There is a peculiar cruelty in watching a European government stumble into a fight it did not need to have. Across the continent, the ancient Jewish practice of brit milah has long occupied an uneasy legal space: not quite medicine, not quite mere custom, but an absolute religious obligation that predates the nation-states now asked to accommodate it.
Almost everywhere in Europe, this tension has been managed through dialogue. Health ministries have sat with rabbinic authorities, hospitals have created protocols for mohalim to work alongside or under the supervision of physicians, and communities have adapted without abandoning the core of the practice. It has not always been elegant, but it has worked.
Belgium has chosen a different path. Since May 2025, three Jewish mohalim in Antwerp—men trained over years, sometimes decades, in a discipline as old as the Jewish people itself—have lived under the shadow of a criminal investigation, their homes raided, their instruments seized like the tools of a criminal enterprise, rather than of a covenant.
Nearly a year later, Deputy Prime Minister Frank Vandenbroucke, also the country’s minister of health and social affairs, has shown no interest in resolving the matter through the kind of accommodation reached in Germany, France, the Netherlands or Britain. Instead, the prosecution grinds on, straining diplomatic relations, alarming Belgium’s Jewish community and prompting even the United States ambassador to Belgium to call the affair “ridiculous and antisemitic.”
One is entitled to ask: Why?
Belgium did not stumble into this crisis by accident. It is not as though Belgian law suddenly discovered, in 2025, that brit milah exists. The practice has been performed by Antwerp’s mohalim for generations, within a Jewish community that is among the oldest and most established in Europe.
What changed was not the practice. What changed was the willingness of the country’s political class, and Vandenbroucke in particular, to treat it as a problem requiring prosecutorial force rather than administrative accommodation.
This is the detail that should trouble anyone trying to understand Belgian politics honestly: Vandenbroucke has, in this same period, also been the minister presiding over a tightening of Belgium’s health-insurance reimbursement rules for circumcision generally. Under reforms that reached full force in 2026, Belgium’s national health insurer, INAMI, restricted reimbursement to procedures with a demonstrated medical justification, phimosis, recurrent infection and similar diagnoses, excluding religious, cultural and cosmetic circumcisions from coverage altogether.
This was, notably, a reform with the broadest practical impact not on Belgium’s small Jewish population but on its far larger Muslim community, for whom circumcision is a near-universal cultural and religious practice, and for whom the loss of routine reimbursement represents a real financial burden on ordinary families.
It is not unreasonable to ask whether a minister facing anger from one religious constituency over a funding cut found it politically useful to demonstrate, simultaneously, that he was capable of “toughness” on circumcision more broadly. And that a minority community with far less domestic political weight than Belgium’s Muslim electorate—Belgium’s roughly 40,000 Jews—made a more convenient target for that demonstration than the community actually aggrieved by his reimbursement policy. Confronting mohalim costs a health minister little. Confronting the far larger and more politically mobilized frustration over insurance cuts costs considerably more.
To be precise about the record: The criminal investigation into the Antwerp mohalim began in May 2025, before the reimbursement reform took full effect in January. A sceptic will rightly note that this timeline complicates any claim that the prosecution was manufactured in response to the insurance dispute. But politics is rarely so tidy as a single triggering event.
What the timeline does show is two grievances: one Muslim, over money; one Jewish, over religious liberty, maturing on parallel tracks throughout the same 18-month period, under the authority of the same minister, who has had every opportunity since raids began to resolve the mohel case through dialogue and has instead allowed it to fester, even as controversy over the reimbursement cuts intensified.
A minister genuinely uninterested in appeasing one community at another’s expense had a full year to close this file quietly. He did not.
Belgian law, tellingly, has no formal licensing procedure for mohalim at all. This means that, as currently applied, essentially any non-physician-performed circumcision could theoretically be deemed illegal.
This is not a narrow technical loophole the prosecution stumbled into; it is a legal vacuum that Belgian authorities have had years to fill, as other European states have done, and chose not to. A government that wanted resolution would have created a licensing framework, as Rabbi Bar and others have proposed, allowing Israeli or European rabbinic certification of mohalim to be formally recognized.
A government that wanted confrontation leaves the ambiguity in place and lets prosecutors do the rest.
The human cost of this ambiguity is not abstract.
It falls on families in Antwerp who must now wonder whether performing a covenant as old as Abraham exposes them to police scrutiny. It falls on a Jewish community already reporting rising anxiety about its future in Belgium—a country now facing uncomfortable comparisons to nations where Jewish practice, kosher slaughter chief among them, has been curtailed under the banner of animal welfare or child protection, while other communal practices with comparable visibility receive gentler treatment.
Belgium has already banned shechita in Flanders and Wallonia. Jews in Antwerp are not being paranoid when they ask whether brit milah is next.
None of this needed to happen. Germany, after its own 2012 legal crisis over circumcision, resolved the matter through legislation explicitly protecting the religious right to perform the practice, developed in consultation with Jewish and Muslim communities alike. France and the Netherlands have functioning, if informal, understandings between health authorities and religious circumcisers.
These are not perfect arrangements, but they reflect a baseline commitment: that a religious minority’s core practices should not be treated as a criminal matter to be litigated in the same breath as fraud or malpractice.
Vandenbroucke had every model available to him. He chose prosecution instead. Whether that choice was driven by a genuine, if misguided, belief that medical oversight requires this degree of coercion or by a calculation that a small, low-friction community made an easier symbolic target than the far larger constituency angered by his insurance reforms, the effect on Belgium’s Jewish community is the same: a message that their most fundamental religious obligation is, in the eyes of the state, provisional.
Belgium’s government owes its Jewish citizens more than silence and prosecutorial drift. It owes them the same good-faith accommodation that governments across the rest of Europe have managed to provide.
Frank Vandenbroucke still has the power to end this needlessly manufactured crisis. The only question is whether he has the will.
