages. Only a tiny minority of activists like Tom Rosenthal seem keen to stress their knowledge – from whatever source – of what they have lost. He has spoken bravely and intelligently on the subject. But he from a secular background (not a Jew, but Jewish as Jonathan Miller used to say) who was circumcised as a matter of family tradition rather than religious doctrine or belief. As an explanation for the acceptance of circumcision he offers the explanation that its power is that of a initiation rite because you have been through it it defines your identity: it’s “who we are” and unquestionable.
What, if anything, is to be done? Well, if I were dictator with a loyal and effective militia behind me I’d ban it for children just as I’d ban cruise ships, Airbnb, windfarms and many other things. None of this is going to happen in the real world. In the case of circumcision you would be breaking the rules of a multi-cultural society and would be vilified as anti-Semitic and/or Islamophobic. Even if you had a majority on your side you would fall foul in several ways of James Madison’s intensity principle because the people against you would be passionate and those on your side apathetic which would mean that you would incur all sorts of costs. Rosenthal is surely right to suggest that the only way forward would be to institute debate which would be internalised by the circumcising communities; this seems to rely on a pious liberal faith in the efficacy of debate. Incidentally, at the other end of the scale is the proposition that circumcision in a multi-cultural society should be provided freely by the NHS. This case was put by Mohammed Saquib Anwar and others in an article called “Circumcision: a religious obligation or “the cruellest of cuts”” in the British Journal of General Practice in 2010. Their argument was in some aspects similar to the argument for legalising abortion in that it said that otherwise the procedure would continue to be done badly and expensively. (I looked online and noted that the current charges range from £600 to £3500 which sounds like an awful lot for the procedure I witnessed.)
Perhaps the more answerable question concerns what is to be learned from considering circumcision. The first observation would be of the power of tradition and identity over reason and universality. The obvious thought experiment is that if nobody had ever been circumcised and someone came up with the suggestion it would be considered lunatic – even if it was claimed that it was a new idea of God’s. Yet I’ve just argued that it is politically impossible to get rid of it. It also counsels caution about the medical profession as subject to fashion and ideological orthodoxy. I’m not comfortable with that thought because my own instincts are to perceive medical orthodoxies as hard science and to be vaccinated when and if they tell me to. But circumcision is one of those stories which would make you rather sceptical.
( Along with my piece on James/Jan Morris and sex change this was something I wrote in the winter of 2024-5 and was surprised how uninterested my various normal outlets were in its contents. In fact it was interesting how uninterested they were.)
Lincoln Allison January 2025