I woke up this morning to the news that a Belgian public prosecutor is seeking the formal indictment of three Jews, accusing them of aggravated assault on minors and the unlawful practice of medicine for the mere act of performing brit milah. The legal theory, stripped to its bones, is that carrying out a ritual circumcision in the manner it has always been performed in Belgium is, in itself, a crime against the child. If that theory is accepted, brit milah will not merely be regulated in Belgium but become practically impossible.
At this point, it is no longer controversial to say that the environment created by Belgian laws, institutions and tolerated practices is toxic for Jews.
Consider that, within a decade, the two ritual acts that make ordinary observant Jewish life materially possible – kosher slaughter and infant circumcision – have become, respectively, banned and prosecutable as aggravated assault. One can debate each measure on its own terms but one cannot honestly debate the cumulative result.
In 2026, a Belgian Jew cannot have meat slaughtered according to his religion’s prescriptions in two of the country’s three regions. He must import it from elsewhere, at greater cost and with a greater carbon footprint, while Belgian law congratulates itself on moral progress achieved by outsourcing the very act it condemns. All this while leaving untouched the country’s enthusiasm for killing animals for sport, recreation and folklore – not to mention its culinary tradition of force-feeding ducks and geese to induce hepatic lipidosis, enlarging their livers up to ten times their normal size, for the sake of foie gras.
In 2026, a Belgian Jewish family that wishes to give a son a brit milah – the rite that has marked the entry of Jewish boys into the covenant of Abraham for millennia – now learns that the public prosecutor of Antwerp considers it a criminal offence.
To this, add the ever-increasing number of antisemitic incidents. Jews have been murdered in Belgium because they were Jews. Synagogues have been set on fire, including one in Liège just weeks ago. A magazine published an article whose author wrote that he wanted to “shove a knife down the throat of every Jew” he met, yet a Belgian court acquitted him of antisemitism and incitement to hatred charges on free speech grounds. Government ministers used the expression “Jewish lobby” and placed Germany – for defending Israel’s right to protect its citizens against Hamas – on the wrong side of history “for the second time”.
I do not need anyone to tell me whether Belgium is or is not antisemitic. I know what a Jewish family can and cannot do here, how it lives, and what this feels like.
Now to the part that should concern not only Belgian Jews. Whenever I describe this to friends in Paris, London or New York, the reaction is some version of: the situation may be bad here, but what is happening in Belgium could never happen here. I would like to believe them. I do not.
The honest question is this: what structurally prevents this assault on Jewish religious practice from unfolding elsewhere?
Not the goodwill of one’s neighbours as goodwill is a mood, and moods change. The Belgian Jewish community had goodwill too, until it did not.
Not the absence of antisemites in the population. Belgium did not become inhospitable because a majority turned hostile. It became inhospitable because a small number of motivated actors discovered that nothing in their professional environment punished them for moving against Jewish life, while a great many others discovered that nothing in their environment rewarded them for pushing back. Indifference did most of the work.
So the real question is whether your country has functioning brakes, not whether the engine is running. The engine is always running somewhere. The question is the brakes.
Concretely: does your judicial system reward or punish a prosecutor who decides to test a novel legal theory that would criminalise a millennia-old religious practice? Do your courts possess a doctrine of religious freedom with real force – one that survives restrictions framed in the language of animal welfare or child protection? Does your constitutional order treat the targeting of a religious minority’s defining practices as a serious harm in itself, or merely as a regrettable side effect of well-meaning regulation? Does your political class pay any price for relativising antisemitism? Is there a single named official, with a budget and a mandate, accountable for answering these questions, or only an ever-expanding archipelago of anonymous working groups, coordination mechanisms and consultations?
If the answer to several of these questions is even partially unclear, then the only thing standing between your country and the Belgian outcome is the current balance of political forces. The lesson of Belgium is that the slide from a country where Jews live freely to one where Jews live carefully – and from there to one where Jews live conditionally – is mediated entirely by institutions.
This means that the work of protecting Jewish life in Europe is not, in the first instance, the work of changing minds. It is the work of building and defending the institutions that prevent the air from thinning for minorities.
In Belgium, we are running the experiment of what happens when those institutions fail. Other countries should not wait to read the results before checking their own brakes.
Yohan Benizri is the founder of The 451 Institute, a Brussels-based, politics-agnostic foundation that works to protect democracies by shielding critical institutions from politicisation, strengthening checks and balances, and turning disagreements into an engine of progress rather than conflict
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