Nineteenth-century medical debates on circumcision were never neutral, being framed by anti-Semitic attitudes.

Evidence

The idea that the circumcised were inherently different because they were marked as Jewish dominates the nineteenth-century discussion. Through the Enlightenment, discussions of such religious practices seemed to be colored by debates about their medical efficacy, but these are never neutral, as specific attitudes towards the Jews seem always to define this debate. As an anonymous author stated in the leading German paediatric journal, Journal für Kinderkrankheiten, in 1872: ‘The circumcision of Jewish children has been widely discussed in the medical press as is warranted with topics of such importance. But it is usually discussed ­without the necessary attention to details and the neutrality that it deserves. Indeed, it has not been free of fanatic anti-Semitism.’ — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 904

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of moral panics coded as medical/scientific debates.
• ADDENDUM: Extends the ‘moral panic disguised as neutral reform’ logic from the immodesty article into the medical domain.